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The Bottom Line
Gmail puts contextual advertising next to the emails you read.
Pros
- 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, Gears lets you read and write mail offline
Cons
- Gmail does not support secure (signed and encrypted) email natively
- Rich HTML formatting in Gmail 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 organize, forward and respond with a canned reply. You can use templates for new messages as well.
- You can access Gmail via IMAP or POP, forward mail to any address, and take the web interface offline with Gears.
- 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 Review - Free Email and Chat Service
What do you expect from Google? Search, simplicity and speed? That's what you can get from Gmail, Google's approach to email and web-based instant messaging and group video chat.The interface is simple and elegant, but also remarkably clever with useful keyboard shortcuts and fast operation.
Of course, Gmail boasts a search box, which usually returns useful results. Yet finding single emails precisely is not the best thing about Gmail: smarter still is its keeping everything in context.
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 POP and IMAP. (You can also put Gmail's web interface in offline mode with Gears and read as well as compose mail while disconnected.)
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.
