BBC News has a story on how people are using the large storage allocations and search capabilities of systems like GMail as very simple but effective personal databases for long-term storage of all sorts of information.
Gmail was designed with the idea of searching for unstructured, unfiled information in mind. Mr Harik says: "We've taken away about 70%-80% of the reason to file things."
However, he believes: "It might still be worth filing e-mails related to a specific project, where comprehensiveness (finding every single message on a topic) was important."
"We have a labelling system that enables you to label messages in more than one way. Also our conversation feature enables you to see all the messages in an e-mail conversation."
I've been using my Gmail account only sporadically, because most of my work is still on a single machine. And despite Google's avowed "Do No Evil" policy, I'm still a little leery that GMail will eventually because a pay rather than free service. But, as with people quoted in the article, I do tend to use my email as a database. I rarely clear my Sent box or any of the other folders besides Trash and Junkmail (and even then only rarely).
[via the ID Discuss list]
Posted by johndan at February 8, 2005 09:14 AM | TrackBack