I Heart Gmail

I would like to share my testimony of Gmail. It has a cool name, it has a cute red icon, it gives you 1G of free email space (which had Hotmail and Yahoo scrambling to keep up), it tabs your conversations so when you send those useless silly emails to your friends and they send useless silly ones back, it only shows up once in your mailbox instead of twelve "Re: I'M BORED! PANDER TO ME!" that you delete because you feel guilty for your mindless torpor. It has the coveted Google search function that allows you to find any email regarding "Thai New York refrigerator" in it, and best of all, it has a built-in chat with cute picture function and status message that allows you to contact those people you only email twice a year and thus feel better about yourself and your long-distance relationships.

That of course isn't to say it doesn't have its pitfalls. You can't actually sort your emails into folders, you can only 'label' them and there are no sub-labels. Occasionally I've Googled an email subject, only to have the four hundred tabbed conversations I had about it come up and then I have to sift through to find what I'm looking for. Their chat is fantastic but the option of having multiple people talk at once (chat party!!!) is still waiting to emerge. I still don't understand why you have to 'invite' people to Gmail (since it seems that everyone's on the bandwagon these days) and they have been in "Beta" mode far too long. Just suck it up and take responsibility for your program!!

I'm sure those of you who have Gmail already know everything I've mentioned. However, there is an undiscovered gem that perhaps is not as obvious. Everyone knows that free internet email programs come with spam. There are spam messages, spam ads, spam banners, spam for dinner... you learn to automatically ignore it all.

But NOT GMAIL! Have you noticed that when you open up an email, the spam (...or so you thought!!) on the right hand side are actually websites and advertisements for what Google considers to be related to your topic of conversation?? That's how they make their money; they are paid to use their infamous Google search engine to show you (the potential consumer) products for people that are paying them money to hawk their wares. It's fascinating to see what Google considers your emails to be about. Some make sense; you talk about moving, they pull up links for U-haul. You talk about furniture, they give you links to warehouses. Sometimes, though, you just have to wonder which key words are being fed into that mysterious search engine, although it provides veritable seconds (and maybe even minutes) of unintentional amusement.

An example: I was one of the few chosen ones to be a poster flyer for Guster. This means they send me Guster posters (attention: shameless hawk for Guster, coming to Washington D.C. on TWO nights, Feb. 28th AND March 1st! Mason Jennings opening and promising to be an AWESOME SHOW!!!) and I stick them up around town.

The email:

I wanna be a flyer poster! Please?
(and then my name and mailing address, which I'm suppressing for online privacy... especially because the mailing address isn't currently my own, as I'm moving in a week)

Their response:

Thanks for volunteering. You will receive a package of posters soon. If you haven't done promotion for us before, here are some tips: Hang the posters wherever you think Guster fans will see them. Telephone poles, etc, are good places, but the best are things like school bulletin boards, music stores, or coffee shops--places where the posters are less likely to be torn down. Just be sure to ask the manager for permission first.

Write back to this address (poster@guster.com) if you have any questions.

-Liz @ Guster

And Gmail's advertisement pull:

Thunderpants boxer shorts
Great gifts for blokes with guts King Pong, Lord of the Ring, more
www.thunderpants.com.au

The Party Potty
Potty Training w/Targeting System We aim to Train
thepartypotty.com

Riiiight. Not sure where they're coming from this time, but I did like seeing the boxer shorts for blokes with guts...

Check your Gmail. Check it frequently. And next time, check to see what they are subliminally trying to sell you... you just might give in to a party potty!!