YuMDaP.net's blog

GMail

After I have been watching Google's webbased email-service GMail for quite a while, I thought it is time to sum it all up in an article. Please read on to find out what's new with this cool service!

You can start off using GMail by getting an invitation from the gmail invite spooler. You might say "What would I want this for? I have like 10 free webmail accounts with other services already?" Well, GMail has alot more to offer than the average webmailer.

Spam

At first I used GMail only to check out their technology. Now I forward all my old (spam generating) email accounts to GMail and watch the magic. All spam is gone! GMail takes care of it all. And all the email is in a centralized place.

Address fun

GMail offers some nice address features. You can put as many periods as you want into the address. For example:
bogusaddress@gmail.com equals bogus.address@gmail.com equals bo.gus.add.ress@gmail.com. Additionally you can append +whatever to you address. If you signed up to a newsletter you could give them the address myaddress+newslettername@gmail.com. In GMail you create a filter that searches for +newslettername and label all the matches with newslettername. It can also be useful if you want messages forwarded to gmail from other accounts to have their own labels (like Hotmail or Yahoo). Just set the address to something like bogus+yahoo@gmail.com and tell gmail to label all matching messages with Yahoo. I am sure you can think up alot of other uses for this.

Additional functionality

The webmail functionality itself is pretty neat already. Still GMail has more to offer. Alot of creative people around the world thought up ways to improve GMail or use it for competely different tasks. You can - for example - use GMail as a remote harddrive for Windows and Linux (OS X should be possible, too). The 1GB you get gives you quite some place to store stuff.

GMail uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for all of it's layout. This makes it possible to create your own Skins for GMail by creating user stylesheets. This can be done in Opera and Firefox. Opera, however, only supports GMail starting with version 8 (which is still beta).

Noteworthy sites to visit

The following are sites I consider essential for the GMail lover.
Aimless Words - a GMail weblog
GMail Loader - a site with a great tool to import mail from other clients into GMail and with lots of links to other great tools
The GMail Resource - the name says it all

Hope this article helps you appreciating GMail
Matthias