Over the past couple of years, I’ve tried Outlook (2000 and 2002), Mozilla (the Netscape-type combined suite), Thunderbird, Incredimail, and just about everything else other than Eudora. However I now use Gmail’s web interface for allof my e-mail, since it’s just so much better than any POP3 client.
It isn’t just about the storage – after all if you are downloading via POP3 then you really have as much storage as the size of your hard disc. Instead, Gmail is presented wonderfully and has a very intuitive interface (like most Google stuff such as GDS and Picasa). Replies to the same message are sorted into ‘conversations’ so that instead of having to read through the endless nested ‘You Wrote’ copies of the previous e-mails, they are all available to read at the click of a button. This can be extremely useful when you’re conversing with someone via e-mail over a number of days and might not remember everything that was said.
The spam filter is decent enough, I’m not sure about the technicalities but it’s at least as good as the spam filter in Thunderbird (maybe not QUITE as good as POPFile) and importantly (since Spam messages automatically get deleted after a certain period of time) doesn’t seem to return any ‘false positives’ – which means you don’t have to keep wading through your Spam folder to see if any legit emails have been canned.
Instead of having e-mail moved into various folders (which Outlook and Thunderbird both try to do, but it never works properly), you can apply ‘labels’ to it (which can be done automatically by setting up a filter rule) – so ALL emails you receive will show up in your inbox, but for example if I want a list of all the emails I’ve received from my domain host, I can do so at the click of a button. This is a vast improvement over folders – you don’t have to go through a dozen or more of them just to read new emails, but you have the categorisation when you need it.
One of the more recent features (which finally convinced me to switch over to Gmail completely) is the ability to send e-mail with a non-Gmail ‘From’ field. Might sound like a spammer/phisher’s paradise, but in fact it sends a verification e-mail to the account which you must click to activate it. So, in other words (unless you’re on hotmail or something similar that will cut you off after a period of time) you can basically ignore your other email accounts altogether. People sending to those accounts will receive a reply from the one they wrote to (important for official stuff etc.) and you don’t have to put up with POP3 annoyances or whatever crap interface your old provider (haven’t Hotmail ever heard of CSS? oh yeah, that’s right, M$ likes to pretend it doesn’t exist) inflicts on you.
As a side-issue, strictly speaking Gmail is still invite-only, but there is no longer anything like a shortage of them – just about any Gmail user will now have 100 invites (per ACCOUNT) to give out – if you want one then let me know.