The "Google mail" (Gmail) webmail service

As with the other webmail services Google Mail offers a huge amount of online storage space for your messages currently 2755.296506MB at the time of writing! The main difference with Google Mail is the way in which the mail is organised.

Google Mail organises the mail into conversation, so that any reply is indexed below the original message.

In addition, messaged can be labelled using user defined names into certain groups. For example, messages from a user’s bank can be labelled by the user as “bank” and then messages can be filtered to these predefined labels.

On top of all of this the famous Google search engine can be used to find any message effectively throughout your entire mail folder.

This type of indexing removes the requirement for folders, effectively simplifying the webmail experience (and concurrently reducing load times for your email which is useful if you only have access to a slow connection).

Google Mail also implements a good quality spam filter, which immediately identified any unsolicited email and directs them to the spam folder, for user checking. The system then deletes any spam messages after 30 days in the spam folder. Users can also choose to delete spam manually.

The only drawback with the Google Mail account is the attachment file size, which like other webmail providers is limited to 10MB, which seems a bit small in relation to the size of the inbox.

The way in which Google “pays” for this service is through the Google Adsense network, which scans the page content for each email and posts relevant links to the page, which when clicked provide Google with revenue.

The use of Google Mail has also been slightly diversified by some enterprising software engineers in the form of programs that utilise the space on Google Mail accounts for online webspace/storage. These programs allow the upload of files to a Google Mail account (generally limited to the 10MB attachment filesize).

For further information on these programs go to:

Gmail Drive

http://viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm (Windows)

Vombato Mail Drive

http://www.vombato.com/ (Windows)

Roamdrive

http://www.roamdrive.com/ (Windows)

GmailFS(PGD)

http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html (Linux)

gDisk

http://gdisk.sourceforge.net/ (Max OSX)

PhpGmailDrive (PGD)

http://pgd.sourceforge.net/ (Web based PHP script)

Xmailharddrive

https://www.xmailharddrive.com/ (Web based)