Sanity's Journal: Gmail ain't all that

Well (unrelated to my previous journal entry - it was a joke people!) I got my hands on a Gmail account - and I was rather disappointed. Gmail has one or two mildly novel ideas, but nothing to make it rival a decent client-side email client. I also found it to be somewhat buggy, filters often didn't work, and were insufficiently flexible. Sometimes it claimed not to be able to parse email (how hard can it be to parse an email?!). Also, their spam filtering, which you might imagine would be amazing, given the opportunities for collaborative spam filtering, was rather ineffective. Ok, I know it is still a beta, people are already raving about it - and I just don't see why.

More to the point, one's email address is an important commodity, and it seems quite risky to invest so much in a Gmail address given the likely difficulty in migrating away from such an account in future. Consider a situation where you had been using Gmail for a year, and they did something really nasty (like trying to spam you). What are your options? Basically you are stuck with them unless you think you can email everyone who might ever want to contact you and inform them that you are changing your email address. No thanks!

Bottom line: After about 4 days of Gmail, I have now migrated back to Thunderbird and to an email address I have 100% control over.

Then can I have your account?

[Elwood P Dowd]

Email login & pass to [e-mail]

Thanks in advance.

Um, no

[Sanity]

I can think of no good reason why you would want to get email sent to [e-mail], but I can think of a few bad ones...

Re:Um, no

[Elwood P Dowd]

Hehe. I thought you might have a more abstract login. You know... like [e-mail] or something.