Gmail

Why I am impressed with Google Mail:

1. It's got over 7.2GB of storage for every user (yes, you read that right 7.2 Gigabytes and the available space is constantly rising!). This means that you never have to delete another email message ever, you can just put them into the archive and retrieve them later.

2. The search function is brilliant, simple to use and very fast.

3. You can access your email anywhere you can get Google - you don't have to be logged on to a particular computer.

4. It automatically includes a calendar which is very useful for scheduling and again is easy to use and customize.

5. It automatically includes "Google reader" which is a one-stop site to which you have all your RSS feeds sent, so every time your favourite websites update, the RSS is sent to your Google reader. If you want to know more about RSS you can find a video I have posted about it on Twitter.

6. It's good at identifying spam. If you get regular spam from a particular source you can put in a 'filter' which tells the mail system to automatically delete it and to not send it to you in future.

7. 'Labels' are easy to set up so that every time you get a message from a defined source (say, a particular friend or organisation) you can get the software to mark it with a label so that you can easily find it visually by scanning for that label (and you can make the colour of the label characteristic) or you can search only for that label and it will pull up only those messages with that label.

8. You can get any other email account you have to bounce messages to your gmail account and vice versa. This is very useful when you are crossing over from one main email account to gmail - it ensures that messages don't get forgotten in your old email box (a bit like redirecting the post when you move house).

9. You can 'star' any important messages with the click of a button, again for ease of finding or searching it.

10. You can add features to it via Google Labs which allow you to put in nifty little add-on widgets.

If you sign up for a free Google account you get gmail included and you're off and running.

Here's where you can sign up:

https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount