Gmail, What About It?

INTRICT Diaries - Week 1

Our first INTRICT class was just an orientation from the prof and an introduction to the Syllabus. Our prof, Mr. Oli Malabanan told us to make a Gmail account with the format "lastname.firstname" and to make a blogspot using the e-mail (Voila! Your looking at it!). This will serve as the communication medium between us students and Sir Oli. But why
Gmail? Why not Yahoo? Our prof answered that questions and more during our 2nd meeting last Wednesday.

So really, why Gmail? Is there anything else incredible in there rather than a built in chat and a humongous storage? By just listening to what the prof says about Gmail, and after that by refering to their guide site: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=5900&hl=en , I knew more stuff about Gmail that I didn't even know:

1. Gmail Search is just like Google Search and the only difference is that aside from searching for websites, you search for your e-mail messages. Aside from browsing through your e-mail messages, you just have to type any keyword that must be relating to the e-mail message your looking for and hit "search" and the next thing you know, you've found it!
2. Messages and the replies their related in (including replies to those replies and so on) are stacked into one group. These are called the Conversation View. They avoid users not to waste their time looking for a message that contains the reply of the contact whom received the message. As replies relating to one message increase, so does the Conversation Message. If anytime the user wants to view separately each message of the conversation, he just needs to go to the settings and expand it. Convenient right? Guess you don't need to get bothered about individual related messages flooding the whole list anymore
3. You don't need to setup Google Talk to use it. Gmail already has built-in chat application (like what I said earlier in this post). Heck! You can even reply your e-mail messages with chat! Just make sure they're online though... hahaha... All the chats are archived just like e-mail messages, making them also searchable and to avoid to lose any essential information... Nice! This really isn't like YM where current chats are only saved and get deleted upon logging off except to avoid that from happening, you have to save it manually for a permanent copy.
4. There's an alternative organizing method for e-mail messages rather than through folders, Gmail has thought of a new way to organize them, through labels. Users can label a message with even more than one label plus they can browse/search for the label their looking for. For example, the user can label his message as either work related, family related, or even both! Then they can also create filters for auto managing of incoming mail.
5. They have a digital organizer and calendar to keep you up to date to your scheduled activities. You can merge organizers with a contact to view the contents of their organizers along with yours. You can even choose which contact can view or which contact can modify your organizer. You can even make schedules and invite contacts so they can be involved. For example: Scheduled party or meeting.
6. At first I thought Google Earth was completely out of Gmail's way. But with Google Earth you can track the place you want to see or go or even track the place of your scheduled activity. You can also mark frequently visited sites in the world.
7. Gmail makes bookmarking favorite websites to your browsers a thing of yesterday. Cause now, Gmail can do that with their own bookmark program. Not only can you bookmark your favorite website, you can tag them to different related terms if you want. Plus, when you're in another pc, you cannot view the links that you saved on your browser bookmark but with Google Bookmarks, the bookmarks are still available for the user
   
8. Google Document is just like Microsoft Word. It has all features in it. You can even make 2 or more contacts edit your message at the same time.
9. High memory capacity (and it's getting higher). Unlike Yahoo!, Gmail has a higher memory capacity. For now, I think it's 1 GB
10. And last but not the least, It's FREE!!