A Quick History and Summary
Back on April 1st 2004, when Gmail was originally released, news of the gigantic amount of e-mail storage space Gmail users would receive quickly caused Gmail to be widely talked about. When Gmail was first released as an invitation-only beta, it boasted a whopping 1 Gigabyte of storage space per user. This completely blew other free, web-based e-mail services out of the water. For comparison, Hotmail offered a paltry 2 Megabytes of storage at the time, meaning Gmail’s storage was 500 times as big.
Today, nearly four years later, storage is virtually a non-issue with all the major webmail players: Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Hotmail offers users 5 Gigabytes of storage initially, with the promise that as they come close to using that up, more will be allotted to them. Yahoo! offers unlimited storage to all its users. And Gmail has decided upon an ever-increasing method of storage. If you visit http://www.gmail.com/ you can watch the numbers increase. At the time of this writing, Gmail offers around 7.4 Gigabytes of storage.
So, now that storage has become a non-issue, it comes down to the features of the webmail service that I’m interested in and will, ultimately, cause me to pick one service over the other.
That being said, I’ve stuck with Gmail since it came out and have been consistently happy with the feature set and pace of its development. While I have been tempted to switch back to Hotmail (due to the absolutely beautiful Hotmail and Windows Live Mail integration, which I shall perhaps write about at a later time) I’ve ultimately stuck Gmail and have been very, very pleased with my choice.
I thought that blogging about my favorite Gmail features might make a nice, interesting post, and I hope that you agree. That being said, I’ll list my favorite features of Gmail.
Conversation View
My first favorite feature of Gmail is its unique Conversation View. Gmail intelligently keeps all the replies to an original e-mail together, making it much easier to see what was said previously. This is most useful when you are reading old e-mails.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts is the second feature of Gmail that I appreciate on a daily basis. I’m a keyboard nut in general and the ability to manage my e-mail without using my mouse is wonderful for me.
My most commonly used shortcuts:
- j/k – newer/older conversation
- x – select/deselect conversation
- # - delete the currently selected conversation
- l – open labels box
- Shift + u/I – mark selected message as unread/read
- g +i – go to the Inbox
- ? – display keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet
Tip: You must enable Keyboard shortcuts under Gmail’s Settings to use them, as they are disabled by default.
Filters + Labels
One of Gmail’s unique features is how it handles sorting old mail. While traditional e-mail solutions would have you place an e-mail in a specific folder to move it out of your Inbox, Gmail invented the concept of Archiving and Labels. When you are done reading an e-mail, you press “Archive” and it is removed from your Inbox and sent to your All Mail folder. If you want to categorize the message before Archiving it, you can “label” it with any label you create (e.g. Facebook, Netflix, or Personal). If you ever want to view all your mail that bears a certain label, you can click that label.
Where this gets powerful and exciting is when you combine it while Gmail’s Filters. Filters allow you to automatically perform an action (e.g. label, archive, delete, and more) upon a new message when it meets a given criteria.
I find it useful to automatically label oft-repeated messages. For example, when I subscribed to Netflix, I would have Gmail automatically label all Netflix emails accordingly. Instead of having to read, label, then archive each Netflix email I received, instead I only had to read and archive. In addition saving me the one step per email, it also gave me the peace of mind knowing that every single Netflix email was labeled correctly.
Mobile Access
Gmail has superb mobile access.
I use my second generation iPod Touch to check and manage my email on the go via wifi hotspots. In addition to email, I also sync my own personal Google Calendar as well as my wife’s Google Calendar to my iPod, but I’ll write on that at a later date.
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