Re: Gmail at Yale

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Quite an indictment.

I use Gmail for both personal and corporate mail.  Indeed, my
company works entirely with Cloud applications:  Google Docs,
Salesforce.com, Skype, etc.  The company policy is:  keep nothing
on your hard drive. This strategy has its problems.  The problems
are trivial, however, in comparison to managing an Exchange
server, for example, but there are other mail systems out there.
Of course, as a Gmail user, I do pine for the days of Eudora and
have not totally sworn off Microsoft Outlook (yet).

But I am no apologist for Google or any other company (except my
own, of course).  I was making a somewhat different point in my
post.

As someone who works with digital research publications said to
me recently, it is not sustainable to have 80% of the cost
deliver 20% of the value.  In English:  some features cost too
much.

I think it is a very serious mistake to design (and pay for) a
system that has the most demanding users in mind.  This results
in systems that are overbuilt and expensive to maintain.  While
there clearly are exceptions, very often good enough is good
enough.

Cloud computing is (mostly) good enough and getting better.  As
it matures it will save institutions millions of dollars in IT
costs. Any my question is, Considering the cost of higher
education and the priorities of research universities, isn't good
enough good enough for email?

Joe Esposito

On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 3:18 PM, David P. Dillard <jwne@temple.edu> wrote:

> 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