How Google Saved my Neshama

I've been a lifetime AOL user. Call it the curse of AOL being the first major Email an internet provider and the fact that I've been using the same email address for 12 years.

Anyways. I want to thank Yishai Fleisher for, unknowingly, opening my eyes to an extremely harmful feature that AOL provides.

Let's forget the fact that Aol NEVER WORKS! And it takes approximately 3 minutes to sign onto your screen name (and this is using the AOL website, forget the AOL program!) where you then have to spend another 10 minutes going through your list of 60 emails to weed out the junk from the stuff that's actually important.

So after spending what could have been productive time, deleting emails for Viagra and Microsoft Windows (all at low, low prices) I can finally go to the top of the inbox to read my email only to find that I have five new junk emails to delete.

How I managed 12 years of this with all my hair I have no idea.

So, now that I FINALLY have finished cleaning out my inbox, I can actually read my mail.

But this is actually not the worst part of AOL.

The worst part is actually the ads.

We learned in our E-Commerce class that most people have become immune to banner ads, and I can say that I've become one of them. But I think the fact that you don't even realize consciously what's on the screen is rather disturbing, and it took me a while to realize that AOL's banners are full of half naked women.

They run an ad continuously for a weight loss program, with a bikini-clad woman, as well an ad for an online dating service that shows a girl in her underwear looking at a webcam.

I think the fact that I didn't even REALIZE that that's what I was being bombarded with every single day shows I have some work to do.

So I emailed AOL and complained and this is the response I recieved:

"We are sorry for the inconvenience that our banner ads cost you, but we have no control over what our advertisers put in their banner space."

Translation: "We're getting too much money to care about the spiritual well being of our customers."

Well, I had been thinking about switching to Google's Gmail for some time and had been unable to make the switch until now.

The real catch was that I could still receive all of my AOL mail in my Gmail inbox. I could even send an email with my AOL screen name, all without having to actually sign onto AOL.

But there have been some additional bonuses to switching to Gmail.

First of all, I love the fact that Gmail does not use any picture ads. They take of the successful model of Google that doesn't use picture-based ads, they only use keyword based ads.

This gives me the oppurtunity to see ads that pertain to me. Take for instance an ad for Rabbi Rappaport's mohel services in the Baltimore-Washington area. Or as I wrote about last week, an ad to buy Rav Kook's sefarim online.

I even saw an ad for a dvar Torah on Friday.

Well I must say that I highly recommend Gmail, also for their unnatural ability to filter out spam, even spam that it brings over from AOL.

All in all I have to say that I am extremely happy with my decision and I hope that Gmail continues to provide the excellent product that they have.