The Wonderful Web - Gmail

Most of you are quite familiar with gmail. But if you’re not, it’s e-mail from google. It’s great – you get a simple interface with robust features, and a massive amount of space for free. It truly transformed my e-mail efficiency from the moment I got my account on November 30, 2004. And in the last 7+ years, I have only maxed out my storage once. So let me give you the main reasons I like gmail in a bulleted list:

  • Free, large storage (I can currently store 7641 MB of messages)

  • You can use multiple e-mail accounts. While logged into my gmail account, I can send e-mail from 6 different e-mail accounts all in one place.

  • Google calendar syncs well with gmail. I keep my calendar on google calender, which lets me quickly send plans from my e-mail to my calendar, and back again.

  • The interface is worlds better than yahoo and hotmail, and much better than any product I’ve used from Microsoft and the university where I am currently a Ph.D student.

  • You can force higher levels of security with gmail.

  • Instead of putting e-mails in individual folders, you can simply apply labels for sorting. So you can have one e-mail that has multiple labels or tags. I use this all of the time – it makes me very efficient as handling and sorting large amounts of e-mail.

  • It is easy and not time consuming to create lots of automatic filters. I have over 150 filters I use to automate my e-mail habits.

  • You can “google” your own e-mail collection, which makes finding that random contact from 3 years ago much easier and quicker.

  • The SPAM filter is really good.