I’ve been checking out Gmail thanks to an invite from my good friend Gene, the ubicomp master.

Labels are good, perhaps better than folders. But they’re not for everyone. In small numbers, labels are definitely better. But the implementation provides a flat perspective of my archive. I would need some 30 labels to replace my 43 IMAP folders. That’s a bit too much for a flat categorization. And with 1 GB of storage, it’s just going to get worse.

And I wish that Gmail provided more control over my from email address. I hide my real address behind a cloud of forwarders, but there is no way to hide when Gmail uses the real address on every outbound email. Maybe they think they have the answer to spam and I don’t need to hide my real address. But I’m not going to convert without being able to hide.

All in all a good effort. Not quite good enough to make me leave FastMail. But definitely good enough to become the archive for all my mailing lists.