Gmail is kinda cool for regular mails, but it's horrible for mailing lists.
The feature it lacks is "ignore this thread" button. Very often there are threads that are completely uninteresting, or maybe they were interesting at first, but became flamewars later. Now the notifier is flashing every 5 minutes and you don't know whether it's an actual mail or simply the flamewar going on.
There isn't even any obvious way to make notifier ignore mailing list trafic. First, one cannot create filters on List-Id (only on From, To, Subject and body), and even if it worked, Firefox gmail notifier doesn't have such option.
Kmail supposedly has this thing done right, but I'm not very enthusiastic about having one more big program running all the time on this small machine, and email being available only when I'm here. I'll probably just drop all mailing lists, they're waste of time anyway ;-)
Friday, July 14, 2006
Gmail sucks
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4 comments:
Using a mail notifier is the problem. e-mail is supposed to be asynchronous. Checking it out every minute is sick.
What's wrong with it ? There are two ways one can use an inbox - either get notified that there is new mail and then check (fast, efficient, email checking gets out of your mind), or keep checking every half an hour, what is frustrating, slower, and takes a lot of time (because you often check when there's nothing new).
I know! Gmail does suck! I actually just got this great new email provider, and you should definitely check it out. It's called BigString (http://www.bigstring.com), the new free webmail program. It offers revolutionary features. When you send mail from your BigString free email account, you are protected. BigString is like an automatic shredder for your email. You can self-destruct or change an email that's already been sent or read. Don't leave your messages sitting in peoples' inbox forever.
Create a label called "Flamewars." Create a filter that matches the mailing list. Make sure the filter skips the inbox and applies the label to the emails. Now you can check out the problematic mailing list at your convenience and the notifier won't bother you.
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