zelph.com

Thanks to my friend Alex , I am the prowd owner of a gmail account. I know, I know… they are just a lame kind of status symbol right now, but I was more interested in how they did things. Working in a User Experience group at Sprint, I was curious as to what methods they used for intereaction, the “discussion” concept, and the like. I just got it a day or two ago, so am still learning what I like and don’t like about it, but I’m sure a lot of that will changes as it is still only a “beta” product and will have many changes on the way.

Dislikes so far are:

• Filters don’t work very well. They don’t explain how they work, so there isn’t much “help” to go with it. I tried just experimenting with it to figure out the syntax that is allowable, and found a few things out. But when I do a test search it comes up with X number of messages that match the filter. But when I apply it, only Y messages are listed.
• Labels are nice, but folders have perks too I love being able to assign a given message to 5 labels. But I hate that unless I want to archive a given message, everything shows up in my inbox. So the daily status emails I get from my server that I don’t want to really read right off the bat… are just sitting there staring at me, taking up prime realestate. It would be nice to have both folders AND labels, so I can physically move a message to it’s “main” category, but still be able to find it as associated to other labels

Gotta get back to work, so I’ll make this short. Just wanted to link to a few cool places:
Gmail4Troops.com - Donate your invites to those defending our country. A small but valueable way to say thanks.
Pop goes the GMail - A hack to download your gmail to a pop account.
Gtray (sporatically working link) - A desktop application that sits in your tray and checks for new GMail every X minutes. It uses Internet Explorer as a conduit to do the checking, and can only open IE directly… so as a FireFox user, I just see the bubble popup saying I have a new one and know to go look, instead of going through that bubble to see what’s new. This is a very early program, so hopefully things will get better.