Gmail

So a friend (thanks, Phil!) just invited me to join Gmail.

In case you haven’t heard about this, Gmail is a web-based email service offered by Google. They pay for the service by delivering targetted ads determined by scanning the content of the email message. They give you a GIGABYTE of storage. They also filter junk mail pretty well.

People have made many tools to allow you to access your gmail account in ways the developers didn’t intend. You can use it is a POP3 account, and relay your mail through it using your gmail credentials. You can mount it as a filesystem in GNU/Linux, even, using that 1GB as free, private, online storage.

The downsides?

1. I can’t read my mail offline. Not to fear, though; I’ve already begun hacking on offline IMAP to see if I can figure out how to integrate it into existing Python libraries and synchronize to my gmail account. That way I can run Mutt when I’m not connected, and dig through archives even if I don’t have an active Internet connection. This may take a while, though; I’m no stellar Python hacker.
2. Targetted ads. You have no privacy. I guess I’m getting used to it, and am beginning to use the phrase “never send in an email or post in a weblog anything you wouldn’t like to see stapled to your resume”.
3. The interface is slick, but it takes some getting used to. I discovered that Gmail supports keyboard shortcuts, though, and that should dramatically speed up my data entry.
4. It’s still Beta. Which means it’s in testing, and your data is not guaranteed. No telling what they’re going to do with the data once they’re out of beta, though I suspect it would be public relations suicide for Google to nuke everybody’s accounts when they go live.
5. I can’t see that there’s any kind of Bayesian filtering built in, but it might be there and I just don’t see it.
6. I like the idea of having multiple folders where my messages live. It makes tracking conversations in mailing lists much more intuitive, and I can ignore them for days or weeks at a time. Gmail instead uses the idea of “labels” rather than folders; you can label messages certain ways, and they become “virtual” folders by using Google’s search engine. I’ll have to see if I get used to it.
7. No dynamic signature creation. I may have to hack myself another Python script to automatically change my signature every few minutes. It’s become a trademark of my email messages that I include a brief quip at the end of each message. I use the UNIX “fortune” program to generate these on my FreeBSD box, and use the Mutt mailer as my front-end at the moment.
8. No PGP or GPG integration. Until I have figured out the solution to digitally signing all my messages, gmail will be a non-starter for my active email usage. It’s too easy to spoof people’s email addresses, and I want “plausible deniability” — if I didn’t sign it, one is left either believing I intentionally didn’t sign something, or that it wasn’t me. Having had my email address spoofed in the past, I love using GPG to digitally sign my messages. Heck, it also works as good as a physical signature for certain documents.
9. Spammers are already abusing it. Yep, they are trying to nail people with gmail accounts, and trying to pretend to be from gmail themselves when in fact they are using some anonymous relay in Brazil to attempt to dump their wares on a gullible populace. Have I mentioned before how much I despise spammers who lie in trying to sell their stuff? I have a new respect for spammers who send their mail from SPF-registered servers, using legitimate email addresses. Many of them need to hide their personal information to prevent anti-spammers from abusing them, but if the return email address is legitimate, and they use a server registered to their business so that people who simply hate unsolicited mail can block them, well, that’s OK, you know? It’s the ones who lie and spoof mail addresses that drive me crazy — which represents about 99% of spam I receive.

Well, that’s about the size of it. Any of you have a gmail account yet? And if you could have an ideal email account, what would it be like?