Last summer at the Search Engine Strategies conference Google hosted its annual Google Dance and during the festivities I was offered a Google Gmail account. At first I was somewhat intrigued, but really what was the big deal?
After all I've had a free Yahoo account for years and I run my own mail server. Well as soon I started using Gmail I realized what all the buzz was about. At first the amount of storage, 1 GB, really caught people's attention. But since then some services have matched that including Yahoo.
The real value of Gmail is the interface and how you can label, organize, and search your email. But there's much more. You can use your own mail client instead of a web browser if you want, although I suggest using the web browser. Attachments can be as large as 10 MB. And there's even an RSS Atom XML news feed which means I can use my NetNewsWire newsreader.
But I think it's the unique organization features which sets Gmail apart from the rest. When you label an email the system learns to add the same label to similar emails. This makes it really easy to archive incoming email.
If you would like to try Gmail, it's free, send me an email and I'll send you an invitation. Why the invitation? Well it's the only way you can get an account right now.