Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Gmail vs. Yahoo Plus

I decided that I should get Pop working for all my accounts so after setting up Gmail I decided to do Yahoo. The default for Mail is to delete all downloaded mail after a week so Yahoo did what I told it to do and a week later deleted all my email. This is frustrating because I had intended to have many of the documents online so they would be invulnerable to hard drive crashes/ theft, etc.
Gmail on the other hand only archived the emails each week. I keep finding that Gmail is easy to use in many small ways that I hadn't been looking for: preventing composition loss due to navigation away from page, combining threads, listing number of unread messages in title (unobtrusive and it can be scanned from other tabs), combining replies.
The combining replies with the original message has multiple advantages:

  • reduces page loads when composing
  • will globally enable a more consistent replying method (as more people use Gmaill there will be less need for the included originals)
  • message content streamlining (the message you write only has things written by you. This makes manual and automated searching more efficient. )
  • reduces wasted bandwidth.
I haven't used Gmail long so there are probably more things, I'll discover.

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