Everybody knows the existence of the world's innovative search engine's free e-mail service that is known as GMail. A few of my close friends would be noticing that I am pretty much obsessed with GMail. A few is still wondering why, because to them GMail interface is crap, plain and boring. I will try my best to explain why I LOVE GMail so much.
#1 - GMail is somewhat exclusive
This is my very first impression of it. You'll need to be invited by current users in order to be able to have one account. In order to be invited you will need either an existing e-mail address or a mobile phone (that's the alternative way of signing up in Malaysia at least). Sure, maybe anybody can simply create an email account out of the freely available providers like Hotmail or Yahoo! but if you don't know anybody that uses GMail, chances are you might not be able to obtain the invite.
Oh, in case you want an invite, you can ask me about it. I've got plenty left!
#2 - Tons of disk space
Even though Google still somewhat limits the maximum attachment size that is allowed to be sent out, the total amount of space you are given in your account is huge! Back then, GMail started with about 1 Gigabytes of mail space, and it was increased rapidly at their anniversary. At the moment, it is about 2.7 Gigabytes of mail storage, and this number keeps on increasing every second!
#3 - Innovative 'Labels' feature to replace the 'Folders' approach
Most of us handle quite a large amount of e-mails throughout our usage of the Internet. Imagine a few years worth of e-mails! That would easily accumulate to thousands of e-mail messages. Some of us organize these e-mails into folders and sub-folders. But here comes the problem:
What if an e-mail is both "work-related" and "college affairs"? If you put it under "work-related" folder you might miss is when you are looking for any "college affairs" e-mails. What if you can add two (and even more) identifier labels to an e-mail message for a much more efficient mail sorting and finding later on?
With GMail, you can apply both "work-related" and "college affairs" labels to the same e-mail message and it would appear on both sections should you start looking for it later on!
#4 - Innovative way of handling e-mail 'conversations'
An e-mail 'conversations' is essentially a series of reply between two or more parties of the same e-mail. Traditionally, when you are replying e-mails to another party, it would appear as a series of replies as separate e-mails. This is generally troublesome to organize - because maybe 20 separate e-mails is about one single series of replies.
How GMail handle this is that all these replies are collapsed into one 'thread', it appears more like a series of long text-chats between the two parties rather than 20 separate e-mail messages. Thus, they call e-mail messages as 'conversations', which makes total sense. Upon opening the e-mail conversation, you will be taken directly to the first unread message, and the rest will be collapsed. Very innovative in my eyes.
#5 - Archive, not Delete
Sometimes, there's a few (or a lot of) e-mail messages that we are unsure of whether to delete or leave it there. One thing for sure, these kinds of e-mail messages clutter the inbox/folder view and chances are our most important e-mail messages will get buries way underneath.
With GMail there are two things you can do to these types of e-mail messages: Delete or 'Archive'.
When you archive an e-mail message, it will be removed from the inbox, but remains available in the account should you need it later. You can access these archived e-mails either via the 'All Mails' or via the e-mail search feature they provide.
... and let's not forget the fact that you have huge space to store your e-mails, you might not even want to delete anything anymore!
#6 - Auto save Draft
It is the most annoying when you spent hours and hours composing that very long confessional letter or business idea to send to your partner only to find out that it is gone the moment you try to send it out - perhaps due to some connection problems, or power outage!
GMail provides you with a draft auto save feature, which will periodically save your composed e-mails as a draft every few minutes, so in case of any unwanted accidents, you can resume composing the e-mail at a later time, with minimal loss.
#7 - GTalk Integration
GTalk, or Google Talk is another of their brainchild. It is essentially an Instant Messenger application. The integration of GTalk into GMail brings two major benefits:
- GTalk Logs saved in GMail
By default, all your conversation to your contacts are logged and they are kept in GMail under 'Chats'. Wouldn't it be very handy to be able to dig out the old conversation for some information at a later date? Not to mention ANYWHERE?
- GTalk in GMail
Not only the chat archiving feature, but GTalk can also function without installing the full client! Yes, you can see your online GTalk buddies and chat with them right in the browser itself!
#8 - Lots of little stuffs
There's also little things that I love about GMail - the UPS parcel tracking feature built into the GMail interface, 'Add to Calendar' (Yes Google have their own Calendar application) so I can be reminded of something at a later date, the RSS newsreader snippet on top of the page.
You can also install GMail Notifier tool on your desktop so you would get alerted once you've got new e-mails!
... and then the complains
My only gripe about GMail is that everything is online. Even though you can access GMail with a POP mail client, but they don't provide the innovative user interface as GMail has created.
Oh and should any of you think GMail interface colors are gaudy and boring, you can start using Firefox, and get this "GMail Skins" extension for it so you can customize your GMail interface to your liking.
So if you want an account you can ask me for the invite.I've got plenty left!
As always, any feedback is highly appreciated. I could be too obsessed or too biased when writing this article. Just to let you guys know, I'm not a Google Fan boy.
[tags]GMail, E-mail, Google, Google GMail, Google Talk, GTalk, GMail features, GMail pros, Website, Innovative, email, mail[/tags]
