Well, I finally started using my Gmail account. It took a while as I’m a long term lover of standalone email apps. I’ve used Outlook mostly but gave Mozilla’s Thunderbird a run out for a couple of weeks.

Ultimately, the combination of living in three different places led me to actually give Gmail more attention. It’s a very good piece of webmail software. In fact, it’s a magnificent piece of webmail software. While the Gmail software itself is shorter on features than many of the more established brands (it is still in development), what they have implemented so far has been done with such care and attention to detail that it feels more like a standalone application than a website.

It’s the little things that matter. Things like not have to reload the page to get back to the inbox (a single click takes you back to the inbox, clicking again will reload it to check for new mail). Then there’s the default ‘conversation’ view of messages. Previous messages with the same subject line are ‘folded away’ on the same page as the new message you’re reading and accessible, again, with a single click and without reloading the page.

Reloading of the page is irritating, time consuming and prone to the Internet’s habit of ‘stalling’, which when all you want is the smallest adjustment to a page put me off webmail. This is heavenly though.

Also worthy of crediting mention (also minus reloads) is that if you choose “Reply”, the reply form expands out on the same page, but if you then realise that you should’ve clicked “Reply All”, it’ll just transform the form you’re current working on, adding the additional recipients into the To: and Cc: fields instantly and leaving the long reply you’ve just written intact. Seeing as I have a terrible habit of always clicking the wrong ‘Reply’ button, this is a joy to behold.

Gmail now handles all my mail, for this domain and anything else I might have laying around. Missing features and improvements will come with time, but everything that they have done so far shows great things.