On Apr 10, 2005, at 10:54 AM, Stewart Stremler wrote:
They enabled POP access. That's inspiring. The interface doesn't move me at all, even when it's demonstrated in its full glory.
Want to know what is inspiring about it?
It handles every piece of international email flawlessly for low-tech end users without getting in the way.
Every user of international email that I gave a gmail invite to immediately dropped all other email service usage. Yahoo US garbles international email (surprisingly, Yahoo Japan gets it right, sigh). Hotmail gets in the way and recodes all of the links (of course, garbling 10-20% of the international ones).
Most end user mail clients require far too much setup for end users to dig through and the tech support of their ISP is going to suck anyway if something actually goes wrong.
For GMail, however: No messing with international configs. No messing with font encodings. No messing with default language. No messing with ports and firewalls. It just works.
Yahoo could get it together, but they won't. I sent in the request to fix international email and groups several times. We actually had to create a Yahoo group on Yahoo Japan just so that the Japanese folks could communicate with us via the group. Stupid. GMail will eat them for lunch.
Hotmail, on the other hand, is so intrusive that it has no hope. I will keep my hotmail account purely as spam bait.
-a
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