Rourke on Technology

I took a look at BigString after a reader of this blog pointed to them as a GMail alternative. BigString is a webmail provider with an interesting angle: when you send mail from BigString you have the option of making that email trackable, recallable, or editable. Even after you’ve hit send.

Everyone’s experienced the problem of an accidentally sent email. Maybe you fat fingered the send hotkey or maybe you pushed “reply all” when you really wanted to reply to just the sender. Panicked, you tried the “recall” function in Outlook, only to have a friend call and tell you that he now has two messages in his inbox — the one you accidentally sent and another one created by Outlook asking him to ignore the misfire.

Email from BigString is truly recallable. How? BigString sends all (or some) of your email as embedded images. Each recipient get’s a unique URL to an image hosted on BigString’s servers. Because the content stays on those servers, BigString retains control over that content and can allow it’s users to edit or delete the sent email. Because the mail recipient’s computer is requesting the images each time a message of this type is viewed, it’s even possible to track how many times your email gets read.

There is a downside to sending email as pictures. Your email looks will look odd and becomes a little more awkward for your recipients to deal with. By default, most email clients — web-based or otherwise — will not download images until the user clicks on a button or alert. Images are also not available if the user is working offline. On a Blackberry or other smartphone the email will look like a list of image links. Only by opening the first of those links using a mobile browser will the smartphone user be able to read the actual message. At that, reading the message will be harder than normal because it will appear as a downscaled image (the text will be tiny).

What about other email features? BigString is up there with Google, Yahoo and the rest of the pack when it comes to storage, size of emai lmessages allowed, and all the other basics. The user interface and speed, on the other hand, leave a bit to be desired. To me, BigString felt about as clumsy as Squirrelmail or IMP. I didn’t do any scientific speed tests, but BigString’s web interface felt much slower than GMail.

Overall, BigString is an interesting service, but not one that I find practical. For normal email, it lags behind the other major webmail providers. There’s no IMAP support, so comparisons with Tuffmail and Fastmail aren’t appropriate. BigString’s differentiating feature is only useful once in a long while and in order for it to be useful you need to force your correspondents to suffer through reading email encodded in JPEG files. Sure, you can chose to send most mail as normal text and only turn on the “recallable” feature once in a while. But who plans on sending an email they’ll need to recall?