Gmail redux

It's no secret that we have been giving out accounts to our blogging friends and journalists. Here are some early reactions to Gmail (good, bad and otherwise) :

• Baby and Baggage : It pains me to report that apparently, without my realizing it, I have become too stodgy and boring to become 'denisester-at-gmail.com,' though Google to its credit did its level best to talk me into it.


• Chris 'Lockergnome' Pirillo : y'all should have an Atom feed for the Gmail inbox (via AIM)


• Matt Haughey : I want to test out the limits of this new email app, see how long it stays spam free...[updated] Gmail Review


• Stewart Butterfield : The test group can't be that small if 'stewart' and 'butterfield' were already taken.


• Jeff Jarvis : Just got a GMail account. Will let you know what I find. So far, I see nothing revolutionary.


• Rick Bruner : So far, it looks pretty cool. Automatically adds any email address you send to, to your address book, which is handy.


• Andre Torrez : This feels like Google (and not Orkut, thank God).


• Mark Pilgrim : Gmail is Google's upcoming free webmail service. The service is not open to the public and is still in active development, and this feedback may be obsolete by the time the service goes live...


• Aaron Schwartz : It's incredibly fast, it's got nice keyboard controls, and the interface is simple and clean...


• Prolific : The advertising is inobtrusive. It's fast and smooth. No image bloat. Yay.


• Forbes : On other e-mail programs or services, the most effective way to search message content without taking a long time is to rearrange e-mail by date, sender or subject and then try to zero in on the message you're looking for. Gmail has solved this problem brilliantly.


• Me, Myself and Ehsan : Everybody (I mean others with gmail accounts) have written a lot about it's features, so I'll write about its persian (unicode) features.


• Luiz Eduardo : you can apply a label to a message when reading it, it's sorta virtual folder; search seems to be really good and fast (duh! it's Google)...


• Ahmad Anvari : Wow! The fastest and the most sophisticated email spell checker in the world. It's like running your spell checking application on your machine!


• Olivier Travers : Access Yahoo Groups through Gmail and get rid of obnoxious ads...


• Sudarshan Ananth : Gmail offers plus addressing which lets you use username+anything@gmail.com as an email address.


• Sarah Hatter : So far, the only thing I don't like is that it Gmail doesn't play the Jetson's theme when I get new mail...


• in pari delicto : Searching is REALLY powerful. I like being able to set more than one label (folder) for a message, and I'm finding that I'm able to locate the messages I'm looking for more quickly than I used to be able to.


• kwc : The spell checker on GMail is also friggin' awesome.

I'll update this post as more reviews come in. Drop me a note if I've missed your review. For those of you still waiting for an account, here is a brief intro to Gmail. I'll see if I can dig up some invites for shellen.com readers.

[update] Some folks I've invited to Gmail with yahoo.com addresses have reported seeing the invites go to their 'Bulk' folder. If you have requested an invite and are on Yahoo! Mail please double-check before sending me a reinvite request.

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