The Bottom Line
Gmail puts contextual advertising next to the emails you read.
- Gmail offers continuously growing storage, free IMAP or POP access and sending from any address
- Smart sorting, searching and starring let you find and organize emails and chat conversations
- Gmail's web interface is both fast and rich, comes with useful keyboard shortcuts
- Gmail does not support secure (signed and encrypted) email natively
- Rich HTML formatting does not support inline images and lacks an undo feature
- Gmail does not offer unlimited online space
Description
- Gmail offers free email with growing storage space. Additional storage can be purchased and shared among Google services.
- Next to mail, Gmail shows contextual ads machine-matched to keywords found in messages.
- Starring and custom color labels let you neatly organize threads (conversations) and precise search options find emails fast.
- Gmail's filters can archive, star, label, forward or delete messages automatically.
- You can access a Gmail account via IMAP or POP in any email client or forward its messages elsewhere.
- A mobile Gmail application tailored to specific phones lets you access mail including attachments fast.
- Gmail retrieves mail from up to 5 POP accounts and lets you use these email addresses (or others) in the From: line of mail.
- Connecting to Google Talk, you can IM and group chat. Integration with Google Calendar lets you create events and invite.
- Gmail supports rich text formatting and can display many attachment types (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.).
- A spam filter tries to sort out the junk and fraud, and Gmail scans for viruses and worms, too.
Guide Review - Gmail (Google Mail) - Free Email and Chat Service
The interface is simple and elegant, but also remarkably clever with useful keyboard shortcuts and fast operation. A simple HTML version of Gmail should work in all browsers.
Of course, Gmail boasts a search box, which usually returns useful results. But finding single emails precisely is not even the best thing about Gmail. Smarter still is keeping everything in context, always and automatically.
With nary a miss, Gmail identifies the relationships between emails to construct "conversations". You can quickly see what has happened previously, or whether somebody has already replied. Gmail also offers "stars" for quick flagging and free-form color labels that can work wonders to organize an inbox.
If a contact is currently online in either Gmail or Google Talk, you can chat right from Gmail, with the conversation archived and indexed. Turning emails into Google Calendar events is just as easy.
All this makes no sense if you can't keep all relevant data, of course. So Gmail grows as you use it, and you can purchase additional storage. To avoid the truly unneeded mail, Gmail sports efficient and effortless spam and virus filters.
If you do not like the idea of Google displaying ads next to emails based on keywords found in the messages (the emails themselves remain private), you can use encryption or access your Gmail using a POP interface. Even better, the flexible IMAP access offers up all labels as folders.
If, conversely, you want to use the Gmail web interface for all your email, you can have it collect mail from up to five POP accounts automatically and put these accounts' email addresses (and all your others) in the From: line of messages you send.
