Opinions on gmail?

[Dimwhit]

That sucks. But if a company didn't want employees accessing personal email, that would be very effective.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Just one question, how many of you are regularly on firewalled computers which block gmail and ohter webbased email services? (I suppose few since such a firewall might block enworld too ) I've never had that, but a buddy of mine recently ran into that situation. He had a gmail account, but his office put a firewall in that blocked it. As he doesn't have email access at home, he's virtually cut off.

I don't, but a friend works for AG Edwards, and they are blocked from everything but the financial websites that they use for their work.

 

[Mercule]

The only reason I use it is because I regularly use 3 different computers, so it's the easiest way to keep all my email in one place. I like it, though, but if I was more or less restricted to one computer, I wouldn't use Gmail.

I grabbed my own domain and have webmail access on my server. Then I POP it down to Outlook at home. I definitely see the point, though.

Edit: I think my attitude of webmail being "throw away" is because I would have a hard time taking anyone seriously who had "MerCulE1789@gmail.com" as their email. By having my home email, I get the option of using a "respectable" username. Since I use email to submit resumes, it matters, IME.

Gmail isn't as bad, yet, but I wouldn't even want to try getting a decent ID on Yahoo! or Hotmail. Gmail will be there soon enough, though.

 

[Mercule]

Just one question, how many of you are regularly on firewalled computers which block gmail and ohter webbased email services? (I suppose few since such a firewall might block enworld too ) I've never had that, but a buddy of mine recently ran into that situation. He had a gmail account, but his office put a firewall in that blocked it. As he doesn't have email access at home, he's virtually cut off.

Have him try "mail.google.com" instead of "gmail.com". That gets through the firewall where I work.

 

[Dimwhit]

I grabbed my own domain and have webmail access on my server. Then I POP it down to Outlook at home. I definitely see the point, though.

Edit: I think my attitude of webmail being "throw away" is because I would have a hard time taking anyone seriously who had "MerCulE1789@gmail.com" as their email. By having my home email, I get the option of using a "respectable" username. Since I use email to submit resumes, it matters, IME.

Gmail isn't as bad, yet, but I wouldn't even want to try getting a decent ID on Yahoo! or Hotmail. Gmail will be there soon enough, though.

I actually have my own domain for email (and web), too, but I don't like the web interface for it, so I forward everything to gmail now. I've set up Gmail so that the reply-to is from my personal domain (another nice feature). Good thing is if I ever change my mind, I can go back to using my old email with my own domain and just turn off all the forwarding. I also got lucky with Gmail and got a good username. Helps having a not-so-common last name.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

I also got lucky with Gmail and got a good username. Helps having a not-so-common last name.

I've got one of the most common last names out there, and I still got a good name on gmail (rjmiller). As it's still by invitation only, there are plenty of fairly common names available (my wife, sister, and brother all got common names as well)

 

[IronWolf]

I mean address book groups, so I put a dozen of my friend's email address in one group and just address the email to that one group instead of everyone individually. Google doesn't handle that (unless I've missed something).

Contact Groups have been added to GMail:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=30970

This is a new feature.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I actually have my full name on my gmail account as firstname.surname @gmail.com, although firstnamesurname was taken so I couldn't get them both. It does kind of bug me that if they leave out the '.' then it goes to a different person, I admit, but I doubt that is very likely as it is very distinct, and reply/address book/auto-respond functions are used much more than typing in an email address. It's better than my student account from college that was just stu13422 as a user name.