Gmail bounced back a lot more quickly than the threatened 24 hours, I’m pleased to report. But I’ve been pondering the possibility of changing the way I use it, and this gives me additional impetus. I know there are some Media Nation readers who love this stuff, so they’ll indulge me, and perhaps provide some advice. The rest of you can skip this.
I made the switch to Gmail a little more than a year ago. For a while, I used it in conjunction with a POP account, but soon I switched to Web-only. Why?
- My mail was the same wherever I was, even if I was using a different computer — including my archives and my address book, which are also in Gmail.
- I could download my mail and send outgoing messages hassle-free even in places like public libraries, which often block POP access.
- Gmail on the Web is just a nice online experience — the labeling, the display, the search features and the like. Aesthetics matter.
Over time, however, I’ve become frustrated. I hope to stick with Gmail in some way, mainly because it does such a good job of filtering spam. But I might change the way I use it. My complaints:
1. It does not integrate well with my non-Gmail account. I use Gmail to access my Northeastern e-mail. Theoretically, I should never have to log on to my Northeastern account. But it hasn’t worked out quite that conveniently.
For a long time, I had NU e-mail forward to Gmail. Mail arrived instantly, and life seemed to be good. But there were minor problems too arcane to mention, so I turned off forwarding and set up Gmail to grab my NU mail directly. There’s a delay that can last from a few minutes to an hour or more — usually not a problem, but occasionally a big problem.
It also seems as though, every so often, Gmail simply refuses to deliver a piece of mail on the NU server. Therefore, every day, I have to log on to my NU account separately to see whether there’s anything I missed. A waste of time, to say the least.
2. Every piece of outgoing mail is somehow stamped with my Gmail address. When I send an e-mail from Gmail using my NU address as my outgoing address, my Gmail address appears somewhere in the header as well. This is not a big deal, but I don’t like it.
3. Gmail’s advertising sometimes sets off spam filters. I have sent messages from Gmail using my NU address that have been marked as spam on the receiving end. In attempting to troubleshoot this, all we could think of was that Google’s ads rang the alarm.
Now, I could go back to using Gmail with POP — or, even better, IMAP. But there are some really nice features I would lose. My Gmail address book cannot easily be exported to Apple’s Address Book. The biggest sacrifice is that I’d no longer be archiving my mail on Google’s servers unless I set things up to make a separate, time-consuming operation out of it. I love the labeling feature and I love the super-fast searching, and I don’t want to give those up.
If there’s anything I’m saying that shows my ignorance, please enlighten me. I’d love to be able to improve my Gmail experience without giving up what I like.
