One of the biggest products from Google is Google Mail (Gmail). As of December 2009, Gmail had 176 million users on a monthly basis and with good reason. Once you are used to the interface which is a conversation type of view, Gmail has some very good features beginning with 7.5 GB and increasing storage. You also can attach up to 25GB of files. Where does one start? Let's start with the contacts list. You can sort by first or last name as you can do with most contacts. What I noticed is for business contacts, not all webmail sorts correctly by business name. Gmail's contact list sorts businesses properly regardless of the sort.
Have you ever sent an email and right away realized that you forgot to include an attachment? Enable "Undo Send" for Gmail labs and you have the ability to undo a sent email for up to 30 seconds after hitting "Send". Recently, Google implemented Google Voice which enables free calling to the US and Canada using Gmails Google Chat interface.
When composing an email, has there ever been an issue where your browser crashes? The autosave feature of Gmail automatically saves a copy of the email you are working on. It starts saving once minute and then varies according to the size of the message. No more having your browser crash and losing an email that you have been working on for the past 15 minutes.
Gmail also works with your Google Calendar. You can accept an invite received on a Gmail and post it directly to your calendar in Google.
If you receive email from someone you do not wish to receive it from, you can easily set up a filter so that it does not go to your inbox (usually Trash).
Searching within Gmail is very easy. There is a search bar in the upper left of the Gmail page and put your search term in. Searching for a person or an email address is done the same way and again very easy.
In all once you learn to use the interface, you will appreciate how powerful and good an email tool Gmail is.
A note that future blogs will look at the webmail for AOL, Windows Live Hotmail, and Yahoo.
