Fuddland

Gmail is still in its cliquey, beta, invite-only stages, so of course I wanted in to the party as soon as possible. But who needs to bid for one on eBay or set up a Blogger account in the hope they’ll send you an invite when you can ask your longtime-Blogger-using girlfriend if she’ll kindly send you her Gmail account invitation?

Despite the major problem [for me] that Gmail is completely incompatible with Opera [due to Google’s use of functions specific to Mozilla/Firefox and IE’s Javascript implementations], I’m quite impressed with the speed of the interface and once I become familiar with the keyboard shortcuts it should become even easier to use. It’s certainly nicer than Hotmail and Yahoo!’s interfaces, and after being used to ignoring them on normal webpages for so long, the Google Ads down the right-hand side of the page don’t bother me at all, even if they are tailored to the contents of the emails.

In fact, the issue with Opera may not even be that much of a problem; there are two “workarounds” that I can see:

1. Set Gmail to be the homepage of my Firefox installation and set the Gmail cookie to remember me [it currently only does this for 2 weeks at a time] — thus, since I don’t use Firefox for general browsing, it becomes a de facto “Gmail client” with built-in capability to open webpages from links within emails.

2. The second option seems more attractive: the Pop Goes the Gmail [PGtGM] sits in your system tray and acts as a kind of gateway [that may not be the correct technical use of the word] between Gmail and a variety of email clients, in particular Opera’s excellent M2 built-in email client [which I use at home] and Outlook [which, for various reasons, I pretty much have to use at University].

   I’ve successfully set this up with Outlook, and will be testing it with Opera later on. It transparently copies your out-going message to your Gmail “Sent Items” folder, checks for new Gmails at a user-specified interval and downloads a copy to your local inbox. Of course this means you have two copies of your sent and received gmails [since they will be stored locally as well as in your Gmail account], but the convenience outweighs the extra storage space [and one can always set up filters to make it easy to delete local gmails every now and then].

   This also nicely circumvents the Google Ads for anyone who really has a problem with seeing them. Sadly, during the writing of this entry, PGtGM crashed once, so it might not be completely stable yet.

[Hat tip for PGtGM: Daisy.]

#1

graeme | 2004 / 06 / 11 – 20:27

I’m using option 1 and it works like a charm (you’ll also pleased by the subtext of this statement - yes I’m back to browsing with Opera).

#2

imogen | 2004 / 06 / 11 – 23:55

just fyi: i’ve used up all my invites now.
and
thanks for the info about opera and outlook — although i’ve been using the firefox option for a few days now — and have been fairly happy using gmail that way.

#3

David | 2004 / 06 / 12 – 01:06

Re #1 & #2: Yay to browsing with Opera! I can now confirm PGtGM appears to work with Opera’s email client just fine, integrating seamlessly with all my other email accounts. Top stuff! :)

[Edited by commenter — 01:07]

#4

David | 2004 / 06 / 12 – 11:26

Re #1: BTW, have you moved to California and branched out into design consultancy, or is that a typo in your URL? :)

#5

Daisy | 2004 / 06 / 12 – 19:12

Four days in and I’ve not received any spam (cf Hotmail where you can count barely 4 minutes between opening an account and receiving your first spam).

Re #4 - eagle eyes!

#6

graeme | 2004 / 06 / 13 – 08:30

Re #4: How I wish I had moved to California rather than just having mis-typing issues.

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