Gmail Lab

Posted on June 8, 2008

Are you a Gmail user? The service was around for a while before people began to catch on to how good it is. Most were saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got an email account. Why do I need another one?’ But millions of people have caught on and most stay with it. Like the Google search engine, it’s pretty straightforward and intuitive to use.

One of the features I especially like is the spam blocking. My ISP account spam control seemed to be either turned on (which meant it not only blocked spam but most everything else as well) or off, which means it blocks nothing. After I got Gmail, I decided to setup my ISP account to just forward to Gmail. Not only does that mean getting my mail all in one place, it means all of the forwarded email goes through the spam filter. And it eats spam for lunch. I forwarded my wife’s account as well and she went from about 150 spam emails a day to 2 or 3.

Also, since Google gives almost 7 Gigabytes of space for each email account, make use of it. I use mine as online storage. How? Simple, email yourself. That’s what I did. I gathered up all of our family pictures and emailed them to myself. Google keeps them safe and though I have backups, it’s nice to know a copy is in my email as well. There are some services such as Gspace that have actually created a drive letter to access the storage. I’ve not tried that yet but the way I mention works OK. The only problem is having to send several emails to yourself if you have a lot of pictures. They have recently increased the attachment size to 20MB per email so that helps some.

So, I recommend Gmail for that and the ease of use. But in addition, Google has just announced they are opening their Gmail testing lab to the users. That means if you have an account, you will be able to play with a bunch of new features. They are looking for feedback to help decide which ones to make a permanent part of the mail program. So you actually get to be a part of deciding what the future Gmail will include. You don’t often get to do that. Most things seem to just get put into apps, like ‘em or not.