Many people converted to use GMail as their primary mail client. I, however, having been used to KMail have found many GMail shortcomings. As a result, I'm still using KMail as my primary email client and try to avoid GMail as much as possible.

Here is what I find problematic in GMail:

1. It doesn't work properly in Konqueror. I have to use Firefox to use it.
2. It doesn't have a way to filter based on mailing list headers (such as "List-Id", "List-Post", etc.). Thus, often when mail is sent from a mailing list, it still arrives at the inbox.
3. It's very hard to follow threads there. They are all on one page.
4. The labels list (which double serve as folders) is flat and not a tree.
5. It doesn't have KMail's Right-click-on-an-email-address+"Reply to..." feature, which is very safe and convenient.
6. Furthermore, when the "Reply-To:" header is set, both "Reply" and "Reply-to-all" do the same thing.
7. GMail has no "Send Again" feature to re-send a message that was already sent.
8. There is no way to label or delete individual messages - only entire threads. As such, if you purge a mailing list archive you also lose all the mail you sent there.
9. Changing the subject line of a replied-to message starts a new thread, not only in the user's GMail account, but for every recipient of the message.
10. The GMail editor has a tendency not to put the quoting symbols (">") in the first line of a block.
11. GMail disables the forward button in Mozilla. So if you press "Back" you cannot press forward again to go back there.
12. GMail has no option to avoid adding the dash-dash-space prefix to the signature. It adds it automatically, without asking. Granted - it can be deleted, and KMail has the same problem too, even for signatures generated by a command line.
13. There is no way to select all the unread messages in a label, or all the unread messages across labels.
14. There is no indication that an email that was sent actually arrived at a mailing list (to which one is subscribed) after it arrived there.

GMail is not all bad. The search is very fast, which is a joy. But I still much prefer KMail, and refrain from using GMail as much as I can. Perhaps Google can fix most of these problems if they are motivated enough to do so, but from my general impression with the gmail.com QA, they don't seem to care at all.

I've decided to make another weblog entry enumerating all the boring things I've been working on lately, based on items ticked off from my daily to-do lists. Feel free to skip this entry and read Reddit instead.

1. Installed Plagger on Mandriva from RPMs
2. Worked on Test::Run
3. Added Google AdSense to DocBook/XML-generated essays, and to the Quad-Pres-generated presentations. Hopefully it will both result in more AdSense revenue for my site as well as not be a deterrent.
4. Prepared the slides for a presentation I'm giving to the Israeli Pythoneers about the Joel Test.
5. Did some other work on my site.
6. Pruned bugs from the XML::RSS queue.
7. Blogged, and blogged and blogged some more. ("When in doubt - blog!")

Well that's it for now. Now to get some more work done.

I was always frustrated that the Google back-links list (using the link: operator) was very incomplete. Well, apparently Google listened and they now provide webmasters a complete list of backlinks to pages on their site, using the Google webmaster tools.

Using it, I found out that most pages that link to the top of my site are my own links at my signatures and stuff, and that someone quoted something I said about re-inventing wheels in his signature (in an Italian forum), and then someone wondered about the origin of this quote and someone found it on Google, and linked to the page on my site.

Having been looking for a good web-based feed aggregator, I decided to give Google Reader a try. Importing my feeds from akregator was done successfully and I was able to fully utilise the reader almost immediately. All in all, I found it extremely suitable to what I need, and therefore decided to stick with it. The only (minor) problems with it that I encountered so far are:

• The page doesn't render too well in Konqueror from some reason. I have to use Firefox for this.
• Once the number of unread messages exceed 100, it only displays "100+" unread messages and not the exact number. Since I'd like to know exactly how many unread messages I have left to read, I find this mis-feature sub-optimal. But I can live with it.
• Google Reader seems to use tags instead of nested categories. So if in akregator, a feed appeared in the Perl sub-category inside the Blogs category, it will appear under both the Perl and Blogs top-level categories in Google Reader. This seems much less useful than having nested categories.

But like I said, I found what I'm looking for, and am going to stop now. So I'm happily using Google Reader to stay keep up with my feeds.

Today I again tried to sign up for Blogger after an attempt I did a few months ago, resulted in my browser being too unresponsive to fill in the form. This time I was prompted for my gmail account details which I entered, and was able to create an account. I also set up a blog there, but I'm not planning to make use of it. But it cannot hurt.

Anyway, now I can use my Blogger account to post comments for people blogs on blogspot.com, which is why I wanted to register in the first place. Thanks Google!