I don't know if as many people are going to switch over now that other free services like Hotmail are going to follow suit with big ass storage. It'll be very interesting to see how it all works out.
Now the question in my head is "is this the end of the desktop email client?" Space is no longer an issue really, connections are getting faster and faster, people are usually "online" as long as their computer is on (as wireless is becoming more popular). Other than events being fired at the user as in popups or wherever, I can't see a big draw for desktop apps... I'll think about this more.
Listening to: The Crystal Method - I Know Its You
Well, it'll definitely be end of the desktop email client for me, and here's why :
ReplyDelete1) I'm to deal of Outlook's filters. With Gmail, if a large number of users report a certain email as spam, it gets labelled as such and added to the filter (ie, communal filtering = less work for me).
2) Never having to back-up or worry about email storage formats. It is possible to backup and restore your Gmail account, but given Google's reputation for redundancy there isn't much point.
3) Consistent web access. I can get to all of my POP3 accounts via the web as well, but they only have what's currently on the server (ie, anything I haven't recieved in outlook yet). I know there are other ways around this (eg IMAP), but those aren't always available (for example on my mail email account).
I mentioned this to Jim (in a gmail conversation ;) ), that I'm suspecting that gmail.com addresses will be everything that the .name domain was supposed to be.. (or at least that's the way that I'm treating it..)
Here's reasons why I probably wouldn't use GMail
ReplyDelete1) I don't like other people deciding for me what is spam and what isn't. If a bunch of people sign up for a real newsletter and then call it spam, do I stop getting this newsletter in my inbox?
2) I don't want to let some free service be in control of backing up my data, or whether or not I can access it at all.
3) I like having control of my mail, using real email clients, that allow me to send 10 GB attachments if I so wish, and let me store 40 GB of data if I choose to devote that much hard drive space to it.
4) When my internet goes down, and it does go down, it's nice to be able to access my data, without having and internet connection.
5) With thunderbird, I can just leave mail on the server for 7, 14, or however many days, so that I can still access this mail when I'm away from home, and not have to worry about the server filling up with too much data.
Reply to Eric's comments
ReplyDelete1) I am prettu sure that you can specify what email addresses are not to be treated as spam (gotta check that).
2) GMail will eventually allow desktop clients to download their mail
3) In case you are on vacation for 2 weeks and can't check your email, would you rather have 1GB of space or 10MB (that will fill up really fast)
4) Your mail server decides on the size of attachments and not your client. Also, you have to make sure that recepient of the mail is allowed to receive large attachments. GMail allows 10MB attachments, which is reasonably high. There are better ways of sharing larger files than emailing them
5) Just as it's nice to have backup if internet connection is down, it is also nice to have a backup on the server in case that your hard drive colapses
I hope this makes the believer out of you. Large accounts like GMail are good thing.
Responses in no particular order
ReplyDeletecp -R ~/.thunderbird /mnt/12gig/thunderbirdbackup
That's a nice way to do a backup as far as i'm concerned.
10 mb is a lot of email. I have saved all my email for the past 6 months, and it's about 40 mb. Apart from people who send large attachments, everything else is pretty small. Anything over 200k probably shouldn't be sent over email anyway. I could just leave my computer on, and it would download the mail for me, and I would have tons of space, if I couldn't check it for a couple weeks.
I prefer blacklisting whether than whitelisting for email. Missing an email is something that I don't want false positives for. I'm too lazy to check all my junk messages to find important ones that might be in there.