- It’s free
- You can keep up to 3 Gigabytes (that’s 3,000 megabytes) of mail there
- Built-in spam blocking, virus protection, spell checking, and search (and Google knows search)
- You can read and send personal email from any computer on the internet.
Plus there are lots of other features like filtering and the way large pictures sent to you appear as thumbnails (which you can then download or view on line in full size). This is great for people with a dial-up connection. If you want to forward a large picture of your grandchild to someone, you can do it without waiting minutes for the picture to move through your modem. Once it’s in your Gmail account, you can forward a large attachment directly from Google’s server to your brother-in-law’s email account.
There are a few down-sides. Attachments are limited to 20 MB (plenty big enough for any MP3 or a very large photo) and executable files are not permitted (but you can simply rename and send them). Since it's web-based, if you can't get on-line, you can't do anything with Gmail. People initially objected to Google’s software “reading” your email and displaying ads with it that matched what the email was about. So if you tell your mother about your new car, a car ad might appear in the margin. If it upsets you, don’t use Gmail, but I don’t view this as an invasion of my privacy. It also works with Google Talk.
