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June 27, 2005
Free Gmail
I find myself trying so hard to convince people to convert to Gmail from Hotmail or Yahoo! mail that I saw myself in this funny bit from The Onion a few months ago:
OLYMPIA, WA—Recent Gmail convert William Ramsak, 23, said Monday that his "heart goes out to" friend Kelly Oldenburg, who still sends e-mail through an MSN Hotmail account. "I feel so bad for you, needing to squeeze into 250 MB of storage space," Ramsak wrote to Oldenburg in an e-mail. "And I hate thinking of you sorting all your old e-mail, while Gmail automatically indexes mine so they are searchable." Ramsak then asked Oldenburg when he was going to "stop being a Microstooge and join Team G."
All your emails that are threaded together stay together, so it's easier to keep track of conversations - they don't get scattered among the rest of your email sorted by something silly like date & time. You can search all your emails, too. For example, you can type in "recipe" and you'll be able to instantly find that fruit cake recipe your mom sent to you last Christmas. Plus, you get over 2 GB in storage and counting. How can you go wrong? Wow, I'm like a commercial for GMail.
The fact that you can search your email has been very helpful – I typed in "phone number" the other day to look to quickly find an email where a friend had sent me their phone number. Without the search feature, I would've had to open about 20 emails from him to find that number.
This Motley Fool article discusses how Google makes money from the ads that run alongside the email text, but I've found the ads pretty unobtrusive.
While Gmail is in Beta testing (over a year now), to sign up requires an invitation from another member. I have around 50 invitations that I'd be happy to send out to anyone who wants them – just send an email to moneybb@gmail.com.
Posted by brian at June 27, 2005 06:44 PM