# Posted 5:46 AM by Patrick Belton  

GMAIL: FIRST IMPRESSIONS: So the folks at Google have been kind enough to let us take Gmail for a test spin and share our impressions with our readers. My first reaction: once you get past the considerable oddness of your email looking like - well, like Google - then it's a very nicely functioning mail program, although for Mac users it doesn't seem to work perfectly in Safari.

Famously, and as we've noted here before, it turns a buck by selling advertising targeted at you on the basis of the content of your inbox. Probably partly for that reason, they give you a ludicrously large amount of storage capacity (1000 megabytes), and zealously encourage you to "archive, not delete." Yeah, really, no surprise there. But I don't really much mind - if it's really the case that individually identifiable information isn't sold to advertisers but is only held by circuits somewhere in Googleland, then frankly I'd rather see ads for foreign policy magazines than for the cars and free vacations that get displayed on the rare occasion when I log into my Yahoo account. But I could see how that could annoy many privacy advocates, and frankly I don't blame them.

As far as the advertising itself, it seems linked fairly seamlessly into Google's justly famed search technology - when I sent myself a test email, over on the side appeared two "sponsored links" from advertisers, both fairly relevant (one a European international relations journal, and the other an advertisement urging me to "download a doctoral dissertation now!"), and then non-sponsored links that it thinks would interest me (oddly, a conservative seniors advocacy group, and a libertarian site). My suspicions of my own mortality are such that I don't really think I'll ever click on any of the links on the side, but I think by this point we've all become fairly inured to extraneous Google search results as part of the cosmic background radiation, and since they're not for Viagra, they're not really that annoying.

The much heralded search feature is, well, exactly what you'd expect - it's quick (particularly when you only have two messages to search), it lets you add a huge array of filters ("has the words", "doesn't have the words"), and it's prominently accessible from the top of each page. Somewhat oddly, it also lets you search the web, but that might just be a justifiably ingrained habit for the engineers at Google.

But what I'll be interested in is seeing how well its filters deal with spam- so if you're a spammer, please spam me at patrick.belton@gmail.com. Let me note that I'm particularly interested in acquiring Nigerian diamonds and a longer reproductive apparatus.

UPDATE: Ha, ha. I appreciate all of our readers who've emailed me in the last hour to offer me Nigerian diamonds. (Incidentally, I still owe a few of our friends and correspondents emails back, and am really awfully sorry about that - after meeting an attractive female Mossad agent in Rome, to my great surprise I was flown in handcuffs to the Middle East, where I was then inserted into a padded white room with a flourescent lightbulb, a computer, and the collected Public Papers of the Presidents (1988-present), and am currently being made to convert caffeine into dissertation text, all while running on a treadmill. You're all warmly welcome to come and visit.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion