I Love Gmail!

Posted Wednesday, October 18th 2006

I’m expressing my undying love for Gmail. I really, truly honestly love it. It has served me well for a long time now, and I don’t plan on using anything else in the forseeable future. I was one of early Gmail users, and I’m proud to say that I invited a bunch of people to use Gmail back when Gmail invites were a rare thing.

Let me explain why I love Gmail.

1. Free Space - As you all probably know, Gmail gives you a lot of free space to store your e-mails. I am currently using 218 megabytes, which is 8% of the total 2775 available megabytes (at this point, the free space constantly increases).

2. Spam Filtering - My Gmail address seems to get pounded with spam, yet I rarely see a spam message get through to my inbox. Sure, a few get through every now and then, but it’s VERY rare. And I just deleted 820 (!!) spam messages from my spam folder.

3. POP/Web Access - I love POP access. I use Thunderbird to check my e-mail, and I love having a centralized way of reading & writing e-mail. I depend on it. The fact that I can read my e-mail through POP when I’m using my own machine, or through the web interface when I’m not, is really useful!

4. Shortcuts - Did you know that Gmail has key shortcuts? Press ‘C’ and you will be taken to the compose message menu. Press ‘R’ to reply, or ‘F’ to forward your message. And there are many more.

5. Filters - Fully capable mail filtering. You can have messages moved to any specific folders, automatically deleted, or pretty much anything else you’d like to do with your e-mails.

6. Bits & Bobs - You can have Gmail automatically respond to e-mails when you’re away on vacation. You can have a signature, or a picture to be shown to other gmail users when they read your e-mails.

Gmail rocks.