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So I've been diddling with GMail, and I've come to a conclusion:
It's brilliant.
But not because of any email brilliance. It's a nice little webmail client. It's got a clean interface, although I hate not being able to easily set up extra folders. I've been using IMAP almost exclusively for over 7 years now, and I like my IMAP folders. But it's free, so how much can I really complain? As well, since no one has that address, I get no email. (Well, maybe 3-4 people). It's therefore my favorite account. It's got a lot of storage, which is also cool.
"But John, that's not brilliant." You're right, it's not. It's the phenomenon Google has created that is brilliant. It's club marketing on the Internet.
No, really. GMail is using the same trick that every Kool Kids Klub uses. You can't just join. Oh no. That would let anyone use it. You must be invited to use GMail. You can only be invited by other members of the GMail Klub. There's now two classes on the Internet. The GMail Kool Kids, and everyone else. In fact, they should call it the GMail Qool Qids, then they'd be all GQQ, which is cooler than GQ, because it has two Q's.
Think about it. You get an invite. Of course you join. Yes you did, and you know it. Then you play with it, and just before the reality of It's just Webmail sets in, you get six invites. Why six? I don't know, maybe seven is a magical GQQ Posse number. But it's enough to invite a few people, but small enough so that you can't invite EVERYONE.
Jesus, all they need is a logo of an extremely large bald black man in sunglasses when you log in. If they charged an insanely high non-invite joing up fee, they couldn't be any more manipulative.
Don't get me wrong, I think the idea of a free email service with a lot of storage is good. But folks, behind the GQQ marketing, it's just email.
And no, I'm not giving you an invite, or my GQQ address. You're not GQQ enough.
Posted by John C. Welch at 13:44 | Permalink
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Comments
The marketing may be great. The service has some of the best web email things I have seen. Contacts and filters could be better but I can deal. If you sense a "but" coming you are right.
Why the hell can't it handle mime encoding better? 60% of the mime attachements I have are HTML mail. So Gmail displays it as an attachment I can download?
What.
The.
Fuck.
Ok. Let me check my understanding. I'm viewing my mail in a web browser. Some of my mail is encoded as HTML. This mail does not display. Sometimes it does if I open "The Attachment" in a new window. Other times I have to save it out and manually open it.
Fricking hotmail understands mime encoding better. It's not like it's a new standard, just check the RFCs. For a web based email client they have done quite a bit. To not handle html based messages is just stupid.
Having been a GQQ for three or four months, I use it as a mail backup and a way to get my email in strange places. Primary email client? Not so much.
Posted by: Michael Krzyzek | September 8, 2004 11:53 PM
Oops.
OK I realize I should have done this sooner. Like, oh, a couple of months ago.
I cracked open the deliquent email messages and looked at the source. The HTML blocks where properly encoded as MIME attachments but not specificaly labeled as text/HTML, just generice MIME attachments.
Hmmm. Strange. Then the lightbulb went off, I am having Mail relay all incoming email to my Gmail account. I sent an HTML message straight to my Gmail address an copied my personal adderess. The message that was sent directly displayed properly. The one from Mail didn't.
When I setup the rule to do the relay I figured mail would just duplicated the message and send it on. Not so apparently. It takes the message and re-builds the MIME encoding. On multipart messages that have both plain text and HTML text it strips the plain text and tacs the HTML text on as a plain Jane MIME part.
Fuck.
Please disregard my previous rant where I act like an asshat.
Posted by: Michael Krzyzek | September 17, 2004 11:52 AM
