Is GropeWise A Good Thing or A Bad Thing? Well... the Apple client is very like the webmail interface, so I can't comment on all the wonderful features it offers to Microsoft slaves, but it does have one particular feature which I really appreciate:
a sense of humour.
On my first day of using it, I was informed by a colleague that his fridge had died on the weekend. Sad as it was, it chose nowhere near as auspicious an occasion for its demise as mine did, two years ago - in fact, my first blog was occasioned by the simultaneous demise of my fridge and Susan Sontag. (That blog followed soon thereafter. Blogging about dead appliances has limited appeal).
But being the friendly, helpful type, I mailed said colleague with the contact details of the fridge paramedic who attempted resuscitation on my fridge, in a message headed "your deceased fridge". Now, unlike the receipt, or delivery, confirmations of Pegasus of yore, GropeWise offers notification of both opening and deletion of mail - entertaining for those who enjoy their mailboxes fill up rapidly. Suffice to say that - in order to assure myself that the system was indeed working - I'd requested confirmation of opening.
I was thus the delighted recipient of a message headed "Joe Soap has opened your deceased fridge". So delighted, in fact, that I forwarded him the message to share the macabre humour. Instant paranoia. This was Big Brother at its worst!
And then, just when I'd gotten bored of it and thought I could trust the fates and switch the notification off, it did its little trick again. Having sent a mail to another colleague headed rather boringly "a couple of things", my curiosity was piqued to receive the notification that "Joe Bloggs has opened a couple of things". I'm dying to know what, and what he found inside...