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Nearly 2 years ago already, I made one of the most important change in my work environment. I ditched Windows and went on Ubuntu. I still remember. A UPS guy knocked on my door to deliver this new Dell Precision laptop that I just bought 2 weeks prior. The first thing I did when I opened it was to insert the Ubuntu CD. I didn’t even boot once with the crappy Vista that came pre-installed with the machine.So I installed my very first Linux distro. Went pretty well. Transfered my data, setup a few things, and I was soon ready to rock and roll! Last thing though, I needed an email client. I tried Evolution, the mail client shipped with Ubuntu. But I did not like it. I had previously tried Thunderbird, the email client from Mozilla, but had problems with it so I was not very keen on using it again.

So I posted on the Ubuntu forums to ask people what email client software they were recommending on Ubuntu. Some recommended Evolution, others Thunderbird or some other software I don’t recall. But one guy said something like:

Dude, why do you need an email client software? Use Gmail! What more could you possibly need ?

Interesting… I had not thought of it. We were already using Google Apps at INBOX since 2006 and our mail was already all managed by Google. But I was previously using Outlook to fetch emails from my Google Apps email account. Outlook… now that I think of it, what an amazing un-productive tool! Everything sucks in it… Anyway, I’m diverging.

So I decided to give it a try. I started using the web interface of Google Apps emails. Fist, you can access it from anywhere in the world. You only need an Internet connection and a browser. Second, it comes free with 7 GB of storage. 7 GB! Although for me it will soon not be enough, still, for 80% of people, it’s about 7 times more then what they’ll ever need in 10 years!

And then come the true great features. While I was used to sort in Outlook, now I can actually use Google powerful search to search through my emails. I can use ” “, [], -, AND, OR, basically any operators to find virtually anything!

More, while I was used to categorize emails in folders, now I can label them! And any email can have more multiple labels!

And you think it’s enough ? Hell no! Filters!!! You can create any kind of filters you want to automatically label, move, delete, archive or even send a predefine reply to any emails coming in!

Oh and another very unique feature of Google mail: the threaded messages. You know when you receive an email and you reply and then others reply as well and you reply again and so on ? Well, in Outlook, this would create 15 new messages in your inbox. In Google email, they would all be displayed into a single thread. You click on it and all the messages that were exchanged with this same subject will be displayed one after another.

And then you archive it, so it will get out of your inbox. But then, 6 months later, someone will reply in this thread. Well, it will pop again in your inbox for you to read, with all the previous messages collapsed for you to uncollapse if you need to remember what this discussion was all about.

Bloody brilliant as my friend David from the UK would say!

So in conclusion, switching to Ubuntu was a great move, but starting to use Google web mail interface was simply a life saver!