Is Gmail an e-mail service or a comprehensive receptacle for just about every Web-based service you’ll ever need? This guest post at TechCrunch argues that it should stay focused on getting e-mail right.
Tag Archives | E-Mail
Gmail Priority Inbox: A New Clutter-Taming Tool
Google is making one of larger changes to Gmail it’s ever instituted. It’s an clutter-taming feature called Priority Inbox, and the company is apparently pretty sure people will love it: Rather than rolling it out as a Labs experiment, Google is turning on the feature for everyone right away. The company prebriefed me last week and has let me try it out for the past few days.
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A Few Observations About Gmail's New Phone Feature
I’ve been using Gmail’s new free voice calling feature over the past couple of days. For a while, I thought that the Google Buzz blowup proved it was a bad idea to introduce non-e-mail features into Gmail, period. Now I now that if it’s the right feature done the right way, it can make perfect sense.
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Search Google Docs From Gmail
Small but useful new Gmail labs feature: the ability to search both Gmail and Google Docs with one click.
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New Hotmail Open to All
Microsoft has finished rolling out its new version of Hotmail. It’s got some clever clutter-busting features.
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A Sign of Gmail to Come?
Looks like a Gmail feature I’d love may be on its way: The ability to jump between multiple accounts with a click.
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ToneCheck Detects and Corrects Your E-Mail Tone of Voice
For all those times that an e-mail sounds better in your head than it does to the recipient, ToneCheck thinks it can help.
The plug-in, which is in a free-for-now beta for Microsoft Outlook and coming to web-based mail services in the future, reads over your e-mails for emotions such as elation, humiliation, excitement and fear. Users can set thresholds for how much emotion to allow in their e-mails, and ToneCheck essentially acts like a spell checker, flagging words and phrases that might be interpreted the wrong way.
ToneCheck’s website has a demo that shows how it works, but I don’t use Outlook, so I haven’t tried the plug-in myself. If anyone tries it, I’d love to hear how well it works. On that note, it would be wise for ToneCheck to offer a web app in which people could dump text from any source, and if they were sufficiently happy, they could pay for the plug-in on their service of choice.
In general, my feelings about ToneCheck are somewhat similar to my feelings about SarcMark and Open Sarcasm, both of which are intended to express sarcasm as punctuation. For someone with decent writing skills, none of these tools are really necessary. I could see a computerized emotion catcher being downright annoying.
But at least ToneCheck isn’t a substitute for the written word, like SarcMark. It’s just a teacher, designed to stop people from writing e-mails they’ll regret later. If that makes the world — or your inbox — a better place, I’m all for it.
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Mobile Me Mail Makeover
Totally Web-based applications don’t exactly spring to mind when you think about Apple. But that’s true in part because of its shockingly archaic approach to them: It wants you to–gasp!–pay $99 a year for Mobile Me, a bundle of mail, calendaring, photo sharing, storage, and “Find My iPhone.” Except for Find My iPhone, all of these services have solid free competitors; I’ve never been sure why anyone would pay Apple for something as readily available as e-mail.
Except…Apple has released a nice new version of Mobile Me Mail. Like its predecessors it has a nicely Apple-esque user interface. But it’s reasonably powerful, too, with features such as rules and the ability to handle external accounts. As before, it’s ad-free, which adds to the clutter-free feel. It feels like what Gmail might be if it were designed by Apple, and it’s worth checking out if you like slick Web apps. (Mobile Me offers a 60-day free trial.)
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Hotmail vs. Gmail
Microsoft has begun rolling out its smart new version of Hotmail, although it’s doing so bit by bit. (It doesn’t plan to have flipped the switch for every user until later this summer.) Lifehacker’s Adam Hachis has a nice look at where Hotmail now beats Gmail–and where it doesn’t.
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Hotmail Sans Self-Promotion
When I wrote about the neat new version of Hotmail last month, I failed to mention one long-standing downside of the service: It adds a text ad for itself at the end of your messages, which makes it a non-starter for business use and a tad cheesy even if you’re just e-mailing pals and relatives.
Now Michael Arrington is reporting that Microsoft will kill off that tagline, starting today. Good news. If I were Microsoft, I’d also contemplate tweaks to the ad panel in the Hotmail interface–I get that it’s the ads that make Hotmail free, but Microsoft’s giant, distracting display advertisements make Hotmail feel fundamentally less serious and professional than Gmail’s text-based ad links.