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Reader comments
barlowJun 23, 2004 at 9:26PM
How about a tip on making the gmail site work faster and more responsively? It just seems very sluggish to me.
Karthik ramJun 23, 2004 at 10:02PM
That's odd. I find it to be the fastest web based service that ive ever used. My experience with web based email is however quite limited (yahoo and my schools web interface)
brendanJun 23, 2004 at 10:12PM
I would like to see more tips on how to actually get a gmail account. gmailswap seems to be down (only half the page would come up on my machine). too bad google wont make this service available to the public.. there seems to be the demand for it.
Karthik ramJun 23, 2004 at 10:17PM
brendan: if you need one just drop me a note karthik dot ram {at gmail dot com
thomasJun 24, 2004 at 1:37AM
there seems to be the demand for it.
Well, of course there's a demand for it. Probably more than they can handle at this point, which is why they're using the invite system.
LodeJun 24, 2004 at 5:04AM
I too find it quite sluggish, especially when your mailbox contains lots of mail and you've setup your account to display 100 messages per page. Still, it's a lot faster than Hotmail, and the keyboard navigation (vi-style) absolutely rocks.
If you still need an account, drop me a line. lodevermeiren at you know what.
Jonathan HedleyJun 24, 2004 at 6:13AM
For me, in Australia, it's very fast in IE and Firefox, and a little sluggish in Safari (still plenty fast enough, though). Presumably that's Safari's slow JavaScript engine fault.
I dig how you can change the URL protocol to https so it's all encrypted over the wire.
Sergey Brin gave a nice interview about Gmail and its upcomming features / rollout.
jasoniscoolJun 24, 2004 at 8:36AM
gmail rocks!
to get an account, ebay has them going now for really cheap. you can buy an invite for like 4 bucks us =]
Runky FunkyJun 24, 2004 at 10:18AM
I've been using Yahoo for 8 years now, and have been dissapointed over and again at their cutting back on service (especially making pop access a premium service. But then, that's business...) Althought they recently made preemptive moves to beat gmail to the punch by uping their account sizes to 100MB among other things. No where near 1GB, but likely more than enough to keep most yahoo subscribers, and a pleasant surprise to see my inbox space suddenly drop from about 73% to 4%. The procrastinator in me just won a huge reprieve!!!
But I'm looking forward to getting a gmail account (no invites yet...), tho I'll be waiting for the hammer to fall their too, in terms of converting some types of services to premium someday.
The thing I'm most looking forward to is the change in ad presentation. Yahoo plugs in banner ads of various sizes, that can make load times very slow on dial up, and even on my new cable modem. Ads are inescapable with a free email acct, but to have them be text based, and less obtrusive will be a welcome development. Any thoughts from current gmail folk?
LodeJun 24, 2004 at 11:28AM
Runky Funky: if you want an account, just mail me (see address in coment above), I've got about 10 invites left. And if you want to paypal/amazon me that's even better ;)
fooJun 25, 2004 at 7:43AM
gmail sucks, it lacks almost all advanced features (i.e. WAP access, to name something elementary for European users), and even many standard features such as draft versions, etc. the spam filter also sucks monkeyballs. I'm surprised Google would ever put their brand name on something as amateurish as this. I'm sure their PR team is happy with the hype, however.
This thread is closed to new comments. Thanks to everyone who responded.