E-Mail Service (Updated)

Well I now have had a GMail account for three months thanks very kindly to a good friend of mine. It came up in email conversation that he had one and that I wanted one. He had an extra invite and so sent one my way. I now have six of my own invites, as of the date of this post, that I would like to get rid of. If you want one send me an email at ahewgill AT gmail DOT com. Make sure you give a good reason why you think you need one because they are certainly not for everyone as I will try to illustrate below.

HotMail
Right now HotMail is in the process of upgrading all of their basic (free) accounts to 250MB of storage space. My HotMail Plus account can now hold 2GB and allows me to send and receive attachments up to 20MB which is twice what Google offers (but costs $20/year). They also recently activated the Calendar option which allows you to use the online calendar in your hotmail account as well as synchronize it with Microsoft Outlook and/or a PDA. Currently I am using Yahoo! Calendar but may try out the new service soon (online calendars are very handy). Google doesn’t offer a calendar service. Even though HotMail is now feature-full it still isn’t the best email service. You access email messages in a traditional manner where each incoming message is one message in your inbox and if you are a part of mailing lists this can be very difficult. In addition my HotMail account is very slow and occasionally fails with “Server too busy” messages.

GMail
GMail is very nice for people who receive a lot of email, especially with mailing lists. Most webmail accounts are very tedious to use since you can do very few things in bulk as you could with a standard GUI mail reader such as Microsoft Outlook Express. Mail in organized in conversations which are easier to work with than single emails. A conversation is a chain of emails that are each in response to the last or in response to an original. For example if I was to email you and then you emailed me, etc., all of these messages would be in one conversation which can be opened and read as one unit. For mailing lists this is a tremendous advantage since all responses to a message to the list are grouped into one conversation, so if the topic doesn’t interest you, you can archive the whole thing without bothering to read it.

Archiving is the other cool benefit. Google built their business on search and it is not forgotten in GMail. Instead of deleting your email you archive it and thus you can use the search feature to find old email. You can still delete mail too and the spam filter does a great job, spam mail and deleted items are emptied from your account after ageing 30 days.

Most people are accustomed to folders for email but Google takes a slightly different approach. All mail instead being stored in folders is left in a single mailbox (even Inbox messages) you can see this by clicking of the “All Mail” link in GMail. Each conversation then can have as many labels as you would like and thus lives in multiple folders if its relevant. Messages in the Inbox have an “Inbox” label and when you archive it this label is removed and it disappears from the inbox. All of the label views work the same way, you mark incoming mail (by hand or automatically) and archive it; then click the label you are interested in to see all the messages with that label (just like a folder). The system works great.

Anyway you get the idea, if you like the idea of conversations for email then GMail is for you otherwise I recommend a HotMail Plus account. Ciao.