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In praise of….GMail

In the past I have expressed my puzzlement about people who use work email or shared email addresses rather than having their own personal email.  The solution is obvious – use a free online email service.


GMail is free and it works very well, so why bother to use anything else?  You can easily set up multiple GMail addresses if you need them (and forward all the mail to one account if you want to make life easier).  You can also receive messages in Outlook, Thunderbird or any other email client if you prefer to work that way.


GMail also has a very effective spam filter, whereas I gave up on Hotmail precisely because I received such huge volumes of spam.  Of course Hotmail have been forced to up their game since GMail came along, and have abandoned their crazy idea of charging for POP3 access and extra disk space and whatever else it is they used to do.


Yes, there’s also Yahoo Mail, and I’m sure that’s also wonderful, but none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for GMail.

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4 responses to “In praise of….GMail”

  1. Richard H avatar
    Richard H

    Sadly many of us office types don’t have access to gmail at work – it’s blocked. That means dashing out to Pacific Coffee just to check if family or friends have been in touch… I find myself gravitating towards work email..

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  2. Ulaca avatar
    Ulaca

    Why would they block gmail? Security, porn, employees wasting company time. But you can do that on a million and one other sites. Just curious.

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  3. Richard H avatar
    Richard H

    Checking personal email doesn’t seem to be considered ‘company time’ sadly… Not sure how people are expected to have a healthy private life, if you can’t access emails from friends and family!
    My shortcut – I get it on my mobile phone 🙂

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  4. Belle Liu avatar
    Belle Liu

    Not sure if you guys have tried this, it’s free!
    http://www.google.com/a/
    You can use your own domain name with your email address(es), e.g. name@mydomain.com, and you can create up to 50 email addresses and unlimited email lists (like aliases).
    My company is using it for corporate email and I can’t believe I could go back to hosting our own mail server or using other hosting company …
    To access gmail in company (where it is blocked), try this: http://pageonce.com/
    Or get an iPhone – with built-in support for Gmail. 🙂

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