Love ya Google - Gmail!

Topic: Gmail|Level: Beginner|Type: Informational

Google is taking over the World! ..Wide Web.

Google is a pretty amazing company, and put out some pretty amazing products. And one of the really great things about all their services is they are all seamlessly integrated to their other services where appropriate. And once you create your Google account, you can easily activate any of their Services you wish to use without creating a new account for each... One Google account does it all!

The topic of this blog is their email service, Gmail. Like most web-based email services (like Yahoo and Hotmail), Gmail is free to sign up for, accessed right from your web browser, and it's an email service. But that's about where the similarity ends. Gmail is by far the most impressive email service I've used so just go ahead and sign up for a gmail account now, you'll love it. But if ya really want some more info on it first here ya go...

Auto-Saved Drafts
As you type messages they are continually automatically saved to your Drafts group incase your webbrowser crashes or any other undesirable events.

POP3 Integration
If you have other email accounts with POP3 access available, you can set them up to have Gmail pull the messages from them as well.

Forwarding & POP/IMAP
You can also have other POP/IMAP email clients (Outlook, etc) pull messages from your Gmail account. Although I prefer to not to run those bulky applications if not necessary, that option is available.

Superior Contacts List
Gmail provides a great interface for maintaining your Contact List. You can provide multiple addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, notes, and even pictures for your contacts. And with the ever growing array of Google intergrated products and services your Google Contact List can be used in several other systems (a couple of which I'll explain shortly).

Conversations
Gmail uses a pretty smart system that based on the sender and subject of an email it keeps a string of emails grouped together as a "Conversation". You send an email to somebody and when they Reply back to it it comes back to your Inbox and shows the previous messages in the conversation more like a Chat interface than just a bunch of deeper and deeper indentations in mess of text at the bottom of the message.

Chat
Google Talk is a Instant Messaging chat service that is built right in to Gmail. You can actually Chat with other Gmail or AIM users (and I've read they're working on integrating other IM services) right from your Email window and Chat converstaions are even kept in your email as another mail message or Conversation.

Labels (not Folders)
Most other email services allow you to use Folders to sort your messages. But the problem with Folders is you 'move' your emails in to them and they exist only within that Folder. Gmail uses Labels. With Labels you can assign multiple Labels to a given message and still find your messages by clicking on the Label you want to look through and it will show you all messages with that Label assigned to it. But you also have special Labels like the "Inbox" label. A message tagged with "Inbox" of course shows in your Inbox, and simply removing that Label "Archives" the message to your "All Mail" group.

Filters
Gmail provides a very sophisticated and yet very simple interface for creating Filters. Filters allow you to do various things with your mail messages as you receive them (or at any time you manually want to run them). With Filters you can do things like automatically assign your "Friends & Family" Label to messages if they are received from your indicated senders. You can automatically Archive (skip the Inbox) messages if they come from other senders. Or even automatically delete messages from others.

** Labs **
Labs is where the real cool stuff in Gmail comes in. Labs are small applets that you can selectively choose which ones you want enabled in your email and they can do all sorts of really cool stuff. You really just have to look through the list of available Labs to see which ones look good to you but some of the ones I use are...
- "YouTube previous in mail" When you receive an email with a link to a YouTube video this puts the video right in the mail message.
- "Pictures In Chat" If you use Google Talk this uses the Picture for your Contacts right in the Chat window
- "Custom Label Colors" Gmail Lables have a handful of Color styles you can assign to your Labels, but this one lets you create your own custom Label Colors
- "Multiple Inboxes" This shows multiple panels of Inboxes in your main Inbox screen. These additional Inboxes can be custom Labels, Starred Messages, or various other configurable options
- "Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat" This one's really cool! If you have a Mobile phone number set up for a Contact you can click their name from your Chat list and select the Send SMS option. You'll then get a regular Google Talk chat window up but messages you send to that person are delivered to their cell phone as SMS messages. If they reply to you from their phone the message comes right back to your Chat window.
- "Google Calendar Gadget" If you use Google Calendar (another great Google service that will probably be a topic for a later blow) this will show your Calendar in a side panel in your mail interface.