OK, so get this. I just tried to reply to someone’s question on the flexcoders mailing list. I hit send and instantly I get a reply (instantly as in a few milliseconds). The reply is from Google telling me they have blocked my message from being sent to the mailing list. Here’s the message I got:

So I think, WTF? And then I click on the link they gave me to explain why the hell the blocked my message. I get to this page and it tells me this:

Here at Gmail, we work very hard to fight spam. This includes not only spam coming into Gmail but spam being sent out from Gmail as well. Believe it or not, spammers sign up for Gmail addresses in large numbers just to send out spam! To help do our part to keep this junk off of the internet, we bounce mail that we are confident is spam. Unfortunately, we aren’t perfect and will occasionally bounce legitimate mail. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Umm, ok, I guess. That’s pretty lame that I’ve been a fairly regular emailer to what is very clearly a Yahoo mailing list for the past few years, and now Google decides I’m acting like a spam bot when I try to send this message. But then I laughed out loud in the kind of “fuck you” way that I do sometimes when I read this:

Depending on your needs, there are a number of different ways to reliably send bulk mail that avoid the pitfalls of doing it manually with Gmail. You may be interested to try Google Groups for newsletters/mailing lists or Calendar for sending invitations to events.

So Google blocks my valid email to the flexcoders mailing list (a Yahoo group list) and then recommends I try using Google groups mailing list. You’re telling me that if I had been sending to a @googlegroups.com email address instead of a @yahoogroups.com email address then it would have gone through?

Am I the only one who’s going to say this? Seems like the Flex blogosphere is drooling over the concept that Google would do something in Flex. But I haven’t heard anyone talk shit about the app. Maybe it’s because it’s 1:30am and I’ve had a few beers, but seriously now, this is what Google comes up with? It’s no wonder the title of the TechCrunch article says “But why is it in Flash?” No kidding, this is an awful Flex site. Comparing the Flex version with the HTML version, I gotta say I like the HTML version more. The HTML site is cleaner and just feels nicer to me (not that I’m a fan of that version either). The Flex version doesn’t add anything you couldn’t just as easily do in plain old HTML. And I happen to think it just simply looks bad. I get a bad taste in my mouth when I look at the app.

ZOMGZ! They have tabs for web, images, and video?! And they show those annoying snap previews for search results?! And getting to the actual page of a search result now takes two clicks instead of one?!?!

OK, I’ll stop badmouthing, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But come on guys, just because Google does something doesn’t make it the best thing ever. And I realize that from an Adobe standpoint being able to say “Hey, Google did something with Flex” is pretty big, but please, this isn’t the app you want them to make. I call BS.