What's so great about GMAIL?

[Ned Seagoon]

Hi all.

I keep seeing invites for free Gmail accounts. As I understand it Gmail is a form of e-mail where the mail remains on a central server, much like an Imap server, but with the added bonus of a search engine to help find messages. Have I got this right?

If this is the case I don't know if I would want all my mail held on a server that I don't have any real say as to who may gain access to it some time in the future.

I've not really got any big secrets but with nutters sending unsoliceted mail all the time, some of it possibly damaging, I dont think I want a central store of this, especially if I don't know if when I hit delete it's gone of not.

Am I paranoic? Have I got it all wrong? Please enlighten me. BF

[renegade600]

Whats so great about it, it belongs to google and one gig of space :eek: I have it but am disappointed with it. It is extremely slow to access, cannot delete email, unable to sort it in any type of order, no pop3 ability and many other features I just plain don't like.

Basically I only use it to receive messages from cth and yahoo groups. Lately I have been considering deleting the account. I am holding off for the moment since it is still beta and am interested in new features they may provide down the road.
I do have a 2 gig yahoo account that is a whole lot better than google - for the moment.

[lufbra]

cannot delete email
Yes it can delete mail. :)

G-Mail is still in "beta" format, so who knows what the final set up will be like. I've had it here for some weeks now, it's good for a secondary e-mail address, and considering the fact it holds 1 gig of mails, not bad for a freebie.

[renegade600]

Yes it can delete mail. :)

G-Mail is still in "beta" format, so who knows what the final set up will be like. I've had it here for some weeks now, it's good for a secondary e-mail address, and considering the fact it holds 1 gig of mails, not bad for a freebie.
Lets put it this way, when I deleted some mail, for the fun of it I did a search a few days later, I found the email that was supposed to be deleted.

[lufbra]

Where were they, on the G-Mail page of yours?

[renegade600]

I do not remember where they were, I slept a few times since then. I will try again in a little bit.

[Ned Seagoon]

OK, so if I were to have one of these accounts I would get 1Gb of storage. This does not mean much to me as I am unlikely to ever receive this amount of mail (spam excluded). But it still concerns me that my mail will be on someone elses machine, and I will have no means of controlling who may access that mail, now or in the future.

Any thoughts on these concerns? BF

[rockboy]

It's webmail so it's vulnerable to anyone who can hack Google's secure database. :dizzy:

In reality, no one will access it but you unless they have your personal user info. It's out there on a secure server same as yahoo, excite, or hotmail. Until it's removed/downloaded even your isp's mail server has your pop3 mail.

Re deleting gmail: If you move it to Trash it's like a recycle bin and is not deleted for 30 days. If you want to delete it immediately, open your Trash, select the messages you want to delete, click the "Delete Forever" button.

http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/more.html#data

I get some newsletters I can now keep and search later. I used to have to sort and delete things I would have liked to keep due to storage limits. The more I use it the better I like it. And it's free. ;)

[renegade600]

OK, so if I were to have one of these accounts I would get 1Gb of storage. This does not mean much to me as I am unlikely to ever receive this amount of mail (spam excluded). But it still concerns me that my mail will be on someone elses machine, and I will have no means of controlling who may access that mail, now or in the future.

Any thoughts on these concerns? BF
It is how much risk you are willing to take. As I said in a previous message I only use mine to receive subscription messages from cth and receive all messages from yahoo groups instead of going to the groups. This way I will not fill up my other accounts with useless or read messages. Any personal emails, orders or other important emails goes pop3 so I have more control over it.

Personally I do not like the fact that google can (even though it is a computer script that does it) target ads base on the subject of your emails.

[Ned Seagoon]

Personally I do not like the fact that google can target ads based on the subject of your emails.
Ah! thanks, that's the catch. I get quite enough ads now and have my machine set up to reject these. However my hotmail account doesn't work properly with these measures in place. So I guess a gmail account would be the same.

I think the short answer is, I'll manage my own mail, on my own machine, from a pop server. BF

[the awesome one]

simple answer: the inbox :wave: