4 posts tagged “gmail”

You may or may not care about this, but as a designer this is definitely important to me.

Taken from http://www.email-standards.org/gmail-appeal

By the way, my ugly mug is the very last one in the video.

Email Standards Project logo

If you've ever tried creating an email newsletter using attractive HTML then you may have encountered a few problems. A lot of the mail clients and web mail providers have their own special ways of interpreting HTML in emails and one of the worst offenders is Gmail.

As a result of this lack of standards, the email standards project has been started by the people over at Campaign Monitor

This website details all of the requirements for email standards and outlines a baseline of what is required for basic and consistent functionality and rendering of a HTML email. They are very careful to ensure that no potential security risks are being proposed and have created their own acid test to evaluate the performance of various email clients.

So, what about Gmail?

My Project Gmail Grimace

There's a reason I'm singling out Gmail in this post. While there are other equally bad offenders (Outlook 2007, .Mac, Lotus Notes), the email standards project is currently on a mission to attract some attention from the Gmail development team and as a part of this they have started "Project Gmail Grimace".

Last year Gmail asked their users to contribute to a collaborative video featuring the Gmail 'M'. Here at the Email Standards Project we're not above borrowing a good idea, especially if it could help get some attention from Google! We're going to put together our own video from photos you guys send in.

Basically they're looking to create a video of designers across the globe despairing when they can't get their newsletter to render correctly in Gmail. It's a fairly simple thing - take a photo, add it to the Flickr group that they've set up, and we're on our way.

We need as many head shots as possible to make something that stands out, so get photographing.

Better Gmail options windows

I read Java Jane's post about using greasemonkey for Firefox to tidy up Gmail's interface and add some extra functionality, and only then did I realise that I've already been using most of the things she mentioned by installing the "Better Gmail" extension.

The Better Gmail extension has been created by the people over at Lifehacker and compiles all their favourite greasemonkey scripts into one Firefox extension. I have never used greasemonkey and any time I see a greasemonkey script I tend to think that I can't be bothered learning my way around it. There's probably not a lot to it, but I waste enough time as it is with my current lot of extensions that I don't need any more distractions.

So what does it do?

Well, it's all fairly simple really. Head over to Lifehacker and install the extension, restart firefox and check out the options screen for what you might like to turn on/off. I like the attachment icons and sidebar alterations (integrate Google Reader!). The super clean look is pretty good too.

How does it look?

See for yourself:

Gmail SuperClean

Gmail with Google Reader

Not sure if anyone here was ever a hotmail user, I know many many years ago I was - a time when you got something like 2mb of mail storage and not much else. It was slow, prone to awful amounts of spam mail, and the worst thing was that if you didn't check your mail in 30 days or 3 months or something they temporarily suspended your account.

Soon after I got that account I moved on and opened up a onebox account. Which seemed fairly good at the time - until they started wanting to charge for the service. I decided that rather than hassle myself with changing email accounts I would pay the $30 for a year. I was unimpressed though that after a year they automatically charged me again without requesting it. I quickly cancelled that account and moved on to a graffit.net account. This seemed good at the time as they offered 100mb of mail storage and fairly useful.

After that I discovered the joy of pop accounts, I started using a mail account from my ISP and downloading messages to outlook express. This was a comparative joy, seemed a whole lot faster because it was local and I never had to delete messages.

Then came Gmail. This was a perfect solution for me. It allowed me to download messages to my mail client (at which time I had changed over to Mozilla Thunderbird), and furthermore, it allowed me to always leave my mail in Gmail and know that if I was away I could just check my mail online and know that it was all there, whether downloaded or not. I don't use the on-line interface very often, but I find it is very simple to get around and very quick to find messages when I need to.

When I heard that Microsoft were launching their new Windows Live Mail beta, I thought, hmm, sure it's worth checking out to see if they've come along a bit now to keep up with the competition.

So I signed up for an account and must say that I was fairly disappointed. They still have an account deactivation period, it still seems fairly slow and clunky, outgoing messages have advertising included, and when you send a mail you get big banner adverts showing happy people jumping on a beach, delighted about the fact that they are using Windows Live.

I would have thought that they could have done something a little fancier really, considering that they are playing catch up on the competition (although they probably have a lot of users signed up I suppose).

The mail interface is obviously set up to be similar to outlook, the contacts area seems dreadfully weak, and the calendar just doesn't match up to Google's offering.

Anyone else tried this out? I'm unimpressed, but maybe I'm missing something?