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Gmail

I got a coveted Gmail account a week or so ago and have since sent all of my old email to the account, and forwarded all of my old addresses to my Gmail address and have been using it as my primary email account.

As you may have read elsewhere, it really is by far the best web-based email anywhere, in my opinion. The interface is great, with a lot of Javascript so that you can load small pieces of the page rather than reloading the whole site every time you send or delete an email, etc. The only problem with this is that it doesn’t work with Safari yet, causing it to crash frequently when you try to use it with Gmail. So I have been using Mozilla Firefox instead, and am pretty happy with that as well. I used the Safari Bookmark Extractor to import all my old Safari bookmarks over. And now with the Firefox Bookmark Synchronizer I can synchronize my bookmarks between multiple computers, and even operating systems, which is one of the reasons I stayed with Safari until now.

The search function in Gmail is one of my favorites, as it lets you very quickly search your mail for just about anything. For instance I needed a phone number for “Jeff” that my dad had emailed to me, so I just entered Jeff in the search field and hit enter, and it immediately pulled up that email. Compare that to searching in Outlook and most other email clients, which take minutes to find something, and even then you’re normally only searching in the subject, not the entire message.

The spam filtering has also worked quite well for me so far. In about a week’s time it has blocked 50 spams, and only missed 3. There were about 3 false-positives. But after I corrected the errors, it hasn’t missed any since.

One thing that could definitely be improved is the address book, as it only lets you have a first and last name, and then an email address. It also adds every person you email to the address book, whether you want to or not. This can be frustrating if you need to look up an address and can’t find the one you want because there are so many listed there that you didn’t even enter.

There are lots of other features that have been listed elsewhere, but suffice it to say it really is as good as everyone says, and you should definitely try to get an invite, or just sign-up when it goes public. (which I’m guessing will be soon, because I just got 5 more invites today, it seems like they are starting to give them away pretty freely)

I use Gmail just fine in Safari.

What version of Safari are you using?

I have the latest version, but it crashes quite often when doing things like labeling messages, etc. A friend had the same problems with the latest safari build as well. Maybe it has been updated in the past week or something.

In the gmail help, it says that it works with Safari now. And I agree about the address book. I said it on teamps. :D

It’s still crashing on my powerbook and my wife’s iBook. Don’t know what the deal is…