Gmail as sole email, day 1

Yesterday I asked Jumpy to point my standard email address (myfirstname at theprf) to my new Gmail account. I still caved and ran Outlook Express at home this morning, because it auto-forwards my Footballguys newsletters to work. I can’t have them sent to work directly because they’re interpreted as spam and don’t make it through the filters. Anyway, I’m going to try to lay off the Outlook Express (Verizon) for the month of July. That means no FBG newsletters at work but, you know, I have work to do.

I think I put my finger on why Gmail seems so fast. It seems to move the display tasks to the client side, that is, my computer. Here’s what I mean. When I delete an email in Yahoo mail, I click the delete button, which sends a request across the net to Yahoo’s servers. Yahoo removes the email to my Trash and orders my browser to refresh. After a second or more, I get a new view of my Yahoo Inbox, sans the message I deleted. (Technical note: this may be imprecise here or there, but I think I’m close to what happens). Same thing when I click to view an email. There’s a browser refresh before I see the email.

In Gmail, it’s INSTANT. There’s no browser refresh. In fact, a couple of times I’ve thought nothing happened because the mail disappeared so quickly. (Aside: I’m mostly Archiving, not Deleting, but I have deleted a couple messages that I know I will not need. The behavior is the same, though). And same thing when viewing an email. It’s instant, no delay at all.

At first I just thought that Google had some superduper servers working. That still could be it. But I’m starting to think that instead, Gmail pushes the display processing to my PC, which is always going to react faster than a server in Palo Alto. Again, I may not get this quite right, but in simplistic terms, maybe Gmail is just altering the HTML for my local instance of Gmail to affect the change I requested. That trashed email is still sorta there, but it’s not being displayed. The only time I have sensed a full refresh of the screen is when I hit “Refresh” to see if I have new mail.

Pretty nifty.

As for email management, I did my first Google search of email yesterday. I Googled “National” because Warren & Marion sent us their itinerary for their September visit and they’re flying into National Airport. Their email came out on top… followed by a bunch of FBG updates (“… National Football League…”). Must remember to be precise when searching my Gmail.