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Update: Initial review of GMail

I finally got down to spending some time with Google’s GMail service and as Mark Williamson describes, Google may have missed a significant window of opportunity to reach the typical consumer.

However, it could still find potential commercial customers by bundling the GMail service as a message server appliance similar to the Google Search Appliance.

Some of the feature sets that I experimented with include:

Contacts: I could not find a way to import my existing contact list

Calendaring Functionality: GMail offers no scheduling or collaborative features.

Archiving: Rethinking the whole idea of folders and storage to facilitate the concept of archiving by flagging messages

Rich Text: Unable to compose messages in rich text.

Virus Scan: Yet to determine if messages are scanned for viruses

Google Power: Full fledged Google search technology powering the service

Converse: The whole idea behind filing messages is built on the idea of conversations. As long as the sender / recepient are emailing the same headers, the message is grouped as a conversation.

The question remains, are we all one massive beta testing group for the new GMail Appliance server?

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