Turning your back on Gmail
Gmail’s feature-rich web interface and the Web 2.0 hype are prompting more and more people to abandon desktop email clients.
Stowe Boyd at Corante dropped Mail.app for Gmail’s web-based interface and was glad to leave the “big fat app” behind in favour of Gmail’s leanness.
Jeremy Zawodny is using web-based email exclusively now. Despite some frustrations, he is “reasonable happy with Gmail”.
Jim at Jounreyman James found that leaving Apple Mail for Gmail simplified his life.
(UPDATE: You can add Cheesetoe to the list. And C.K. Sample III.)
Against this background, Jean-Francois Arseneault’s post about canning his Gmail account stood out. He is very happy about a return to Thunderbird, which he in turn says has simplified his email life.
Google has gone off the boil for him. His concerns, which he lists in his blog entry, are part technical and part privacy-related. “Knowing Google can see my communications is down right freaky”, Jean-Francois says.
Concerns about Gmail and privacy are nothing new. Gmail’s policy of never deleting anything raises interesting questions about privacy and data-ownership. Its revised privacy policy, released in October last year, was not reassuring.
Mike Bell recently posted his concerns about Google Analytics in the Mint Support Forum. He’s dropped the Google service as he believes that it violates his site’s privacy policy. “I’m not impressed, however, with the fact that Google has access to all of my user stats and they can cross reference those and correlate them and then target my users,” he writes.
Another new Gmail feature also raises privacy concerns. Suyog is worried about Gmail’s new “map feature”, which offers to map any address found in one of your emails. “For God’s sake”, he says, “I hope Google stops any more feature creeps like these!”
Tags: Apple Mail, email, email clients, GMAIL, Google, google analytics, mail.app, map feature, mint, privacy, thunderbirdRelated posts
January 3rd, 2006 at 8:12 am
Questions and concerns about Gmail/Google and privacy seem like a bit of a mute point to me. Any ISP can see your email correspondence, whether you’re using a web or local client. Further, Google is simply using an automated system to pick up on tracking numbers and addresses - it’s not like people are parsing your email or they’re harvesting them for some ?ɬºber-spamming onslought. If people are worried about email and automated services like this, they should take a look into how their credit card purchases are databased and who has access to that information. That’s an insta-heart attack right there for anyone who guards their privacy closely.
January 3rd, 2006 at 8:44 am
Sure, there’s a lot in what you say. I’m not one of the “tinfoil hat” brigade.
But there are three significant differences between Gmail and - for example - Fastmail, my primary email service:
(i) When I delete a message in Fastmail, it’s gone. In Gmail, it lurks around in their backup system and is still used as part of their data collection and processing. It’s clearer to me in a Fastmail account that I retain the ownership of my data.
(ii) Every ISP can look at your mail, but very few actually do as systematically as Gmail. See Suyog’s comments about the “map address” feature.
(iii) Fastmail doesn’t process my email and another data to make a profit for its other business arms. It doesn’t have any other business arms.
None of this makes Gmail an evil thing. But it does mean that it is not a “free service”.
It’s a transaction. You gain access to an innovative and useful service, but you “sell” (or give or surrender) your data to Gmail in return and Gmail uses that data for its own purposes.
People should understand the cost better.
BTW, loving your work @ TUAW :-)
January 3rd, 2006 at 6:54 pm
I like GMail very much - I automatically forward all email from all my accounts (home and work) to my GMail account, which effectively gives me ‘desktop search’ of my email without the processor drain.
However, the biggest failing of GMail for me, and the aspect that stops me from switching to it full-time as a primary mail interface, is Google’s stubborn insistence in only offering the “conversation” mode.
Yes, I know the way it’s implemented to remove quoted text is very clever. And yes, I realise that if Google gave the option to just view email in chronological order, nobody would use the conversation mode, because people always use what they’re most familiar with.
But the fact is, I just don’t find it as easy and intuitive as a stream of incoming emails. I’m sure the designer of the system would argue that it provides the same functionality, because as new emails arrive, the conversations float to the top of the list.
But the multiple “from” names is confusing. For example, there’s a conversation listed in my Gmail right now that is from “Dan .. David, Dan, Sim.. (8)”. That’s just not helpful.
It’s even more confusing because it’s not possible to tell who the most recent message is from.
For example, I have a conversation from “Brad .. Dan (7)”. And here’s the sequence of messages:
1. Brad Pecza
2. Phil Sweeney
3. Simon Wright
4. Dan Warne
5. Phil Sweeney
6. Dan Warne
7. Brad Pecza
How do I tell from the Gmail conversation names that Brad has contributed a new message to the conversation? I would have guessed from “Brad .. Dan (7)” that Brad posted the first message, and I posted the last.
Also, Google being so cool and all, why can’t they index attachments to your email? That would make GMail’s instant search infinitely more useful.
January 5th, 2006 at 12:16 am
[...] Since Gmail is all the rage, here’s another way of getting your contact information out of Address Book and into Gmail’s web interface or into Thunderbird. [...]
January 31st, 2006 at 1:21 am
[...] Jay Tamboli swims against the tide by returning to Mail.app from Gmail . [...]
February 3rd, 2006 at 2:16 am
[...] I have been tossing around the idea of migrating away from my local mail account to GMail, as many other people have been doing of late. The fact that it enables me email anytime, anywhere, on any platform with few, if any compromises in terms of features is very compelling. [...]
February 5th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
[...] Tim Gaden has posted some interesting thoughts at his excellent Hawk Wings blog on why some people love Gmail and why others are turning their back on it. [...]
February 28th, 2006 at 5:22 am
The way I see it, I’m not talking about anything remotely interesting in my email, so i could care less about who is seeing it. I mean really, I get the “it’s my data and I have the right to its privacy” crap, but really, is your email really full of so much private stuff that gmail’s robots are going to care?
I recently had an exchange server failure and immediately switched my mail to all begin flowing into gmail, personally and for my company. I even got an invite for the gmail hosted domain email but declined it because there are no gmail checkers that work with it yet. I have to say my wife and I are doing just fine running the company’s communications from gmail.
The only thing I am missing is an OSX menubar app that can check 2 or more gmail accounts RELIABLY and report when new messages come in. Anyone game?
October 12th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
[...] Long-time Hawk Wings readers will know that Google and data privacy are an old hobby horse of mine. (Many interesting things about Google, privacy and data ownership are summarised in a earlier Hawk Wings post, “Turning your back on Gmail”.) [...]