Gmail -- not exactly a G spot

That's G for Great, not what you're thinking!

I got a Gmail account a couple of weeks ago but I only started using it. Am I the only one that thinks that it's not God's (that G again) gift to email-kind? I love the 1 GB (1000 MB) space but quite frankly, I don't know what to do with it. Plus, Yahoo's moved to 250 MB now and I really think that's pretty good (100 MB was great) and I don't want to keep all my messages; I'll delete some. Okay, I'll let that go.

The thing that *really* bugs me is that Gmail doesn't work with Opera. Now that's enough to make me mad. Why not? They use some ActiveX control stuff. Now why would Google which runs so beautifully on Opera (and has integrated the search engine into the browser) not run Gmail on Opera? Arrgh! Why drive users towards a particular browser?

Maybe it's just me. In Gmail, if you reply to a message or get replies, it gets grouped into something called a conversation. It's good because I can find all the replies and if I want to keep all the emails in a conversation, but not so good if I want to delete one email in a conversation. Ah, that deleting habit again.

Then, there's this "Loading" message that comes up on the right hand side of the Explorer window (did I say that I can't use Opera) and you miss it sometimes, even when you've seen it before. That takes some getting used to.

I don't like the Labels concept much either. If I want to move a message from my Inbox, in all regular web-based email sites, I create a folder and then move the message to that folder. In Gmail, I have to create a label, mark the message with that label and then click the Archive button. (Note to Google: Ordinary users might not know what archiving means.) That's the way I figured out how to do this. Now, again, there might be a better way to do it, but I've not figured that out yet. And I've been using the Internet and email software for a while. I guess I missed the memo on that one too.

But hey, I like the comfort of 1 GB, even if I am not sure if I want my personal email "scanned".