Gmail makes life so much easier.  Its simplicity and features really make it stand out from other email programs.

The best thing about Gmail is the spam control.  If you find yourself sifting through spam, you must switch to Gmail.  Very few unwanted emails make it through my spam filter and there is no need to check for important emails in the spam folder.

Switching to Gmail is easy.  In most cases you just enter the email and password of your current account and Gmail will import emails from that account every hour.  If every hour is too seldom for you, set up your old email account to forward all of the emails to Gmail.

Once your set up your Gmail account, the features are endless.  Here are some of the more useful features:

• Over 7GB of free storage: This blows the doors off of all other email web apps. If 7GB isn’t enough, buy 20GB for $5 a year, 80GB for $20 a year. There are other plans if you want more storage still.
• Offline mail.  Enable Gmail to be used offline.  It downloads messages, attachments and contacts and you can change the settings if you don’t want it to take up too much of your disk space. If you aren’t always on the internet, this is a very useful feature.   It will also run much faster if you have a slow internet connection.
• Text, Voice and Video Chat.  If you have a contact that has Gmail as well and is online, you can use this feature.
• Canned Responses.  If you get emails with similar questions often, you can save your response and quickly select and paste it into your message.
• Forgotten Attachment Detector.  If you use the word, “attach” or “attached” in your message and haven’t attached a file when you click “send”, a warning will appear asking if you intended to attach a file.
• Undo Send.  This holds the message for a specified period of time after you click send.  If you realize that you forgot something, you can click “undo”.
• There are many, many more features such as adding Google Gadgets to your page, and pretty much every feature you find in other email programs such as vacation reply, folders, message search and more.  Chances are that you will find all of these features easier to use and organize with Gmail.

Opening a Gmail account makes other web apps available to you.  Just a few of these are Google Calendar, Google Docs, iGoogle, Google Voice, Blogger, Page Creator, Picasa and more.  Google isn’t just the king of search; it’s quickly becoming the king of software as well.