GMail obsession
Is anyone else utterly sick of seeing all these tossers swooning and soiling their panties at the mere mention of gmail? All credit to google for conducting a stupendously clever marketing campaign, where people feel it’s some sort of achievement just to have one of these email addresses.
It’s not even like the damn thing is that incredible. Have our standards sunk so low that we now sprout (or don) 11inchers just at a web interface that has unobtrusive ads?
Perhaps it’s just me, but I simply don’t get it. For one thing, there’s no way to make gmail talk to anything else. No hooking up into any existing servers, no import export, no sync with anything, it’s an island unto itself. This is all great for those of us who have so far resisted succumbing to the modern day evil of email, but for those of us with existing accounts, gmail is a nice gimmick, nothing more. It’s a pathetic, laughable, and mostly pointless offering for anyone currently using IMAP.
Setting aside that rather important omission, the bloody thing also has no folders. Now I know that a bunch of you have brainwashed yourselves into thinking that you can do whatever you want with labels and filters, but come on, isn’t that just your way of pretending you have folders? What’s so evil about folders anyway?
Then we have all the asshats losing bowel control over the stellar UI. Yes, stellar that is if you happen to use IE or a mozilla whelp. Anything else is shit out of luck. Sure, it’s plain and functional, and the keyboard shortcuts are handy once you learn them, but so what? What’s the fuss about?
Worst of all is all the pillowbiters who try to get others to compete in performing some demeaning circus trick in order to ‘win’ a gmail invite. Disgusting. In fact, just to spite you asshats who worked hard to ‘win’ an account, I hereby offer up one gmail account to a more or less random commenter to this entry. You don’t have to do anything to win. Being rude, offensive, witty, and generally disruptive to the happyhappylalajavaland collective might improve your chances, but really, I’ll give it out on whimsy for what will no doubt be a fairly ridiculous reason.
Now, regarding Russell ‘fatshit’ Ashcroft, I’ve decided that the vote was close enough that he doesn’t quite earn a full bile interview. Given that he’s deleted up to 20 comments from his entry whining about me and blocked several IP’s, I suspect any further humiliation hurled his way will result in a flood of tears and a rampant round of that ‘phoneplay’ he’s so fond of. Those poor Nokia models. I bet they never quite realised they’d be used in that disgusting way; boldy going where no small rectangular object has gone before.
Besides, the fat little fuck has enough trouble holding a job, and is reviled aplenty by everyone he’s ever worked with, if his resume is at all factual. Here’s a tip bushboy, the next time you’re offered a resume writing class, don’t elect instead to cram your filthy face with wafer thin mints, and go to the fucking thing, for god’s sake. At this rate, the only person Russell ‘IHATEYOUYOUCONDESCENDINGFUCKWHOLOVESBUSH’ Ashcroft will be able to have a conversation with will be Marc ‘IWILLMAKEWEDESTROYYOU’ Fleury.
See you kids at JavaOne.
June 26th, 2004 at 2:30 am
Hani, don’t be shy, if you want a gmail account, just ask. I’ll give you one if you promise to post a bile on Fahrenheit 9/11.
June 26th, 2004 at 5:00 am
I’ll reverse the question. Aren’t folders just a less flexible way to have labels?
June 26th, 2004 at 5:40 am
Charles, you sound just like all those Epiphany fappers out there, who completely ignore what people want and implement what they believe is the One True Way(tm). Epiphany, for those who doesn’t know, is the Mozilla-based web browser in GNOME and has labels for the bookmarks instead of folders.
Let me give a piece of advice to anyone who feel they have a great new paradigm in computing: Don’t remove the old way first. What’s wrong with having both methods available?
June 26th, 2004 at 11:30 am
Juicy
June 26th, 2004 at 11:40 am
Ray Bradbury > how about you read the whole story next before commenting.
Hani is offering a gmail account, not asking for one.
June 26th, 2004 at 11:41 am
Ray Bradbury > how about you read the whole story next before commenting.
Hani is offering a gmail account, not asking for one.
June 26th, 2004 at 11:56 am
I have no penis.
June 26th, 2004 at 12:35 pm
Actually I’m glad I got my Gmail account. I’ve forwarded my POP3 and now I don’t have to care about missing from town for 2-3 days, like in Hotmail days, when viral attachments filled that box.
I don’t have an IMAP free account (I heard aol is offering, which means it should be a damn slow thing). I am not willing to pay for something I can get for free.
I don’t think you can use 1 GB in your Formicary account.
Finally, I know the invitations are a marketing scheme, but, anyway, who cares?
And, since it is a Java place, have you heard about Mr.Postman?
June 26th, 2004 at 3:01 pm
I don’t know about IMAP, but surely POP3 sends everything in clear text – account name, apssword, messages content.
Gmail may be used in SSL-exclusive mode.
June 26th, 2004 at 3:36 pm
heard of pop3-ssl and imap-ssl
June 26th, 2004 at 5:42 pm
The fondest memory of this presidential campaign has been the time I spend with Russell watching the vagina monologs. We held each other and cried, it was so moving.
Good times
JFK
June 26th, 2004 at 10:00 pm
Two weeks ago I couldn’t wait to get my gmail account. The idea of a free gb of storage can make you envious when your paying $20/year for a mere 25mb from yahoo. But that all changed when yahoo bumped me up to 2gb and removed all ads in response to their offering. So now I have an account with a mature web mail system and more space than I know what to do with completly free of ads. Not to mention the additional features they offer (pop forwarding, calendar, and disposable email addresses).
June 27th, 2004 at 2:12 am
whAT THIS POST where? me gmail.
