Yeah I know

[altivo]

You get what you pay for. Gmail is free.

It has also become a bloated monstrosity. The featuritis is taking the whole thing over to the extent that I think they are losing touch with the original purpose of e-mail.

The real aggravation though, is the fact that whenever they have a slowdown or outage, as they did today for a couple of hours (early morning here, mid-morning to noonish in EU) the error messages always try to put the blame on the user, the user's computer, or the user's ISP. "Your internet connection is too slow" or "This is taking longer than expected." I love to hate that last one. Whenever they drop some unannounced enhancement into place, their server grinds to a near halt and they pretend it's my computer that's too slow...

Of course, for those of us who use e-mail heavily, as I do, changing to another address or provider is not a happy thought. I also dislike POP mail systems that download the mail onto whatever PC I'm using at the moment. I use too many machines in different locations, and my mail would end up fractured halfway across the county. I also like being able to read my incoming mail on my cell phone, which I can do with Gmail but not with any of the other web-based e-mail systems as far as I can tell.

I like the user interface mostly, though I wish they'd let me hide or remove some of the unneeded features, such as chat.

Unlike some of my friends, I only lost access for a half hour to an hour, during part of which I was commuting to work. It has continued to be erratic and sluggish though, for most of the day.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I just have to disagree with that. IMAP and POP are not good tools for the way I use e-mail, because I don't carry a laptop around. I've used web-based e-mail tools exclusively for my personal e-mail for probably seven or eight years now, and there's no problem with dialup. Or at least, there hasn't been, except since Gmail caught this featuritis bug. Most of them are a bit slow to connect, but then work fine once you're logged in. Gmail seems to have a huge volume of scripting, and they insist on downloading it all anew every session rather than letting it be cached. Then they set all sorts of timers and bitch and moan if it isn't going fast enough, which is just plain stupid.