4/20/2004 06:04:00 PM

First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations.

So what else is new?

Gmail has many other special features that will become apparent as you use your account...

So I sent out my first Gmail today. My address is Dan.Hughes AT Gmail DOT com. I sent the message to myself at Hotmail. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to be delivered. I didn't know if this was due to the touch-and-go nature of any fledgling Internet service that is popular and overtaxed or the normal time it would take to scan the email for content queues to serve appropriate Ad Words at the bottom of the message. I had crafted my first message in a keyword loaded fashion:

this is a message about Lord of the Rings. also about Jesus Christ.
perhaps about Corn Flakes and hybrid cars as well.

Discontent with waiting for my first Gmail to be delivered I sent another message to my Integration Research account to do a controlled test. I moved to my other laptop that has Outlook on it and immediately received my first Gmail in my inbox--though it was the second one I had sent. Hotmail immediately became the suspect for the delayed delivery of my first Gmail. I checked the Bulk Mail folder and there it was. It could be that the Gmail domain is in the Hotmail spam filter (we are entering the next phase of the global Internet wars you know). If so users will have to declare individual addresses as safe when they recieve Gmail.

What was most interesting is that neither message had any Ad Words. Neither had anything other than the text I had written and the normal headers. I knew that Google was publicly wavering on their Ad Word plans, but I did not expect for them to pull out the functionality while they were still in soft-launch.

Here is my initial list of observations after my minimal use of Gmail.

What I Love:

Not having an address book.

Gmail uses something like intellisense to offer suggested email addresses that you have used in the past with each letter your type. Very cool.

Spell Check

Spell check on web-based email systems is a notoriously clunky feature. Gmail's spell checker is the most elegant and intuitive system I have used on the web. It comes close to the usefulness of recent editions of Word.

Labels

Creating a rudimentary, functional taxonomy by labeling emails with simple metadata is very useful.

Email as Conversations

Every email that you receive that can be tied back to prior emails is presented in a threaded conversation. Contextual email presentation is my favorite feature so far. One can minimize and maximize threads as one scans over, what could end up being, a significant conversational chain.

Trash

When you click on the Trash link the fist time you are presented with:

"No conversations in the trash. Who needs to delete when you have 1000 MB of storage?!"

The list of innovative features goes on and on: snippets, keyboard shortcuts, user-defined filters...

I like what I see so far.