Why Gmail?

In the few weeks that I have been running these tech tips, you have probably noticed quite a number of references to Gmail and other Google applications.  I suppose it's time that I explained why Gmail appeals to me and why I frequently recommend it to others.

• Universal Access: As a web mail client, Gmail is available to you on any computer on which you can access the Internet.  And it's free.
  
• Customization:  You can do a great deal to customize Gmail to behave and work the way you want it to.  These refinements are part of your account; they're not local.  That means that no matter where you log on to Gmail, your customizations travel with you.
• Aggregation of Mail Accounts:  With Gmail, you can consolidate all your email accounts into one location with a consistent interface.  Gmail can be configured to apply the appropriate return email address whenever you reply to an email.  In other words, if you reply to an email send to your home account, Gmail will use that email address as the return address.
• Storage:  At present, Gmail provides 7GB of storage; that's a lot of room for email, which, as a rule, is primarily text; text doesn't require a great deal of storage.  Google regularly adds more storage to their Gmail servers, so this figure has a tendency to grow slowly over time.  I have been using Gmail for a number of years now.  Email from at least five different email accounts funnels in to my primary Gmail account.  I get a lot of email, and I delete almost none of it, other than spam.  After all that time, and with all that email, my Gmail account uses only 9% of my total storage allotment.  This luxury of storage means that I can keep all my email, no matter how trivial it may seem at the time, in case I need to refer back to it in the future.
• Searching:  How do I find the message I need in all those thousands of emails?  Every email is fully indexed within Gmail.  That means that you can search for any word, or combination of words, and retrieve all the emails which contain those in a matter of seconds.
• Auto-saving of Drafts:  I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this has had the experience of losing work while composing an email within a web mail system.  That rarely happens in Gmail because it aggressively saves your drafts every 30 to 60 seconds.  In addition, you can explicitly ask Gmail to save your draft by clicking on the "Save Now" button.  In that way, if, while composing a message, you need to refer to a previous message, you can easily save your work and navigate to that message.  To return to your draft, you simply click on your drafts folder, click on the message, and resume editing.
• Threading "Conversations":  Imagine that you send a message to a group of five people, asking them which of several dates works best for a meeting.  In most email systems, their responses would be sprinkled throughout your inbox, and when it came time to tally the results, you would have to search through your inbox to find them all.  In Gmail, those messages are "threaded" as a conversation, in much the same manner that topics or conversations are threaded within a message board or discussion group.  That means that you can open the conversation, expand it, and see all of the responses at once.  If you were to archive that conversation and then someone responded to any of the messages within it, the entire conversation would re-surface in your inbox so you could read not only the new message but also the context to which it applied.
• Organization Tools:  By default, Google provides several tools to help you with your email workflow:
• Archiving:  Most email systems force the user to either leave messages in his/her inbox, which can very quickly get out of hand, or file them away in folders, where they may be forgotten without being dealt with.  In Google, the user simply archives messages to move them out of the inbox.  If he/she still wants to deal with them, he can attach stars or labels to them to indicate that they are not complete.
• Labels:  Rather than using a folder metaphor for tagging or organizing emails, Gmail uses a label metaphor.  The primary difference between folders and labels is that labels are non-exclusive.  With folders, the user must decide on one particular folder when filing his/her messages.  In Gmail, though, the user can apply multiple labels to any message, effectively filing the message within several categories.  
• Stars:  Stars are rather difficult to explain since their use really depends on the imagination of the user.  Perhaps the most common use it to flag/tag messages that still need attention, although they can certainly be used for many other purposes.
• Filters:  Gmail has a powerful filtering system which can automate a number of aspects of mail handling.  For example, you can create filters which automatically label incoming messages according to the account they were sent to.  So, your Chinook email would appear with a Chinook label and your Xplornet email would appear with an Xplornet label, ...
• Labs: Google has many extra features, called labs which can be activated to customize its behaviour and tailor it to your workflow.  These add-ons will be the subject of my next Tech Tip, so I won't say that much further about them here.
• Spam Filtering:  Gmail has some of the best spam filtering available.  Essentially, Google is able to achieve high accuracy by relying on their users to identify spam.  Every time you mark a message as spam, this information is relayed to Google and added to its spam database.
• Phishing Filters:  Before Christmas, I wrote about my experiences with phishing.  Gmail quite regularly identifies email phishing scams and actually disables the links within the offending email to protect Gmail users from this type of fraud and identity theft.
• Built-in instant messaging:  Google instant messaging (Googletalk) is built into the Gmail interface.  In addition to text-only communication, Google talk also includes voice and video capability.
• Passport to - and integration with - the Googleverse:  Creating a Gmail account provides access to - and often integration with - a vast array of other useful Google applications, including:
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs
• Google Reader
• Google Sites
• Blogger
• Youtube
• Google Maps (personalized)
• Picasa photo albums, 
• and more

In short, there are many reasons people switch to Gmail.  For me, threading, auto-saving, searching, and storage space top the list.  You may find your own favourite reasons.