Thursday, January 26, 2006

Google adds astonishing new feature to Gmail!

For days now Gmail has bragged about a New Feature! What might this be? Some great new way to organize your mail? An improvement in spam filtering? Direct delivery of your incoming mail via neural transmission to your brain??

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It turns out the new feature is -- and please be sure you are seated before you read further -- it's a DELETE BUTTON!

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Since the day Gmail launched, it's been a pain to delete a message you don't want to see again. Google wants you to keep a lot of mail in your Gmail account. You see, they aren't just looking at your incoming mail; they are analyzing and mining all of your mail, to figure out what ads to best serve.

So if you keep a clean in-box, you're not the best Gmail customer. That's why Gmail made it so hard to delete mail.

Either they've gotten millions of complaints, or they've gathered enough terabytes of mail so they don't need to harvest more information from your old messages for analysis. Maybe they want to make it easier to delete your mail so they don't have to store so much of it. Heck, they've got 2.6 gigabytes of in-box from me.

Thus we have it: Google announces an astonishing new feature for an e-mail system: the Delete button.