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While reading Paul Buchheit, the Man Behind GMail on Google Operating System and hearing how, as you do these days with new technology, that GMail has revolutionized mail. Now my first impulse was to say, “rubbish, it’s not that good!” but then I realized how much I’ve come to rely on GMail for my email, much more than I did when I first got the internet and my first “hotmail” account.

When I had my hotmail account it was to check the odd email when the service was functional and to use MSN Messenger (Live Messenger). Email wasn’t a big way of communication back then. If you wanted to get a hold of someone in a decent time you picked up the damn phone and gave them a call. Nowadays if you need to get someone you can email them and expect a reply in a few hours, not days.

When this change started to happen hotmail didn’t cope anymore. It was slow, boring, hard to see when you’d replied and with what and you were forever deleting emails since you had a terrible 4mb storage capacity. So when I first heard about GMail, with its 1GB of storage (Now almost 3GB) I didn’t think it would revolutionize email but I was willing to give it a shot, being the geek I am. I’ve never looked back. I have multiple GMail addresses and multiple other emails that all direct to my GMail account. I couldn’t live without it. The sleek interface, massive amount of storage, labels and especially the conversation view are all features I use daily. I find it easy to find items in my mail with the built in search, whereas even with the also wonderful (for what it does) thunderbird, searching is limited to sender and subject only. I even added search my gmail into firefox’s search engine so I can search straight from my browser. I love it.

So if your still stuck using hotmail, or some equally boring email client/webmail/whatever. Get a GMail account or find out more and if you don’t fancy changing to a @gmail.com (googlemail.com in the uk, I was fortunate to get an @gmail.com before the lawsuit) then redirect your email to GMail or set GMail to get it via POP3 to keep your old address (GMail can also send email’s from your current addresses).

You won’t regret it.