A little over six months ago I started using GMail, Google's popular email service. (I have some invites, btw, if you have not yet received one and are interested; if so, drop me a line...) I still use Outlook for my personal and business-related emailing, contact management, scheduling, etc., but I've since moved over all of my ListServ email to GMail. GMail is great for such activity (ListServs) because of its:
- Large disk quota. Even after six months of relatively heavy ListServ traffic my GMail size has reached only 119 MB, or 12% of the gigabyte GMail provides.
- Grouping messages in a thread view. I never liked using Outlook for ListServs because of the fragmented message stream that continuously poured into my Inbox. Yes, I had incoming message automatically filtered into Folders, but I might get an email on one list from Person X about Topic Y, then the next email, chronologically, might be from Person Z on Topic A. Then the next one on Person B on Topic Y, and so forth. Basically it was hard to follow a thread. (Yes, I know that Outlook let's you group messages by Subject, but I found more often than not it would leave out messages or misorder them, due likely to mail clients or SMTP/POP servers that tweaked with the subject line.)
GMail's grouping of messages in threads does break every now and then, as I suspect some clients leave out the Thread-Index SMTP header that GMail (I believe) uses to group threads. But for the most part, the threading is done very well, in an easy to use Web-based interface.
- Searching is fast, thorough, and accurate. Searching email in GMail is as easy and powerful as searcing the Web through Google. No surprise here, but compare this to Outlook's default search which is SLOOOOOW. (For my Outlook searching I use Lookout, although Google Desktop Search and other technologies provide similarly fast searching of email and other contents.)
I found that with GMail I was able to subscribe and manage many more ListServs than with Outlook, for the reasons mentioned above. I wish Google could do the same for USENET; yes, the have Google Groups, but the USENET posts are delayed by several hours.