Re: Gmail at Yale

["David P. Dillard" <jwne@temple.edu>]

There are problems for heavy email users with Gmail that I have 
encountered with corporate Gmail.  One serious problem for those 
on discussion groups is that the mail sent from a Gmail account 
by a member does not come back to their inbox via the list or 
when one mails a message to themselves, it is also not received 
back in their inbox.  Hence, for mail sent to a list, one must 
check the list archives to see if their message has cleared or if 
the list is not archived, there is always prayer.

Messages are accumulated in groups or threads in Gmail's reader, 
when one deletes a message in Gmail directly, not an alternative 
reader, one may be deleting the entire group of messages. 
Consider Google Alerts. One alert may be valuable, others 
worthless.

In the Gmail reader one may lose all or need to keep all for the 
good one in the group.  At some point, all of the messages in my 
inbox prior to 2003 were deleted well after the conversion to 
Gmail by their server.  Posts sent to all members of a local 
listserv, about four or five, over time, were not received in my 
Gmail account, I had to ask a colleague to send me a copy of 
these posts upon hearing about them.

If one uses an alternative reader to view their email and deletes 
a message, it goes to a file called All Mail and continues to add 
to the large but finite total of space afforded in Gmail accounts 
(Yahoo Mail has no space limits). One then needs to go through 
the All Mail folder to delete the messages deleted from the inbox 
or sent-mail folders so that they then can go to trash from 
whence they again need to be deleted. One weekend, I lost three 
or four percent of my accounts space when, after a glitch, the 
All Mail folder had messages I had deleted from other folders, 
but they failed to appear in the All Mail folder which was 
entirely empty until I logged out and then logged in again. 
Upon logging in the old mail was in the All Mail account, but not 
the messages deleted from other folders, but the percent was the 
same before and after.  The same thing happened this weekend 
past, but the empty All Mail folder was replaced by a full folder 
upon logging out and back in again.

In short, and there is more, the cloud in my computing is a large 
amount of wasted time due to the existence of corporate Gmail in 
my life.  I have talked with other corporate Gmail users who have 
had one problem or another, but never report them, hence the 
organizations that adopt this service may tend to think that 
there are few or no problems with Gmail.

One key overriding difficulty is that some of these kinds of 
problem causing factors for some users could be options that 
could be turned off, but no such turn off feature exists for not 
getting your own emails back or for clustering message threads. 
Hence one must live with these features, like them or not, in 
corporate and other Gmail accounts.

Also, I have a number of outside email accounts and I was in the 
practice of sending important emails to these accounts for backup 
storage.  Once Gmail came, Gmail blocked these messages to 
multiple recipients, all me, as spam.  My frustration was ended 
when my institution rerouted my outgoing mail from my alternative 
email reader to another server, instead of the Gmail server and 
more recently, I can also send mail to several recipients from my 
Gmail account directly, so this problem may have been solved for 
me in my Gmail account.

I hope that the institutions that adopt Gmail have good computer 
services units that will help users and interact with Google 
regarding Gmail account problems as has thankfully been the case 
for me, this is a very important ingredient in this formula.

Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
jwne@temple.edu