My Argument for Gmail

I started slowly with a Gmail account last year, only using it as a spam filter account, and then to do a little bit of personal email as a novelty. Then I started having my newspaper sent there, and eventually migrated my travel stuff, receipts, mailing lists. Gmail has now declared victory over my email existence. Much of the time, I use it as my primary interface to my email, INSTEAD OF my own email client software. What's up with that?

In no particular order, here is a list of factors.

==> Labels instead of mailboxes. A subtle difference. Applying a label is just like putting a piece of mail in a folder, with one exception: no mutual exclusion. Putting things in folders makes them go somewhere. . . and stop being some other where. This is not the case with labels. They are not a dead-end. They do not conceal things. They simply mark them.

This didn't sink in immediately. It wasn't until I had about a dozen different labels that I realized that I really could, and might want to, multi-label pieces of mail. I have a "Lists" label for mailing lists. But many emails last year were "Political". Many emails from friends are both "Friends" and "Political" -- they come from a certain person, but they concern a certain domain.

So say I have some piece of email labelled as "Friends" and "Political", and it's also new and unread. If I click on my "Inbox" section, I see the email there, clearly. (That is, it also carries the label "Inbox").

Now if I click on the "Friends" section (which would be like looking inside a folder, under a mutex system), I see every message that has a Friends label, so the same message lives there _as well_. It's listed up top, in bold, because it's unread. But it's also clearly marked as "Inbox, Friends, Political". And so it goes.

Of course, I almost never manually apply labels. I've been building up a set of filters:

==> The filter system. Very nicely done. You create a simple filter (say, mail from "nytimes.com"), and it's extremely easy to instantly preview just which messages in your archive would be grabbed by that filter.

Filters can do sophisticated things, but so far, the only thing I do with them is to apply labels. (Can anyone suggest something else they use them for?)

My hypothetical email where the "from:" line matches a friend, and the "subject:" line includes "rove", matches two different filters, and gets automatically labelled "Friends, Political".

It's so easy to proliferate labels and filters that I expect I'll have have developed a very tailored system in the next six months, without much work on my part.

==> Search, the obvious one. It's fast, consistent, present on every page. It doesn't care about folder hierarchies or other artificial boundaries; all muscle, no fat. A joy to use. I can't say the same for any web mail service, or even for my desktop mail client. Incredible, if you think about it too hard.

==> Message threading or "view by conversation" is the *only* way Gmail lets you look at email.

By enforcing this way of looking at email, they ran a risk. If things get threaded wrong (all the messages with subject line "Hi" getting run together in a single thread), that's an annoying experience for the user. There have been failures with this kind of feature; certainly, using "view by conversation" in Outlook is very annoying, IMNSHO. Gmail seems, however, to have done their threading very intelligently, and gotten a good usability payoff.

Google are saying "This is how you look at your email in Gmail. Take it or leave it." It does one thing and does it well. They were smart, they placed their bet, and they were right.

By comparison, Microsoft likes to say that you can do it this way, and this way, and this way, and you remap every keyboard shortcut if you know how, and you can even embed it as an object inside a spreadsheet, and email it to someone! With a macro. Which might be true, strictly speaking, but in usability terms, in human terms, it's a car crash. None of the 9 ways of skinning the cat it particularly well-implemented, well-documented, pleasurable to use, or efficient. "View by conversation" in Outlook is echt Microsoft. No one uses it.

==> Keyboard shortcuts. A total throwback to the days of pine or elm. And great for that reason! Single-letter shortcuts (like 'j' and 'k') take you back and forth in your inbox, for example. This increases your sense of working with an actual application, rather than a web page. No need to reach for the mouse if you don't want to (and I don't).

Since this application runs in a browser, however, you have to be careful about where the keyboard focus is. Letters could start appearing in the address bar above the page . . . or in the email you're editing . . . rather than being interpreted as commands. The problem is worse in the Safari browser, which seems less fully supported than the Windows options.

There needs to be some solution to this. All web applications that try to hug the keyboard tightly are suffering from the same problem right now.

==> "Archive" instead of trashing turns out to work very well. If you're like me, you like to hang onto emails that might come in handy later, everything from URLs to poems to funny sentences from friends to directions to someone's house. I might want that funny sentence later, to write on a birthday cake.

But under an email foldering system, I have always had to decide (a) when should something exit the Inbox -- thus disappearing from my first layer of attention? (b) is it important enough to keep, or should I delete it? (c) which folder? (don't file it wrong or you won't be able to find it) (d) how good is my folder system these days? (e) do i need to create a folder for this kind of thing? (i.e. directions to people's houses) (f) when should something move from web storage to a hard drive, becoming less available?

These are annoying choices which I never face now. They're just gone! You Archive it. If you need it later, in Wichita, you have it. And when you click Archive, you don't think about "where" to put it. If it's labelled, it will keep living with its labelled counterparts. If it's not labelled at all, it's still available through Search or through the "All Messages" view.

Confidently clicking the Archive button all the time has made my inbox trimmer than it's ever been since 1991 when I started using email. My inbox never grows past a single page anymore.

(I mentioned earlier that "Inbox" is just a label that a message might have -- like any other label. Basically, what clicking the Archive button does is to take the "Inbox" label off a message. The message still retains all its other labels.)