There is no doubting the fact that we love the spam catching abilities of GMail and thanks to some help from our very smart friends and few tips and tricks, we have been using it to clean our massive email inflow. However, GMail’s UI is an acquired taste - some like it. Others don’t. Liz, for instance, likes it, and I don’t.
Still, it is a product that enjoys a passionate user-base. Mike Arrington, ebullient over the new Mail Fetcher feature, had a near religious moment, which he shared with all of us, in his post, Gmail Just Got Perfect.
Perfect, as I have argued before, is a very subjective word; one I am loathe to use, unless of course when describing Frank Sinatra’s classics. But then it is subjective ;-)
Nevertheless, Mail Fetcher is a way for GMail users to read their messages from their non-Google POP3 mail accounts within the Gmail reader interface. Now Yahoo, Mac and several other web based mail systems have had this feature for a while now.
Google is now introducing this? What took Google so long? Isn’t that the big question? And even now Mail Fetcher is available to a limited number of users. These two-penny features that don’t dazzle me at all. How about making GMail available over IMAP? Oh wait, that is going to cut into the money Google makes from advertising … never mind.
Anne Zelenka is not that impressed by Mail Fetcher as well. She gives her reasons over on Web Worker Daily. Liz has a list of things Google can do to make it nearly perfect. But then she is a passionate user!
GMail logo courtesy of Google Inc.
8 comments so far
6:31 PM PT
I’m with you… can’t stand the interface. I just posted this method to use Gmail over IMAP at Mike’s place. Enjoy your lovely Mail.app interface with Gmail’s lovely spam filtering abilities.
Incidentally, I’m also doing this in reverse right now to clean my normal IMAP mail.
6:35 PM PT
This is overblown. Would you have even posted about it had Techcrunch not made it such a big deal?
8:02 PM PT
Good one Shadilac. Completely agree. This is stupid. I already forward my email to Gmail from other account. Now I can pull them. Wow! Gmail is finally complete. And I wish people would take their noses out of Mike’s ass.
8:24 PM PT
Probably not! I would have typically ignored it if there was no chatter about it. Since people are talking, I am just adding a few lines of my opinion. Anyway RCM, I kinda said pretty much the same thing. Just being a tad mellow in my words this weekend.
4:31 AM PT
Most of the Google’s features are user generated ideas in forums and suggestions. And the good thing is that they listen to these and try to implement it as fast as possible. What Liz says it is right but there is no mail program that does all those things, but who will be the first one to do it, it surely will be Gmail.
9:01 AM PT
I use gmail more now than I did a year ago, but I’d use it more still if the html editor had some Ajax-power injected into it. Such as: give power users a vi- or emacs-like interface. I dread interacting with an html textbox - whose interactive feature set (lack of it, really) hasn’t changed in a decade.
12:13 PM PT
Sorry Om, didn’t mean to infer otherwise, I just thought it was weird to see you re-blog such a mundane article of Mike’s.
2:08 PM PT
So Hotmail has been perfect since 1998. Because that was the year that I started using Hotmail to read my POP3 mail on the go: way before MSN bought it. Is that feature no longer available? Is that even a feature? POP3 should be standard equipment in any email client.
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