Gmail FTW

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It’s that time of year again; the almighty Google has opened its doors once again and have allowed the commoners to enter their glorious domain  of Gmail. For those of you who have been living in a cave for the past three years, search engine giant Google created Gmail back in 2004 as a new way to look at email. At the time, many free email providers limited you (greatly) in the amount of space you could use to store your emails. Cue Google stage right with their unheard of (at the time) storage of over 1 gigabyte for messages (or conversations as the Big G calls them). Although Gmail was revolutionary at the time, it unfortunately wasn’t open to everyone. You had the chance of being picked by Google themselves to try out their new email system or you could receive an invite from one of those lucky few with a Gmail account already. This made it hard to get ahold of an account and therefore increased Gmail’s sex appeal.

Fast forward to 2007 where Google now offers its email service to everyone and has increased storage to over 2.8 gigabytes. While the huge amount of storage for your messages is now almost commonplace with many of Gmail’s competitors (read: Windows Live Mail, Yahoo!, etc), its Gmail’s other features that make it so attractive. The first thing that will come to mind when hearing the word Google is searching. In fact Google has replaced the word search in many everyday situations (i.e. Mary, I can’t find my socks. Will you help me Google for them?). This in mind, Gmail’s search function is by far the best I’ve seen in free mail offerings to date. At first, a search box didn’t seem very helpful, but after a couple of years worth of emails cluttering your inbox, you begin to see why having a fast and effective search feature is important.

Second on the list of oh so attractive features within Gmail is its integration with Google Talk. Google Talk is a small program/service Google offers to communicate with other Gmail users. Its small, its simple and its effective. It doesn’t clutter up the screen or bog down your system with useless features like those in AIM or MSN messenger, and its talk feature was one of the first in the industry to actually work (in my opinion). A talk function has been around as long as I can remember on AIM and Yahoo!, but they never seemed to work right. Even with a fast computer and DSL there was the inevitable lag and disconnections that came with this sort of technology. Even today, when AOL has fixed their talk feature on AIM to work 90% of the time, Google Talk is still my favorite. Add to the mix a voice mail service that catches messages and sends them to your Gmail inbox (when people try to “call” you on Google Talk and you don’t respond), an integrated conversation log for all your Google Talk conversations and pop up email notifications and you have yourself quite a bundle. Now on top of it all, you can still use Google Talk on the road when you are at a public terminal. Simply log into your Gmail account and bam: your contact list is all loaded up and ready for you to use. Also, with the recent partnership between AOL and Google, it may be possible to contact AIM users via Google Talk in the future.

I could literally go on and on about the advantages to Gmail, but that would be wasting both your time and mine. Instead, I suggest you head on over to http://gmail.google.com and test drive it for yourself. You can even forward your old email to your Gmail inbox and send messages from your old account  if don’t want to give up your previous provider cold turkey.

And by the way, no I don’t work for Google. I consider this my public service announcement to the community (similiar to my “go download IE7″ post).

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