Flashes of Panic

Despite railing a bit against Gmail back in 2004, I did actually pick up an account a few years ago, if only to stake out the name.

Yesterday, grappling with mounting frustration at Mail.app’s inability to filter spam out of my email, and (since the Intel MacBook arrived) its tendency to crash when I label spam, I got fed up. I’ve been watching the Shipwright and many, many students using Gmail (which makes a lot of sense if you don’t have a laptop to use as a central email store,) and I was intrigued by the interface. I decided it was time to run the experiment: I shut down Mail.app and set all my (many, many) inboxes to feed into Gmail. I’m going web-based.

I’m deliberately trying not to recreate all my desktop-client habits, instead letting Gmail steer me into the most effective way to use it. The thing I like most so far is the “conversations” organization, which reminds me of the way elm used to file both sent and received mail in the same folder, defaulting to the username part of the email address on the other end of the correspondence.

(Yes, elm. Back in the days when I read mail over a 9600 baud frame relay network (and no, I’m not missing an order of magnitude there.) Damn, I’m old.)

Another driving motivation: I have Yet Another Mailbox now, in the domain of our forthcoming website. The Shipwright has, so far, been farming out domain services like email to Google Apps, so that’s a Gmail box by default. Yesterday he made us a small run of business cards. (Small, because the name is likely to change before we release anything.) It’s a very small set of information: logo, my name, my position (“Founder”), the new email address, and my cell number. I feel postmodern without a postal address.

Now Playing: Trans-Neptunian Object #1 from Cherry Marmalade by Kay Hanley

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