June 27th, 2004 at 2:15 am
No more joke you about russellmeister, too, ok?, he isse so good engineering.
June 27th, 2004 at 3:27 am
See you there, Hani.
I haven’t touched my clown all week–so I’ll be primed and ready to go.
June 27th, 2004 at 8:09 am
Almost totally unrelated to anything, I just found an equivalent of Hani for the MS world:
http://caustictech.typepad.com/
June 27th, 2004 at 9:09 am
GMail?! OMG! Gimme, gimme, gimme!
What can I do for you, Mr. Hani? I’m *VERY* flexible ;)
June 27th, 2004 at 10:47 am
please send me a google invite , i’ll bend over and be your loveslave
June 27th, 2004 at 6:04 pm
just go to amazon and get one for 0.01$ if your lucky..
June 27th, 2004 at 6:07 pm
wtf am i saying .. i mean’t ebay.com
http://search.ebay.com/gmail
seems they have beeing bought a bit higher than last i checked.. but its still possible to get it really cheap. that is if you would pay for something that is free in a few months.
June 27th, 2004 at 10:42 pm
Hani, I am blogging this! And since I think blogs are gay, and refuse to keep one of my own, I will just use yours…mkay thnx!
Right now, I am drinking FREE BEER in the Esplanade–Sierra Nevada Pale Ale no less.
That’s it for now….too many clowns here. So much fappery and the conference is barely under way.
The Fireside Chat was—-in a word—lame. Good thing the free beer was close by. It helped calm my nerves.
June 28th, 2004 at 9:06 am
I am useless, I’ve never written a single useful comment to this blog and if you give me the gmail account I will never, ever use it. So gimme it just to spite the fucks.
June 28th, 2004 at 10:57 am
>> Yes, stellar that is if you happen to use IE or a
>> mozilla whelp.
>>
>> Anything else is shit out of luck
Do you mean if you are an OSX gimp?
Why dont you use a proper computer – with proper soft?
June 28th, 2004 at 11:07 am
And if you dont know what proper soft is, then you dont deserve gmail.
June 28th, 2004 at 1:19 pm
Toot, do you mean like this:
http://developer.apple.com/java/promo
June 28th, 2004 at 2:10 pm
Is that apple/sun deal supposed to be good? It’s daylight robbery.
June 28th, 2004 at 3:08 pm
The only thing it steals from you is the Blue Screen of Death. (unlike other platforms that steal your credit card and bank account information).
June 28th, 2004 at 6:07 pm
Hani, you’re a worthless pile of shit.
June 29th, 2004 at 11:47 am
more or less random
June 30th, 2004 at 3:48 pm
Prepare to die!
July 1st, 2004 at 1:13 am
http://www.fastmail.fm offers free IMAP. It’s pretty nice.
July 8th, 2004 at 6:42 pm
hmmm i wanna win
and yeah bush sucks
July 9th, 2004 at 3:28 am
Your article makes some good points, but one can’t just set IMAP or any other integration for that matter asside. Gmail sure is an island. Unfortunately these days if that island just has some fancier palm trees then lets say the hotmail atol or the lagune of yahoo, this is more than enough to appeal to the lamers.
I for one prefer running my own server so I can have IMAP, and read my mails in Opera or any other mail client. (Side-rant to the Opera M2 folks: Folders are indeed not evil). There’s a squirrel mail running for some folks who dunno how IMAP or anything works, but still use my server coz its add-free, appaerently faster than hotmail and functional. They can do that over SSL, or I can tunnel IMAP, which kind of eliminates the point made by one of the earlier posters. But at least this way one is using open standards and not some companies proprietary cr*p (make no mistake, I used to like google before they became this stock market obsessed thing they are today).
Besides, wtf is 1GB mail space anyhow? With my own server, I can easily have 160GB (minus a few MB for that OpenBSD install) and another terrabyte is just a frikkin’ NFS mount away :)
July 9th, 2004 at 3:34 am
> Not to mention the additional features they
> offer (pop forwarding, calendar, and
> disposable email addresses).
Check out http://www.mailinator.com – THATS disposable e-mail addresses. You can create them on the fly.
Oh, and I might still be interested in winning a gmail invite. I’d like to test drive it a bit so I can rant about it as an insider, too ;)
July 13th, 2004 at 7:22 pm
I am in love with a beautiful girl. it’s sad to think that we have come to a day where people are spending so much time bitching about shit that dont even really mean that much. it’s like the people who want more smiley faces on their instant messaging programs. they sit around for hours talking about messaging. how f,ed up is that? joining instant messaging site forums. what next? email account forums? prob allready going on as i write this. they should add more space to the emails….I need to send some long porn movies.
July 22nd, 2004 at 5:21 am
Looks like Hani has some sort of ulcer.
Well, let’s talk about folders and what’s so evil with them. There are at least two evil things:
1) They represent hierarchy and that is not trivial for non geeks and non programmers. Have you seen REAL folders in folders in folders? Drawer, folder, file. That’s about it.
Folders are so natural for computer people that they do not even think that can be a real culprit for mere mortals – they rarely encounter such hierarchies in real life.
2) You cannot have same mail in two folders at once. And THIS is important. And this is very nice feature. Instead of fighting where to put this damned message you just apply apropriate labels. Simple and efficient.
There are more “cooperish” things in gmail I like, but I think I’ll stop here.
It is not a good thing to bark at good thing because many like it because it is a good thing.
July 28th, 2004 at 11:58 am
Hani, you asshat. Time to spout some bile about that truely awful search on your blog. Type in “gmail”, “GMail” or even “Gmail” and what do I get? sweet F.A.
Shite, thats what it is.