A few years ago a friend of mine sent me an invitation to GMail. I accepted, created an account, and there it remained untouched until last year. Up until then I had been using Microsoft's Hotmail, and had become tired of the endless problems I was having with their service. Then I remembered I had a GMail account, so I dusted it off and started to test whether this was the way to go, and I'm glad I did.
Spam
First off, the account had been unaccessed for a good couple of years, so when I logged in and found absolutely no spam in my inbox I was very impressed (please note that there were hundreds of messages in the spam folder). GMail has the best spam filtering I have known from any email service I have ever used. No spam has ever made it as far as my inbox, and legitimate mail very rarely ends up being filtered by mistake.
In comparison with Hotmail, I was getting spam in my inbox on a daily basis by the end, which was the main reason why I was considering switching. Additionally, I wouldn't have been able to leave a Hotmail account untouched for that long without it being erased.
Capacity
Unless you are a hardcore email user (such as a business or professional), then you are unlikely to run out of storage space, and you can always purchase more if needed. The capacity for a free user at the time of writing this is over 7GB! I have been using GMail for about a year now, and receive email from four different email accounts, and I still haven't used even 1% of the total capacity! Hotmail has been catching up with this recently, but like with everything Microsoft does, its too little too late!
Filters
This is an extremely useful and powerful GMail tool. Basically, based on certain criteria (such as message origin, subject etc.) you can filter incoming mail and perform action(s) on them. This includes deleting, forwarding and labelling the messages. This allows highly flexible customisation of what you see in your inbox. So, messages from that special someone can be marked as important, and those from that jerk from work can be auto-binned so that you never have to see them.
Additionally, you can use the same search options on all the messages in your account, so it's easy to find the email you need whenever you want it.
Labels
Labels are basically a more flexible type of folders system. The flexibility comes from a message being able to have as many labels as you want. Furthermore, GMail allows you to customise the colour of the label, so that messages with different labels can quickly and easily be distinguished from each other. This is even more useful when coupled with the filtering system, as messages can automatically be labelled when received. This way you can immediately see what messages may be important when they arrive in your inbox.
Labs
Google are always striving to improve their products, and GMail is no different. Labs allows beta features to be used and tested by us users, and many of them are very useful. My favourite labs feature is "Offline", which allows my messages to be accessible when not connected to the internet. Of course I could use a desktop client to download my emails, but I prefer to use the web based interface, so this is the perfect solution.
There are also a couple of funny lab features, such as "Mail Goggles". This requires the user to answer a couple of simple mathematical questions before being able to send a message, basically to help combat the sending of embarrassing drunk induced messages.
Googlemail
One negative point against GMail is the fact that in the UK it has to be Googlemail due to a trademark dispute. This means that instead of your email address being xyz@gmail.com, it's xyz@googlemail.com. This is less punchy and more cumbersome, but all the GMail positives lead me to forgive this small failing.
Other Features
GMail also comes with the external access options you would expect from an email service (unless of course you're with Hotmail). GMail comes with full POP and IMAP support, so you can access your mail using another email service or a desktop client (such as Outlook). Furthermore, you can POP another email account, and receive that mail in GMail, so you can have it handle all your email (unless the other email service doesn't support POP access).
It doesn't stop here though. GMail also comes with chat support (text and video), as well as themes to make the interface more interesting to look at. You can also download and install Google Talk or GMail Notifier on your computer and receive alerts when you get new email.
Final Verdict
If you are looking for a free full featured email service, then you simply cannot go wrong with GMail. Used by individuals, businesses and even schools, GMail provides everything you could want from an email service, and more!
Posts
