Flashes of Panic

I’ve been thinking about this since I had two nice people offer me Gmail invites several months ago. (It’s interesting, by the way, that we’re using the verb, invite, as a noun for these things. It’s as though they’re actual actions, not objects.) Julie’s recent review gives me a good hook to hang it on, especially now that the height of the frenzy appears to have passed.

The best reason why I don’t have a Gmail account is simply that I can’t figure out why I’d want one. The hosting plan for this site includes more inboxes than I need, on this and another domain; I have POP, IMAP and webmail access to them. With a POP or IMAP client of my choice, I can slice and dice those messages in any way the MUA (Mail User Agent, a TLA for a POP or IMAP client) can handle them, and I can have mailboxes up to the capacity of my hard disk drive, which is well in excess of Gmail’s vaunted gigabyte. My hosting company is a bit more conservative with their spam blocking than I would like, but that’s because they’re doing it for customers, not employees.

I’m not disturbed by the privacy thing. My mail is already filtered for spam, and webmail in any form (in fact, SMTP, period) is highly insecure to begin with; if I really wanted privacy, I’d insist on all my mail being encrypted. I do find it a bit unsettling that my outbound mail to Gmail users is being indexed, but the same encryption point stands. (Does Gmail support PGP, by the way? I’m wondering if a free webmail ever will.)

In short, I can’t see that Gmail has anything to offer me. But still, I’ve felt the pull.

Google’s marketing has been brilliant: when the fad was in full swing (May and June?) everybody wanted a Gmail account, because nobody had one. Having a Gmail account was the mark of the cool kids. (Try Googling gmail "cool kids"; you get a lot of hits.) The bottom fell out of the market eventually, of course, but for a few weeks there was almost a scary sense of haves and have-nots divided by an email domain, with the haves dispensing status in the form of an invitation email.

When it was in full swing, yes, I did want a gmail account. Not for any practical reason whatever, not even to stake out the username I’d already used with Hotmail and Yahoo. I wanted to be invited. Whether I used the account was irrelevant. I wanted to be one of the cool kids.

Once I figured that out, I saw it wouldn’t really be any use at all, for the practical reasons outlined above. So when people did ask me, I thanked them as politely as I possibly could, and declined, because the fact that they asked was enough.

I don’t want to imply that gmail users are childish style-chasers. I can think of dozens of practical reasons why someone who isn’t me (someone relying on hotmail or yahoo for non-work email, for example) would want a gmail account, and I think the social weirdness surrounding the gmail invites was the fault of Google, not of those with the invitations. (I actually considered getting an account just so I could spread invitations.) But wasn’t it a little primitive there, for a while?

Now playing: I Am Superman from Life’s Rich Pageant by R.E.M.