Why you should be using gmail

March 24th, 2009 | by geo |

I have been blown away at what google has done with gmail over the past several months. It is by far the BEST email application in my book, and here’s why.

I’m not going to go through a feature list…boring, but I will highlight some of the features that have made my life easier. First, gmail can pull email from all of your existing accounts, and centralize your messages into one location forever. The benefit - a single interface to manage EVERY email account that you own, the ability to use the amazing google search technology to find anything, and you can save every message forever. You know, those messages that you really need to find a few years down the road…yea you can find them.

Secondly, You can customize the interface to show multiple inboxes, or create your own “inboxes” using the filtering and label tools. This means you can label  messages based on criteria you set, and  have them appear on your main page using the multiple inbox feature in gmail labs.

The list goes on and on, but other cool things include the ability to “unsend” a sent message (within a 5 sec window), use keyboard shortcuts to navtigate quickly through messages and labels, and a really cool third pary add-on for firefox that searches attachments in gmail for you, called Xoopit. I have been using this and love it. It works, and oh yea it also integrates with facebook.

There are some limitations, especially for using gmail in the business world. With multiple accounts gmail only fetches mail after you’ve manually checked it a few times. It’s based on an algorithm, so if you don’t manually fetch the mail for a period of time it will only check once per hour. Also, it’s currently impossible to have multiple signatures, and outlook recipients will see that you are sending a message from gmail. For some businesses that may be a problem.

The good far outweighs the bad, and I suggest that you drop your microsoft outlook client, or even some of the other ok web based mail programs. Gmail is simply unmatched. It also has a task manager - which I have been using for some time, and love it because it’s integrated with messages, so you can easily add and link to do’s to emails.

Anyways, if you’re not on gmail you are making your life harder than it needs to be.

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