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I recently closed an email account that I had been using since I moved to the Delmarva peninsula nearly seven years ago. I have switched to Gmail. Had the account I closed not been a local provider for most of the years that I was a customer and had I not put a good deal of value of electronic stability (I'd been sandra@ that provider for many years), I would never have hung on so long. Gmail is everything I need and then some.

For starters, Gmail has better spam control than I have ever seen. Almost none of the mail that makes it into my inbox is spam and, so far, none of the mail that has landed in my spam folder appears to have been legitimate. Whether the folks at Google accomplish this by carefully monitoring how other users respond to the same messages (e.g., reporting those messages as spam) or by applying sophisticated text analysis to these messages, I don't know, but I've never had this degree of success when I have tried to manually adjust the level of spam filtering available for use on other email hosts. I've either lost legitimate email through heavy-handed filtering or found that well over 90% of the email in my inbox was spam, usually the latter.

Gmail is also astoundingly generous with their disk space. Instead of a measly 10 MB which I was paying quite a bit for on a yearly basis, I now have 4 GB at my disposal. Even after nearly three years of using Gmail. I have used only 4% of this space. My former service provider seemed to believe that 10 MB was a lot of space and didn't have much sympathy when I frequently ran out of space and found I could no longer receive or delete messages. With Gmail, I get playful chastising messages asking why I bother deleting mail when I have SO much disk space at my disposal.

One of the more interesting innovations of Gmail is how my email messages are clustered around discussion threads. If someone invites me to a lecture about climate change and I reply that I will be attending, the original message and my response will be grouped together. I can also attach one or more labels to a message so that, when I am only interested in viewing messages on a particular issue, I can limit my view to just the messages with the relevant label. Labels provide the same basic functionality as folders except that, using labels, messages can appear in multiple groupings.

The search tool for finding messages containing a particular search string is also both fast and effective. Instead of having to follow "Older" message links or try to remember when a message of interest might have arrived, I simply type a string that I know appeared in the message and find it within seconds.

I have also noticed that, when I send out test messages to verify that some alerting mechanism that I have put in place to monitor services that I administer, the messages sent to my Gmail account arrive within ten or twenty seconds, while messages sent to other email providers take several minutes to appear in my inbox.

Another feature that I like about Gmail is how easy it is to send messages to repeat contacts. Gmail does a great job of keeping track of my contacts while still giving me enough flexibility to create groups and add email addresses myself.

Lastly, Gmail is offering an interesting collection of other services -- a calendar, document storage, sharable photos and other services that I have largely been too busy to explore. I expect that I will make very good use of the discussion groups I set up today. What an amazingly useful set of tools for personal and professional effectiveness. And all this for free.

In the early days of Gmail, one could only join by getting an invitation from a current user. Today, you can just sign up. Need a URL? Don't bother; just Google "Gmail".

ITworld.com

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