I found an excellent post on LifeHacker talking about 10 great things that GMail does. This is putting aside the mundane email handling, massive storage space, spam filtering etc; but instead looks at features that makes GMail exception. Here’s a summary:
- Themes: You can completely change the way GMail looks using themes
- Chat: You can launch video and audio chat right from within your browser, no downloads required
- Backup your email: You can back up your email onto a different platform anytime you want. So you don’t have to feel you depend on The Big G
- Audit: You can see all the locations you’ve signed in and out from
- Contacts: Contact management is a real breeze on Gmail and integrates nicely with other platforms too.
- Consolidation: GMail lets you consolidate different email accounts in one place
- URLs: As Gmail is web based you can bookmark locations and send them to your friends
- Keep email on your desktop: You can download gadgets and even an entire Google Desktop which integrates nicely with your email
- Search: Google is the master of search and whether you’re looking for milk churners or fat burners you’ll always be able to find them in your mailbox
- Experiment: Google Labs always has new exciting features in development, so if you’re so inclined, you may want to give them a whirl.
Head off and read the post.
I started using Gmail in April of 2004 when a friend of mine gave me an invite. It was 1GB of free email, and that seemed like A LOT! Back then we only had 4 invites per account and they were a hot commodity, even selling on eBay.
I’ve been using Gmail ever since, and the new features just keep rolling out more and more. It’s such a awesome service, I love it. I religiously use the Reader, Docs, Calendar, Books, and Groups also.
I think the spam filtering is my favorite feature. Others offer it but Gmail’s performance is amazingly better.
Yes…. I like my google …. I use google as my reader too!