GMAIL: Have your heard of it? Opinions pls.

scouselass

I am receiving lots of SPAM and I want to block it. Another moneysaver on this site recommends GMAIL by Google, and says this has got rid of all his SPAM. With it being by Google I'm assuming it must be good, but when I check out the internet there is very little about GMAIL, and some of it is negative as it suggests it is intrusive because it intercepts all of your emails, in order to screen them.

Have any other members used GMAIL and if so pls offer an informed opinion?

shrek101

I use gmail its great its very much like hotmail. You can only get gmail via refferals. If you PM me your email address I send refferal via gmail.

scouselass

I have the referral, but I am weighing up whether to use it, and really to get some feedback on GMAIL and its benefits etc.

elvis_bloggs

Gmail is great, I have 40 accounts, I use them when ordering freebies...what I find good about having lots of them is I can forward all the mail from them into one account, namely my outlook express account, so I don't have to go round them all to see what mail I have.

Howells

Check out [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]www.google-watch.org [/font]which shows how creepy and secretive Google can be.

I find Yahoo email as an alternative to be very effective against spam and it too has 1Gb storage.

Basically, because they are free, try them and see if you like it. You can easily throw it away it if you don't like it.

Rex_Mundi

The advantages of gmail are the size of storage (2GB) and the fact that it's free.

The disadvantage is the fact that google use software to 'read' all your emails so they can target you with spam that is within your area of interest.

It depends how you feel about your privacy and allowing a company (google) to scan all your emails. Personally I don't like the idea of this, so I won't have a gmail address even though I keep getting invites from friends. Yahoo are also free and offer 1GB of storage which is more than enough for 99% of people. Yahoo don't scan all your emails as well.

elvis_bloggs

People on the internet end up with spam sooner or later from umpteen various ways, what difference if gmail happens to send spam, incidentaly I don't really think I have been targetted with spam that has originated from gmail, no spam gets forwarded to my other e-mail address because my gmail account filters it out.

Ickle_Steve

Rex_Mundi wrote:

The disadvantage is the fact that google use software to 'read' all your emails so they can target you with spam that is within your area of interest.

I don't believe they use the information to send out spam. Isn't it so they can place relevant adverts down the side of the page.

spook

Be warned - I've found that Gmail's spam filter has sometimes filtered out genuine mail (eg from Ebay). I check the spam box every couple of weeks to make sure.

You can't disable the spam filter, and spam messages are deleted after 30 days, so you could theoretically miss important e-mails. However, it does learn pretty effectively if you mark messages as 'not spam'.

Interestingly, I have two Gmail addresses - one is my name and the other is a more 'random' username. I've been just as careful with both, but the 'random' one gets almost no spam mails, while the guessable one gets 20-30 per day.

I think the best thing about Gmail is the interface - it's very nice. I like the 'archive and search' approach to mail, it's much less hassle than using folders and just as easy to find old messages.

Gmail don't send out spam, they just search for keywords in your mail and display 'appropriate' advertising. Don't use it for personal mail if you're not comfortable with them doing this.

Spook

joshm_2

I have been using GMail for some time now and feel that I would never look back at a "normal" mail client.

Like someone already says, the storage is great, the search facility is excellent, and the novel way of storing email by conversation rather than individually is excellent. By this I mean, all emails are automatically sorted by email subject and displayed this way to form "conversations".

Another big plus for me is that GMail saves copies of sent mail automatically, unlike Hotmail (I think it's terrible that Hotmail does this).

I have had no problems with the Spam filter but I guess you always run the risk with them and need to check - it's easy to check.

I'm not sure about the accuracy of the comment suggeting that you can use Google to search people's GMail accounts. The initial fuss when launched was that Google would display small context-sensitive adverts alongside a mail. So if your email was about computers then you may get some computer adverts displayed. But these are not intrusive.

I have never had a problem with reliability and the sign-in page is free of clutter.

As you can tell, I'm a fan and would recommend GMail to anyone. In the past I have held accounts with Hotmail and XMsg and Totalise and GMail is superior in most ways to all of them.

The only issue I have with GMail at the moment is that there is no direct link to your address book if you want to forward a mail to someone or add someone to a reply - you have to start typing their name(s) and then select the appropriate address(es) that automatically appear(s) using GMail's auto-completion feature, which is linked to your address book. Minor niggle, probably poorly explained!

Hope that helps,

JoshM

Rex_Mundi

So while you are reading your emails, you also have adverts displayed that are selected because of info they have picked up while reading through your post.

I know it's not a classic case of spam, but it's pretty much the same thing IMO.