An awesome email service (gmail.google.com)

Member Name: Donnabroom

Product:	gmail.google.com
Date:	06/08/09 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use

Disadvantages: Spam function

Googlemail:

Back in 2004 Google launched Gmail as an invitation only webmail, POP3 and IMAP service it was not until 2007 that is became widely available to the public. Right from the off people were raving about it, enthusing about how great it was and how it was going to make deleting emails a thing of the past. To be honest at the time I couldn't really care what email service I was using and I was quite happy with my webtribe account. When webtribe became increasingly unstable and unreliable I jumped ship and finally decided to give Gmail ago. By that time another email service Gmail.co.uk had challenged Google about the use of the name Gmail and Google had to change it to googlemail instead. The other half has @gmail.com and I have the slightly longer @googlemail.com.

Initially Gmail offered a storage capacity of 1GB which was a marked improvement on the other services around at the time and great for people who like to email themselves stuff to keep safe or for easy access on other people's computers. Now googlemail offers over 7.5GB and it is steadily growing. You can also rent anything from 10GB of extra space to 400GB if you really need that extra storage. As for never deleting an email again, I don't think that will catch on. It's great having all that space but I like to bin emails when they are no longer useful, (review alerts for instance, once I've read the review the email gets deleted).

All of the things that make googlemail great are small and on their own they are barely noticeable, things like being able to send huge attachments, tag emails to make finding them easy in the future, the built in chat feature and the community driven Spam folder.

The Spam folder is a curse and a blessing; whenever one user marks something as spam the database is updated so it uses that information for all users. It makes it less likely to receive an email in your inbox stating that someone or other has the princely sum of 200 million USD that needs to be deposited in your bank etc, but it also means that things I want to receive in my inbox get dumped in my spam folder on a regular basis and I have hunt through hundreds and hundreds of spam messages to find things which, in my opinion, defeats the purpose of having a spam folder in the first place.

Being able to archive and/or 'tag' emails is really useful too. It means I can leave unread mail in my inbox, archive anything important and delete the rest. So I can quickly find what I am looking for in my archive I can 'star' it with a little yellow star at the click of a mouse button or tag it with something like 'passwords and account information' or 'stuff from Tim'. This is one of my favourite features and something I use almost daily.

I also love the chat feature as it lets me chat to my Mum in the mornings when we are both sorting our emails out without having to balance a phone on our shoulders or click back and forth through different webpages.

You can also apply a theme to your email account and there are hundreds to choose from. At the moment I have a cutesy anime type with candy coloured backgrounds and pictures of girls eating ice cream but I have also had a cute Japanese fox who keep a lovely zen garden and it changes throughout the day. obviously these themes serve no other function than making your email account more aesthetically pleasing but I like it. You can set a photo for yourself as well which will be displayed by your email address in other googlemail users contacts list if that sort of thing appeals to you.

There are loads of other ways you can customise your email account using something called Google labs. I haven't really bothered with it too much but you can use it to send an automatically generated 'out of office' reply to emails when you are not online or to set up custom keyboard shortcuts; the nerdy other half uses a lot of these functions but I really can't be bothered.

You can also access other useful functions like Google calendar, documents, (which stores any documents you receive as an attachment), and Google photo sharing services. I use the calendar and the documents function a lot and I really do find them useful.

To be honest I could go on and on about all the features of googlemail and you would probably all get bored, (if you aren't already), needless to say I really do find googlemail has improved my overall email experience and makes the arduous task of sorting them out each day less boring and less of a chore. Oh and it nearly always loads first time unlike some other email services I have used which seemed to have a lot of 'down time'.

If you need a new email service you probably won't find a better option than googlemail and if you have a Microsoft email account you will not believe the difference!!

Summary: Try it you might like it