« Metanews | Main | Simplicity » Fibber McGee's inboxI have the same relationship with email that Fibber McGee had with the contents of his closet; I've posted several rants about my email woes, and here's another: after several months using Gmail as my primary mail client, I've gone back to Outlook again. At least Outlook is performing better than before, probably because I spent the many hours scrubbing and defragmenting while trying to correct a Firefox performance problem. I'm still getting most of my mail at gmail, either directly or by forwarding other accounts, but I'm using Outlook to retrieve it via Gmail's pop3 system. I'm doing this because Gmail's system was just too chaotic; I was missing messages right and left. If you get a couple hundred emails a day, Gmail is probably fine, but when you get thousands, it's very hard to keep track. This is because gmail uses labels rather than filters, so you can't drop messages categorically into various mailboxes so that it's out of the way until you need it... so you can miss messages in the deluge. Worse, gmail combines all messages on a single subject, with no option to view the messages separately. This made it much harder for me to see responses to messages I'd sent or conversations I'd joined. I should say I'm using BOTH Outlook and Gmail. Gmail is too valuable for search to abandon completely, even though its architecture defeats a power user's attempts to organize. It's also handy if you move around a lot, and sometimes prefer a web-based client. I suspect many other folks are set up this way, and that's fine for Google - they only want the data. Photo: Fibber McGee, buried under the contents of his closet. jon posted this at 5:12 PM |
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