I’m searching for a web-based email solution. I’m returning to school and about to divide my digital life between a laptop and a desktop and I want an easy, fast email system, that keeps my archives all in one place, no matter how or where I log into it.
Google is doing really well right now, but do you have a sense of
Gmail’s longevity? Do you think it will become a solid system and
endure the way Hotmail has?
Sometimes when I register for something on the INTARweb I’m told I
cannot register using a Hotmail account but must have an email address
from, I dunno, a recognised ISP, or something. Do you think this is
likely to become a problem with Gmail also?
Are there any Gmail restrictions you can think of that I might need to know?
I don’t think Gmail is going anywhere. If anything, I think it’s more likely to be around in a decade than hotmail and the like.
2)I’ve never had a problem registering for stuff with my gmail account, and I use it for practically everything.
3)There’s a reasonably low limit on the size of attachments (10mb, I think.) Other than that I can’t think of anything.
There’s one hidden pro/con with gmail of which not a lot of folks are aware: When you use the web interface, it reports the originating email address for the email as Gmail itself, not your home computer.
So, what that means is that people who spam using the web interface (a difficult proposition to do on any real scale) end up getting the entire service in trouble when the first person complains to, say, Spamcop.
On the plus side, if you’re sending email, and you don’t want anyone to know who are where you are, Gmail’s web interface is really the best out there.
The caveat here is that it will expose your originating IP address, just like any other free email host, if you use the POP access to send your email.
You are using their smtp server, so it rightly shows that, almost every single web mail interface does this. The only major thing any of them do is some still include the originating ip, others don’t. Gmail doesn’t.
But that does not mean it will get listed in spam lists. You can see here one of their ips at least isn’t (they all have multiple ips). Spamcop in particular uses a scale to list spammers, it compares # of non-spam emails vs #of spam emails - so using a large service tends to work well since they have so many non-spam emails.
And it does not expose your ip if you use pop access, pop is for picking up mail, not sending it. Overall it just follows normal smtp rules.
To the original question. Out of all the big boys these days, hands down gmail is doing it best.
Gmail is going to be around for a long, long, long time.
Frankly unless you have serious reservations about privacy issues I don’t see one can’t use it for main email. You can still grab everything via SMTP anyway so it doesn’t even have to stay online.
It all comes down to getting what you pay for. If you rely on free email, and something goes wrong, good luck getting it resolved. The chance of that happening are probably pretty slim, and if you don’t do any business or serious mail stuff, you probably won’t care.
I pay $20 a year for mine, through www.fastmail.fm. I am very happy with them, and if something goes wrong, they are on the other end to fix it. It’s a pretty small amount per year for peace of mind. They offer webmail, IMAP, the works.
I use gmail for some stuff too, it’s great. Especially with Firefox. :)
