For those of you who already use Gmail, you can stop reading immediately. For everyone else, Gmail is revolutionizing email with some very basic technologies.
Archiving: With over seven gigs of storage, you never have to delete emails, furthermore it works perfecting with Labels.
Labels: These color-coded tags works the same way as folders, only you can have more than one label on an email. This allows you to create sub-categories, or criss-cross organize anyway you see fit.
Conversations: Emails are listed as conversations. This means that if three people respond to the same email with you cc-ed, it shows up as one tab, with three parts. For those of you in large organizations, this means instead of finding 45 new emails from lunch break, they are seperated by topic into the six conversations.
Filters: Whether you want to automatically archive all emails from your mother, or have all your golfing buddies’s emails go into a special label (which then looks like an inbox on the sidebar), filters can save you time. It takes only a few seconds to set up, and can filter by email address, topic, keyword, or other methods.
Spam: Google has the best spam guard in the business. Furthormore, it holds spam emails in a special folder for 30 days, just in case your important contract in an email from an unknown friend’s address ended up there by mistake, you’ll have time to save it.
Apps: Google has some of the best integrated applications, including calendar, documents, and many more, which can save you lots of time, and are extremely easy to learn and implement.
The Takeaway:
While moving your email could seem like an intense process, it’s easy to sign-up for google, and takes less than a minute to set-up your email so that you can send and receive email from your old address. Furthermore, you can set it up so that you can send emails from countless addresses and domains. Test it out, you have little to lose, but it can save you enough time to make it worth the short time it takes to figure it out.
