GMail - Google’s Great Mail
Google is currently one of the technology leaders in the Internet space. It’s lead in search engine technology is being extended to adjacent fields. One of the headline grabbing news to come out of Google in 2004 was that it would offer 1GB of email - this was larger than any of the free email providers. It was attention-grabbing because it threatened the dominance of Hotmail and Yahoo as portals to the Internet.
I’ve kind of given up on Yahoo! in the last few years. Ever since Terry Semel took over the reins in 2001, this Internet company has refocussed on making business sense instead of launching new technology. In a way, I’d be happy if I were a stockholder (I once was), but as technology professional, I’ve stopped expecting ground-breaking technology from Yahoo! This void seems to be filled now by Google.
GMail in it’s current form beats the others in several respects:
- Lot’s of free disk space! Few people I know have mailboxes of that size.
- Integrated search - this is it’s most controversial feature. Google indexes your mail and allows you to find data almost instantaneously (I previously mentioned how Lookout did the same for Outlook’s mailboxes), but at the same time privacy advocates feel threatened.
- Free POP3 and SMTP access. What’s more - their connections are secure (i.e. tunneled through SSL).
- Excellent Web interface with clean, dynamic Javascript that raises the bar in terms of responsiveness and usability.
- Use of Labels to mark emails. Somewhat akin to my use of categories to group my photos, Google’s labels allow the marking of emails and permits multiple labels per mail item - a departure from the standard folders paradigm that was inherited from the file system structure. The current implementation doesn’t support nested hierarchy of labels, so you lose that if it’s important.
All in all, this is the best web email service that I’ve come across.
The reason why I’ve gotten this late was that Gmail accounts were by invitation only. Each user that’s active can invite others, so you’d only chance across an invitation when someone you know offers. So, if there’s anyone out there who wants a Google account, send me an email!