Review: Orgoo.com

A few months back I signed up for the Orgoo beta and had to wait until they opened it up for more accounts. Last week I received a notice that my account was ready to be used. I quickly went over to the site and signed up for my account. I have been testing this over the last few days and while it is a good service I do not think it is ready for most people to use as their primary e-mail / IM.

It is extremely easy to setup your IM or e-mail accounts for use on Orgoo, the interface is nice and easy to navigate. The entire design of the site is easy on your eyes so you will have no problems staying on the site for a while. There are no obtrusive flashing banner ad’s or anything like that.

The few drawbacks that are keeping me from using the service full-time are quite important to me. Even though they are minor annoyances they seem to really get to me. First it will allow you to add almost any e-mail account, GMail, pop, imap, .Mac, etc. You can have each e-mail account have it’s own named folder for it’s virtual in-box or you can have all accounts go to your in-box. The first annoyance comes from the global in-box. There are no column headers to state the To, From, Subject, etc. If there were what I would really like to see is an account column so that i can easily see which account the email is from probably just a user@domain account name or a custom account name like My GMail. There is also no way to currently re-size columns, I would like the ability to make a column wider. If there is a message with a really long subject line it would be nice to be able to widen that column to read the subject. It looks like in the future they plan to allow removal of messages from the external server when the messages are downloaded but for right now all messages will remain on your server. When it comes to GMail this is not a problem but for pop accounts this can turn out to be a problem. Unless you have the server set to purge messages that are older than a certain date you might find that your pop mailbox will become full. I really hope they integrate this feature soon. When typing up an e-mail there is no cursor icon to let you know where the cursor is. I also cannot click somewhere in the text and insert other text or change current text. I am not sure if this is a compatibility issue with the browser I am using or not. It very well might be since I am using FireFox 3 beta. Another issue I found with the e-mail portion of this service is that when you send an e-mail it checks the addresses to see if they are in your contact list. If they are not it gives you the ability to enter a first and last name for each contact. You then check the check boxes and click the Add button for the contacts you wish to add to your list. I did this for 3 contacts that I sent an e-mail to and it seemed to work. That is until I checked my contact list. The contacts were not in my list. I did not see the new contacts in my list until I logged out and then logged back in. I am guessing this is due to their ajax front-end not refreshing the contact list every time you load the tab. One final issue that I just found is that if you click on an e-mail it will load the body of the e-mail in the body window. You cannot use the arrow keys to scroll through the e-mail body. I tried this and all it did was change to the next message in the list. At first I thought this was because the message list was the most active window in the application. However I clicked the message body window about 15 times in a row trying to make that the active window and then tried to scroll with the arrow keys. When I did this the first key press did scroll down in the message body but it also changed to the next message.

The second annoyance comes from the buddy list in the IM client. You cannot alias a username so that you can remember who they are more easily. You also cannot drag a contact from one group or another, and I have not found a way to edit the contact so that you can move it from group to group. It seems that whatever group they were in when you added your accounts that is the group they will remain in unless you use Adium or some other IM client to make the changes. Also every time you log-in all of your IM groups are expanded, it would be nice if it would remember which groups were collapsed and expanded the last time you were logged in. I usually only have my work related groups expanded during work hours and everything else collapsed. This is a minor annoyance but it’s still there. I have also noticed that it is impossible for you to add a Google Talk account that is not a gmail related email address. The company I work for uses Google for their mail server and my address is a castlecomm.com address. When I attempted to add this IM account it would not let me put the domain name in the username field. When I used the username jcrawford and my password it rejected it.

Orgoo also offers a video chat which I cannot review here because I have not tested that feature of the site yet. Personally I rarely use video chat so I am not sure that I will ever use this feature.

Orgoo also manages your contact list and allows you to import your contacts from sites like GMail, LinkedIn, and others. The issue I have found with this is that in the past I imported my GMail accounts into my LinkedIn account. When I choose to import my GMail and LinkedIn contacts into Orgoo I ended up with a ton of duplicates and had to purge my contact list manually. I would have thought they had some sort of handling for duplicates whether it be merging records or skipping duplicates all together. I was wrong. While purging my list I noticed that it was a bit slow. I would select about 40 contacts at a time and then click delete. The message that my contacts were removed was instantaneous, however it took a good 2 minutes for the contact list to actually refresh and have the contacts removed. This could be in part because I had upwards of 300 contacts in my list due to the duplicates.

The search feature for searching your IM logs and e-mail messages seems pretty powerful. However the issue I found with this is that when an e-mail message is found in the search results when you click on it the message will not load in the message window. You have to go back to your inbox, find the message and click on it to see the message contents. The From column (remember no header for the column) also seems shorter than in the in-box, long names will show in the in-box however search results will truncate the From name and currently there is no way to re-size the columns.

Orgoo also claims to have a powerful spam engine that will remember users actions when they mark messages as spam, however I have not been using the service long enough yet to review that feature. This feature takes time to gain a memory based on the users actions.

Overall I would rate this service a B+ however if they integrate more features and make it more usable I would love to use this service on a daily basis. I don’t know how many times I have been looking for an e-mail on my workstation to find out that it downloaded on the laptop. I also have been annoyed when I set the laptop to leave all messages on the server and when I get home have to sift though tons of e-mails that I had already read on the laptop while on the road. This service would be very handy for me since I have a lot of e-mail / IM accounts and love the idea of a central location for them all. Keep up the good work and if it becomes more usable you have me as a user.

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