What's So Great About Gmail?

Gmail is Google's free email service. You can find Gmail at mail.google.com

What's So Great About Gmail?

This is the first question a lot of people ask when they're offered an invite to Gmail. Turns out, there's quite a lot of great things about Gmail. For a free email service, it may even be the best one out there.

Gmail used to be available by invitation only, but it has been opened up to everyone.

When Gmail was first introduced, the growth was limited by only allowing users to invite a limited number of their friends to open accounts. This let Gmail maintain a reputation as being elite and created demand as well as limiting growth. Gmail was almost instantly one of the most popular email services available. The limited invitation system officially ended on February 14th, 2007.

Gmail is sponsored by AdSense ads. These ads appear on the side panel of mail messages when you open them from within Gmail. The ads are unobtrusive and computer matched to keywords within the mail message.

Unlike some competitors, Gmail does not put ads inside messages or append anything to your outgoing mail. Google also assures everyone that ads are placed by computer, not by humans.

Most email services offer some sort of spam filtering these days, but Google's is one of the more effective. In fact, in two years of using Gmail, I've seen fewer spam messages in my inbox, compared to other email accounts and I've never had a legitimate email get flagged as spam.

Virus Protection

Google also offers virus filtering. You cannot turn this service off, and it prevents you from sending an executable file as an attachment. This limits some of what you can do with a Gmail account, but it probably prevents more mischief than it causes.

Gmail shows your Google Talk contacts on the left-hand side of the screen, so you can tell who is available and use Talk to instant message them rather than sending email, if you choose.

You can even start a voice or video chat using this integration.
You can also archive your Talk transcripts and store them within Gmail, if you use Google Talk or Gmail as your Talk client. This doesn't work if you use your Google Talk ID with a third party program, such as Adium or Trillian.