Gotta Love Gmail

I know Gmail has been out for quite some time now, but today I needed some info on some computer parts I ordered over a year ago, and Gmail made it trivial to look it up. Although it wasn't the first time, I realized what a Godsend Gmail is. I then also realized that Gmail really has really changed the face of free email. Whether you have a Gmail account or not, you gotta love Gmail.

If you don't know what Gmail is, it is Google's free email system and in many ways similar to Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc. Before Gmail came along, typical free email accounts would have quotas on the order of 20MB or so. If you wanted more, you would have to upgrade your service and shell out a few bucks a year. In this day and age, 20MB is quite pitiful. With that type of quota, you have to go in and clean house relatively often. Otherwise, if someone sends you an email with some attachments, it would easily cause your mailbox to overflow, and you would never receive the message.

Gmail changed that by offering a whopping 1GB. With that much storage, you could esentially never delete an email again (at the very least, keep emails for a VERY long time). Soon afterwards the other freemails began to follow suit and dramatically increased their quotas as well. So whether or not you have a Gmail account, you have Gmail to thank for your larger mailbox. If Gmail hadn't been born, you would probably still be manually deleting emails and cleaning up your freemailbox.

One thing that still seperates Google from the others, is that Google's quota is still increasing daily. As of this post, it is 2745MB and counting. Of course, Gmail also gives you the great searching features you would expect from Google. Consequently, if you still don't have a Gmail acocunt and would like one, just let me know and I can send you an invite.