Why I love GMail
I use Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail and few other email services for various email needs. In this post, I will cover why GMail is the best email solution for me.
I have been using Hotmail and Yahoo as my email solutions for several years. I have been a paid subscriber of Yahoo premium email account and enjoyed the following benefits:
1. Sending emails without Ads
2. Creating custom disposable email ids.
The disposable mail ids are one cool feature I really enjoyed with Yahoo Mail. When I register a temporary account with an unreliable site, I could create a disposable email id with Yahoo premium account and track the emails through that id separately but within the same Yahoo inbox. I can delete that mail id when I am done with that site.
However, I hate the antispam feature of Yahoo Mail and also hate their new interface.
Hotmail has been a reliable email solution for me for a long time. However, once GMail came up, I moved to GMail for several reasons.
There are few cool things that I discovered recently but not really known to many.
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This is the cool feature of GMail that made me write this blog today:
I was composing an email to few of the editors of IndiaStudyChannel.com. Due to the confidential nature of the email, I decided not to send it to the editors group, but rather decided to send the personal mail id of the respective editors. I typed first person's name and Google showed me a name match. I included that person. Here is the cool thing. The moment I typed the second editor's name, Google told me 'you probably chose the wrong first person'!
Yes, Google was right. I had chosen the wrong person as the first address. There were 2 people in my address book with the same name and when I selected the second recipient, Google was smart enough to recognize that and tell me that I usually don't email both of them together! And GMail went to the extra step of telling me which addressee I would have meant with a click option to replace the wrong addressee! GMail - I love you!
I have been enjoying the recipient suggestion feature in GMail. In this feature, when you select a recipient, GMail suggests other people who you usually email together and it has been very helpful since I always email 2-3 people together who work in my websites. I own about 50 websites and when I want to email the editors of any of my sites, Google would suggest me the group of people I want to contact as if it read my mind!Few other reasons why I consider GMail as the best email solution
1. It is free for most uses. (I used several paid email accounts from Google for business purposes. Business email solutions from Google is low cost and very reliable. It costs $50 per year per email account.)
2. Fast. You can navigate between emails really fast as if it is an offline solution.
3. Reliable. I never had any issue of missing an email.
4. Best spam control. The spam control of any other email solutions I used are not even comparable with GMail.
5. Easy to use Attachments. You can simply drag and drop attachments to email.
6. Best search feature. I rarely organize emails into folders anymore. GMail search is very reliable and it will find exactly what I need when I look for it.
7. Labels. I can attach multiple labels to any email and organize them under multiple labels. So no need to be confused whether to move it to this folder or that folder. Other email providers like Hotmail and Yahoo provide an option to organize mails under a single folder.
8. Hierarchical labels. Google recently introduced this feature. You can now nest the labels on another and organize the emails much better. Hotmail and Yahoo do not have the nested folders.
9. Undo feature. How many times you found you wrote the wrong thing after you clicked the "Send" button? But you were late and helpless since there is no option to call back an email. But not anymore! GMail gives and "Undo" option which allows you to cancel the Send after you click the "Send" button. After you send an email, GMail displays the "undo" link for few seconds.
10. + addressing. Did you know that you can append a + symbol to your email id and add anything after that and it is still your email id?
For example, if your email id is "MyCoolMail2000@GMail.com", then all of the following mail ids are valid and map to the same above email id:
MyCoolMail2000+JobSearch@GMail.com
MyCoolMail2000+Personal@GMail.com
MyCoolMail2000+Business@GMail.com
MyCoolMail2000+Spam1@GMail.com
The beauty of the above + addressing is, when you are registering in unreliable websites, you can add a + to your personal mail id and append a special term/name to it. If that site send you spam and unwanted emails, you can simply filter or block that specific email id in GMail.
11. Attachment reminder. Did you write "I have attached ..." in the email but forgot to really add the attachment? I have done it many times, but thanks to GMail, I never really sent it out without an attachment. GMail politely reminds you saying: You wrote "I have attached", you but really did not attach anything. Are you sure to continue?
12. Search operators. You can search emails using various operators.
has:attachment -> This will show you all attachments which have attachments
has:attachment pdf -> This will show you all emails that have .pdf file attached.
Here is the complete list of GMail search operators.
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That is actually a great find. Google in general, and GMail in particular has always been quite practically oriented software option. Unlike the competitors which fill up fancy items in the interface, Google always makes room for the useful stuff.
And I love Gmail too.