gmail annoys me

Slowly all my main non-work email moved to my gmail account. But more and more I'm actually concluding that using gmail is actually giving me more problems than solving them. It starts by CPU use. When Firefox is open with an open gmail tab, it's usually using at least about 7% CPU. Idle! When I turn off gmail, it drops to about 2-3%.

Then there is memory use. Leaving gmail open I can see my memory used by Firefox slowly growing without any sign of "garbage collection". Soon my computer is out of memory and I have to restart Firefox.

Then goes to organization itself. I'll have to agree that probably gmail has the best online user interface for email. Yahoo has drag-and-drop, which I use all the time, but it's dog slow. Gmail's simpler UI is much quicker and provides a lot of nice features, like tagging of email. That's why I moved most of my email to it. Also the 1GB free was a great push.

At first I used POP3 and Mac's Mail, but that didn't quite scale very well to the amount of email I received (Mail becomes dog slow with too many emails). Also gmail doesn't mark downloaded items as read, so when I had to access my email from work, I wouldn't know what I've already read by just looking at what is marked as read (like Yahoo does). So I tried to move to the IMAP, but that was quite slow too and very confusing with the tags becoming folders and repeated unread folders. So I went back to only using the web UI. And now I'm stuck.

Oh, well, choices you make in your life. If I had a better option out there I would try to take it, even if the transition is painful. But it doesn't look like there is one, so I'll hang in there and buy a bigger machine with more CPU power and memory. Maybe this will hide some of my annoyances.