E mail Fail

E mail Fail

This post is inspired by a recent post by top internet technology venture capitalist Fred Wilson, titled "Email Fail" (LINK).

Basically, as I understand it, hes been struggling for years with an e-mail client that will handle masses of e-mail. Programs such as Outlook, Entourage and the like cant deal with the size of his e-mail archive. Thunderbird choaked. GMail is the answer but he cant get used to the way in which GMail threads all e-mail, without a choice to view e-mail in the more standard way.

Ive said this before, but GMail works for me because:

- The threaded conversation interface is a true innovation--get used to it! Having all your e-mail in a conversation, with both the incoming AND outgoing e-mail all pulled together is so much more effective. To me, this is the "killer" feature that prevents me from trying anything else. This design is what truly distinguishes GMail from everything else.

- It can handle a seemingly unlimited amount of e-mail, seemlessly, without choking.

- The search capability is great.

- There are wonderful add-ons like GTD Inbox (LINK)

- It has you tag e-mails instead of putting them in folders allowing any e-mail to exist in multiple places

- Google for Domains provides great, small workgroup e-mail management services

- Being able to have all your e-mail searchable via the BlackBerry GMail client is wonderful (and so what if its not "push" in the same way that the regular BlackBerry client works--a slight wall against crackberry addiction is ok with me)

- Googles junk mail filter seems to work better than any others

I also occasionally use Thunderbird via IMAP for:

- offline GMail (although I have found the offline GMail function to be perfectly useable)

- as a backup, just on the off chance Google loses all my data

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