I have done enough personal posts till now, so I got the feeling that more computer based posts are needed. This is the first one and I have decided to write a review about Gmail, Google’s email solution. First of all, I’m going to have a brief history and then we will talk about it’s pros and cons.

Gmail started it’s Beta with giving away invitations to web techies and soon everywhere you could observe that people long to have the membership. It was initially became well-known for offering huge space for the members to store their emails. The storage space became such an important matter that Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail decided to increase their space too. Imagine that Yahoo had to change the space limit from 6 MB to 250 MB and later to 1 GB. Right now, Gmail offers a growing amount of space ( 2.8 GB on the time of this review ) for which you can see the counter on it’s home page. It’s still in Beta phase but public registration is now available.

Pros.

1. Huge space, much more than enough so that you never get the feeling of a need to clean up your inbox and drafts.

2. Manage multiple email accounts all together in your Gmail account. It can receive emails from your other pop3 enabled email accounts and let you manage them all in one place.

3. Search your emails. This is probably one of the most useful features of Gmail. With advanced search options, it becomes even easier to find a specific email among thousands of emails.

4. Using labels instead of folders. Gmail lets you label your emails or even define a filter which labels incoming emails automatically based on your definition in a user friendly wizard.

5. Accessible via mobile phones.

6. Available in many languages.

7. Powerful spam protection. In my own experiment, I received 307 spam mails in 19 days. Among those spam mails, only 1 email was not caught by spam protection tool. This is the most important factor for me to choose Gmail. I have used other free email programs like yahoo which really did not impress me in spam protection field. ( Yahoo’s spam protection is one of the weakest ones out there, in my opinion of course).

8. Free POP and SMTP access.

9. Easy and simple user interface.

10. Public registration is now available.

11. Many other features that are really useful. Gmail is growing rapidly and there could be other useful options for it’s users in future.

 

Cons.

1. Ajax enabled user interface takes a long time to load. This is of course not important for Broadband Internet users but still bothers Dial-up ones. On the other hand, Gmail offers a light version ( in basic HTML ) which is recognizable for all Internet browsers and takes a little time to load up.

2. Lacks a full featured rich text editor ( Like Yahoo’s ) for composing an email.

3. It is still in beta phase and actually it’s been a long time for Gmail staying in Beta. Update: Gmail is a stable release now.

After considering pros and cons, I strongly recommend you to give it a try. I’m sure you’ll like it more and more each day, just like I do. Right now, I’m managing 4 other email accounts with Gmail all in one place and the truth is I’m satisfied.