I’m a big fan of Gmail but they’re a few things about it I find annoying. My Friend Kenny Lee, of Hidden Messages fame, sent me the band’s album, which they had recently finished recording, earlier this week. He attached each track as an mp3 to an email (I believe Gmail has a total attachments limit of 10MBs per email).

So I had 14 emails from Kenny each with an mp3 attached. Gmail saw all these emails and grouped them into a ‘conversation’; this was actually very convenient since I could access them all together. My problems started when I went to download the first track, Gmail insists on running a virus check of files before you are offered a download link (again a nice feature). I noticed Gmail was running extremely slowly, this is because it was attempting to virus check every single attachment in the conversation.

Doubly annoying Gmail doesn’t remember which emails in my inbox it’s virus checked, so each time I reload it the whole process kicks of again. Now Kenny had originally sent me the emails from his Gmail account therefore they would have been virus checked when they were uploaded, this just all seems a bit inefficient.

At the end of the day these are minor grumbles and Gmail, in my opinion, is still pretty ace. I guess it’s probably because of things like this that Gmail is still stuck in Beta mode.

# Pete Graham