Well, I decided this week, while I was "in the field" that I would give GMail a try. I've had an account for a long time now, but I'm used to having everything local on a machine where I store gigs and gigs of mail from at least the past 8-9 years.
I'm a email pack-rat I guess.. but it has saved my butt more than once.
But, it's hard to carry around a desktop just because it has all my email.. and it's hard to not do email when you're not near that desktop. I had to bite the bullet and do something radical like resolve myself to permanently use a remote mail service, namely GMail (I also have Fusemail, which sadly I long ago suggested we use for our work email platform, and has not been the astounding success it was supposed to be).
So GMail, here I come. First things first. GMail is far from perfect, but it has enough features to suite my needs. My biggest complaint was with wasted realestate; bad column widths, font sizes, ads, etc.
Luckily I only ever use Firefox, so "Greasemonkey to the rescue". I installed the plugin and started hacking and testing with firebug to locate the offending elements.
As a result I produced the G[rease]Mail greasemonkey user script, the result of which is the start of a nice clean GMail UI:
Now, maybe I can start to like GMail a little more.
My simple greasemonkey GMail UI cleanup script: G[rease]Mail
Enjoy!


