It does, really. I mean yeah, it’s yet another web-mail thing, but seriously, take a look at it… if you’ve gotten an invite by now of course, otherwise there’s no chance of getting in any more. Plenty of invites around though, so if you Google around a bit, I’m sure you’ll find someone who’s willing to send you one (try this).
Anyway, why does it rock? Cause you get 1GB of space for one, but that’s not all. There are others that do the same thing, no biggy, but the GMail has some nifty features that make a geek like me feel all warm and fussy inside.
First they order your emails in “conversations”. Now WTF is that you ask, well, it’s simple. It’s like usenet newsreaders that group relevant posts together in a single thread, so does GMail with your emails. And it does it pretty good as well.
So whenever you receive some reply to a mailing list thread of a few days ago, you see that conversation listed in your inbox, which allows you to easily see what other people where babbling about in the very same thread. Sweet innit.
Also in GMail you don’t use folders for instance to catalogue/order your received emails. Folders are out, pass�, you use tags instead. You can tag any conversation with more than one tag. This can be handy if, for instance, you let GMail automatically add a tag to each email that comes from your, lets say, favourite gabber.org mailing list.
You’ll get a “gabberlist” link on the left of your inbox, which will work just like a folder, grouping all the labelled conversations together.
But -and here comes the neat part- you can also manually apply a second label “mixes” to all emails that contain links to mp3 DJ sets, which gives you another folder-like link, which will contain all DJ mixes for future reference, from various mailing lists (cause you’re not only listening to hardcore now are you).
Yes I know, it rawks, and that not all. The GUI is like… whow… fast.
A lot of DHTML and background refreshes using a hidden frame are done to speed things up for you, and make things blindingly fast most of the time. The pages get refreshed now and then of course, its still web based, but it’s a hell of a lot faster than Hotmail or Yahoo or any other web based email thingy I’ve used in the past.
Check out that spell checker for example, fast & easy. I actually used it to check this post for spelling mistakes… looks like I have a problem with the word received btw.
So personally, I think this GMail thing is gonna blow the competition out of the water… and it’s currently only in beta! Ha! Eat that Microsoft.
Oh yeah, and I don’t care about those ads no, cause they are so unnoticeable it took me a week to find out they where actually there… but that might be just me.