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My Favorite Gmail Features

I've been a Yahoo Mail user since it was launched. Never really liked Hotmail, although I still maintain an address for instant messaging purposes. I liked Yahoo because it provided a simple interface, which unfortunately got more and more bloated with advertisements. The recently launched Yahoo Beta, sports an Add banner, to the right which takes up nearly 20% of the screen, and then there are yet more adds in the toolbar to the left, which take another 15%!

Frustated with Adds, I started using Gmail, and the more I used it the more I liked it! Gmail has a simple interface, and beneath this interface lies a very powerful backend, which enables users to manage their mail very effectively.

In this post I will cover some of my favorite Gmail features, which in my opinion set Gmail apart form the rest of the crowd.

Mail Threading
If you are a member of a high-traffic mailing list, and you don't have this feature, than you will find it very difficult to follow discussions in the mail. Gmail's threading capabilities sort mails with matching topics together which allows you to follow a discussion in a mailing list. It is a hugely useful feature for me personally, for example, being a member of the Linux kernel mailing list(LKML)(which gets 300+ mails per day), if I send a mail out to it, I may received 10+ replies. It would be very difficult to follow the discussion if the mails were not threaded together. This feature also keeps my inbox 'clean', for example a discussion about a patch to the kernel, may generate 30+ mails, however it may be completely irrelevant to my work, thus with threading I simply select the top most mail, and all mails in the thread are deleted! Had I subscribed to yahoo or hotmail with LKML, I would have to select all those messages which I don't want to read manually!

Tag Filters
Filtering mail is nothing new, Yahoo and Hotmail have been providing the ability to filter messages and route them to specific folders. However Gmail does not allow you to route a mail to specific folder, but tag them so that they are identifiable, in one glance, in the inbox. Tags in my opinion are better than routing mails to folders, because for example, typically users create folders to differentiate between different categories of mails: friends, family, office etc... And with folder based filters each mail ends up in a specific folder. But what happens if a mail overlaps two categories, that is its when its both business related and from a family member? Gmail allows you to attach different tags to a single mail. In the lower left corner you can see a listing of all defined tags, and how many emails you have which match the tags specification, clicking on the tag brings up all the mails relevant to the tag, and you can start dispensing/replying to the most important mails.

Putting a lid on Spam
Spam filters in recent days have gotten increasingly effective. Not long ago I used to get hundreds of mails in my inbox.
Gmail allows you to create custom aliases, which are an effective way to deal with spam. When giving out your email address to a company, who may latter end up giving your email address to scrupulous spammers, you can give your email + some custom alias for example:
xxx@gmail might be your email address then the custom aliases would be xxx+custom.alias@gmail.com.
You can then set a filter to star the following mail, highlighting in the mail box, or sending them to trash etc..

Messages in Atom/RSS
In Gmail it is possible to use any aggregator to subscribe to an Atom or RSS feed of your incoming mails! This is not a hugely beneficial feature for my, because of the 300+ mails I receive from LKML, but many of my friends have raved about it, saying that they can be instantly notified when a mail arrives.

Searching Mail
Searching mail has been one of the oldest features around, so what does Gmail offer which others don't?Its fine-grained searches! Yahoo Mail simply supports searching of mails by text-matching, you enter the text, and it tries to find that text in all mails in the folders(inbox, sent etc.). Gmail allows you to refine your searches to narrowing done to sender, to, subject etc. Again this has huge productivity benefits if I'm looking for a specific reply in a thread. Lets say I want to know what Linus Torvalds has to say about this patch? I simply put the subject, and then set the from field, viola! There's the mail!

Tons of Space
I don't really know why Gmail offers an increasing mail box size, do they really offer that much, knowing that most people wont even use 500MB! Will they ever stop there mail box size count? But one thing is for sure: Gmail has made mailbox size a non-issue. We were using 4MB mailbox sizes when Gmail came around to offer 1 GB!!

Google since its launch has made a major impact on the way we use the Internet! Google Search is the default search engine, and provided an Add free, technically superior search engine to existing search engines. Gmail on the same lines, offers a powerful webbased mail management solution which has revolutionized the field, by introducing an interactive interface, tons of space, and some advanced features, some of which have been documented here.

Read the other of my favorite Gmail features