Gmail is the newest craze in email. When Gmail, Google's email
provider, first started, it was hard to obtain, because
you had to have
an "invite" to get an email account through them. However, as the
site has grown, members have recieved an almost unlimited amount of
invites, and Gmail is open for almost anyone who wants it.
The reason Gmail was so wonderful, is that it offered something almost
no one else did - 1 MB of storage on an email account. Their goal
is to allow anyone to have as many emails in their inbox as they want,
without having to delete any because their inbox was full. Gmail
is currently increasing their storage capacity by the second,
(literally, you can look at the site to see it rising) and are working
hard to increase the
features as well.
There are many wonderful features to Gmail other than just the massive
storage. There is a wonderful search feature that allows you to
search your emails for words or phrases, thus finding the exact email
that you want without having to read through a million emails.
There are also labels that you can apply to your emails, thus allowing
for easy archival. Each message in a
conversation is grouped with
the previous messages, thus making reviewing a conversation much
easier. There are no pop up ads with Gmail, however there are
"relevant" ads at the top as well as at the bottom of each email
conversation. These ads are sometimes useful, and are very rarely
annoying.
The people at Gmail are working hard to develop new features and
such. POP message forwarding is currently available with
Gmail. Messages can be sent and read in most languages.
There are 5 fully supported browsers, as well as others that are at
least somewhat useable. There is a spam filter which
automatically sends suspected spam to a special spam folder, where it
can be reviewed and deleted or marked as not spam. Rich text
formatting is also available.
Gmail is the best email program out there today, in my opinion.
With its large storage and ever-growing features, the people at Google
are working hard to make their email the best the net has to
offer.