The Information Architecture of Email
Boxes and Arrows — “Gmail revealed to me my email behavior — something I hadn’t previously given much thought. By making certain things easier (and others more difficult), Gmail showed me how “typical” email applications weren’t necessarily designed according to how I used them.”
July 20th, 2004 at 4:42 am
At home I use Kmail for my email needs. Kmail has recently added virtual folders, which act as stored searches across your mail archive. I dabbled with these and found them marginally useful, but I still mostly relied on “real” folders for categorising my email.
And then I got a Gmail account, and realised that gmail’s “labels” are basically the same as virtual folders. They can do almost everything a normal folder can do, but they can also do a lot more - in particular they allow a message to live in more than one folder at a time.
I’m in the process of reconfiguring Kmail to make better use of virtual folders, which I now think are the bees knees. I’m using a Gmail-ish strategy - just throw mail into my “Archive” folder and set up some stored searches to act as folder views. It works great.
Now the only thing Kmail needs is to store mail in a database format so that searching my mail archive is as fast as it is on Gmail.
Conclusion: On one hand, Gmail is just another webmail system, but on the other hand it’s got some really nice features that blow other webmail systems away, and that compete quite well with modern dedicated email clients. However I expect those email clients to catch up to Gmail quite quickly.
September 3rd, 2004 at 5:00 pm
Actually, Gmail is more like a copy of Opera M2 email client. Opera M2 has had all the features that Gmail has (and more), and it has a very powerful search too …