Great for creating a throwaway email address (gmail.google.com)

Member Name: stuff10

Product:	gmail.google.com
Date:	02/06/09 (15 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free, access your email from anywhere

Disadvantages: Doesn't look great, lots of advertising

I'm not a regular user of GMail (I have my own pop3 email address and use Thunderbird), but I do have a throwaway GMail address and from what I've seen of GMail, I'm relatively impressed.

GMail is completely free to use and offers around 8Gb email storage (although why you need 8Gb of old emails is beyond me). The design of the inbox is fairly basic and isn't the nicest-looking site out there - the colours are harsh and it just doesn't site quite right on the screen.

You can compose and send your emails online and access them from any internet-connected computer, which is obviously an advantage when you're away from home. Composition comprises of a nice large text area with a Word-like toolbar that allows you to manipulate the text in several ways - bold, italics, underlining etc. Attachments can be easily added and there's even a spell checker included for you.

Recently Google has had some outage problems, with GMail being completely inaccessible for several hours at a time - not very good if there's an important email you need to send. However, what really annoys me about GMail is all the advertising - GMail may be free, but it analyses the text in your email and then displays relevant adverts at the side of your messages. It's not a massive problem, but it is annoying.

GMail is a decent free system, but it's not for me - I'll keep my pop3 account.

Summary: Great for a throwaway address, but I wouldn't use it as my main email account