Freeware

GMail: The Perfect Email Experience

By EAN ⋅ August 6, 2007 ⋅  Email this Post ⋅  Print this Post ⋅ Post a Comment

Developer: Google
Check it out here.

There’s nothing like the college email experience to make you hate web based email. Year upon year having to deal with UCLA’s tempramental web based email nearly drove me to toss my computer through my balcony window - but alas, I pulled through and just dealt with the molasses-like speed and the lack of any noticeable storage space whatsoever.

But then I was introduced to GMail. From the day that I had heard about it, I had been dying to give it a run for myself - but it was a closed beta and I couldn’t find a soul who had access and could share an invite with me. About six months or so after GMail was released, I was talking to my girlfriend’s roommate who picked up an invite from her boyfriend’s friend friend or something along those lines. In any event - I was finally in - and boy was I hooked.

The first thing I did was oogle at the vast amount of space that was at my disposal. What a beautiful sight to see an email provider that could store more than 20 MB of information within its servers. Little did I know that the amount of space would skyrocket up to almost 3 GB and spawn several applications that allow you to use your inbox like an online hard drive.

This sounds pretty corny, but I was smitten with everything GMail had to offer from the moment I logged in. It all felt so fresh and new. Such a relief from the claustrophobic atmosphere that my college email service forced upon me. GMail was my release from crappy email services once and for all.

Enough of this lovefest. Let’s get into some of the functions. As you would expect from any next gen email provider, GMail has an address book, a spam filter, and a bunch of other stuff that makes it extremely handy. It can also be accessed from the web or through a software based client like Thunderbird or Apple Mail. Although I have it set up through software email clients on both of my computers, I find that I enjoy using the actual web interface far more.

Which brings us to the reasons why you should use the web interface instead of a software client when checking your mail. GMail is infused with Google Talk - a hybrid instant messaging client sort of thing that is great when you are talking on the phone with someone and you want to send them to a website - provided they are near a computer too. Also, the ability to star emails that you want to save and an auto complete email address feature that never misses make the web interface an excellent asset to an already great email service.

I’ll nitpick a little here and talk about the only “flaw” in GMail’s service. The spam filter. While it gets the majority of spam emails right, it does miss a few from time to time. And other times it is a bit too overzealous with its blockage and tends to suck in a few emails that were not spam at all. I suppose that is to be expected from any spam blocker, though.

Get GMail now. Right now. It really is excellent and a fantastic user experience - much like everything that emerges from the minds of Google’s development team.

Check out GMail for yourself.

- Eric Norton