Trying Out Gmail

After begging, borrowing & stealing, I finally have a gmail account. I’m impressed by the interface & like the service. Data export / import would make a huge difference.

Well, after many attempts at getting in, I’ve finally been deemed worthy of an invite to The World’s most exclusive webmail. I’ve only been playing around with it today, but I thought I’d post my thoughts.

The UI is very impressive, it’s amazing what they’ve manage to coax out of javascript. Gmail has really raised the bar for other web applications. A few more web applications with responsive, rich user interfaces could make me less sceptical about their benefits. Having said all this I am honour bound to mention that GMail actively discriminates against the blind. I hope that the gmail team is carefully working to ensure that this great UI can degrade gracefully.

Naturally, I won’t be using gmail as my primary account, I pay for koziarski.com for good reason. However, it’s now officially my account for strangers & dodgy looking forms.

Import & Export would be nice, I currently have ~200MB worth of Maildir email and another ~60MB of mbox, searching & accessing this archive with Google’s technology would be great. Without a decent, scheduler-friendly Export, I’m too scared to lock my data away. Even if it’s on the biggest data center in the world.

Now what would really kick arse is if they allowed my to use my domain names & regularly mirror the data for backups. I’d pay good money for that, and use their service every day.

Now, if you feel like it, drop me a line