Clearly not content with a virtual monopoly over internet search engines (anyone remember Lycos?!), since 2004 those loveable techno-rogues over at Google have been devilishly engineering their full-scale assault on your lives through the increasingly essential Gmail (formerly Googlemail) vehicle. Cheerfully for us laymen, when Google set their mind to something, they usually make it worth our while, and this is no exception. Indeed, the last three places I’ve interned at – one national publication, one established media company and one web-journalism start-up – have asked immediately if I were the proud owner of a Gmail account. I wasn’t? Then sign up, sonny boy, cos you’ll need it.
But what’s the big deal? Features, features, features, basically. Integration, efficiency, streamlining – all those management speak words you never thought meant anything: in short, you can do more or less everything you might need to in an office-environment with the help of gmail. Old hotmail, this ain’t…
Threaded Conversations
Of course, in essence Gmail is fundamentally a means for you to send and receive emails. Useful, no? Doubly so, as emails are organised into conversation ‘threads’. Rather than deal with the usual linear static of back and forth response between two people, Gmail organises everything that stems from an original email into the same ‘thread’. For example, if you email two people and they both reply to you separately, these will appear in the same conversation thread. If you then forward one of their responses on, it will end up in the original thread. This might sound a little confusing, and can disorientate at first, but once mastered provides an extremely efficient way of amalgamating the various email exchanges which relate to an original topic/request/idea etc. Just be wary of the ‘reply to all’ button…
Nice touches like the ‘Starred’ function also make it easy to highlight important emails to view/respond to later, and creating your own named folders is a piece of cake in comparison to the rather cumbersome approach employed by rivals such as Hotmail.
Calendar
Not only can you organise your life without the need for a trusty (heavy) Filofax, but the Gmail calendar allows you to co-ordinate work and play commitments with others as desired. You can add fellow Gmail user’s calendars at their discretion so that their events show up on your own – a particularly useful tool in the work environment. For instance, whilst working for Spoonfed.co.uk, a calendar was set up for ‘Homepages’, allowing us to add articles we thought worthy of gracing the site entrance to the homepage rota for approval by our editor. Very efficient. Oh, and the whole system is glossily colour-coordinated to allow differentiation between different people’s calendars. Goody.
Google Documents
Another Gmail marker laid down for the peerless inter-communication allowed fellow Gmail users, the Google Documents function – again integrated into the basic Gmail client – allows users to share certain documents with one another. For instance, work rotas or guidelines (or pretty much anything important) can be created in Gmail and then shared with numerous fellow users at the click of a button. Based on settings designated by the original creator, these documents can then be altered and updated by those they have been shared with, fashioning a truly collaborative environment through the mail service. Infact, the Google whizzes are so on the ball that just last week the ability to view Microsoft Word documents (in addition to PDFs and Excel Spreadsheets, amongst others) has been added.
Buzz/Chat
These features highlight the social-media savvy outlook of Gmail. The chat is fairly self-explanatory, allowing users to add an address book of Gmail-using email contacts and then converse with them online, similar to Facebook chat (but far more reliable). The ‘Buzz’ feature is relatively new, and cleverly allows users to integrate their Twitter updates into the Gmail hub, which can then be seen by the above mentioned contacts without them ever needed to sign-in to (or sign-up for) Twitter. Alternatively, non-tweeters can ‘Buzz’ independently of Twitter to keep contacts posted on their minute to minute situations. Coupled with the fact that Gmail is mobile compatible and unsurprisingly links out to the web search in a simple click, the social media integration is yet another example of why you barely need leave the client to achieve your day-to-day web tasks. How did you ever do without it?
Spam Filter
This might not be a pressing concern at first, but long did it take your Hotmail account to open the floodgates and allow you to be bombarded with wave after wave of penis-enlargement and Nigerian banking email attacks? It’s annoying, and Hotmail’s spam filter, whilst improved, still allows too much to slip through the net. Not so with Gmail. Indeed, if anything it almost goes too far the other way, so be sure to occasionally check your ‘spam’ folder, but certainly rest assured you will no longer receive anything you don’t want. Nor will any mean-spirited malware find it’s way into your inbox, as executable files are blocked.
What email provider do you use? Do you have a different recommendation? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.
