Every time I think of a new reason, I'll blog it here.
Well, my blog did the trick. I (and a friend) now have GMail accounts to play with, courtesy of some very generous individuals, EC and KH. Thank you both very much.
My twenty-fifth reason talks about searching. Both Outlook and Hotmail tried but failed to implement useful searches. Outlook had good intentions offering the ability to search with multiple parameters on multiple fields but after a few thousand messages in my account, it is deathly slow and hangs the program. Hotmail on the other hand didn't try that hard at all, with their extremely limited Find feature which only allows searching on either the entire message or the From/To/Subject fields. Personally I want something like what Windows Explorer does, searching on key fields, with date ranges, and thankfully GMail provides this ability, with the added bonus of being able to exclude keywords. With GMail, my searching woes would be over.
Reason twenty-four talks about preview. Outlook has the preview pane but of course Hotmail does not. The downside with Outlook's preview window is that it has to open the email in order to present the preview. When using Hotmail, it is a waste of my time when I see new messages in my account that may or may not be valid email because either the sender or subject are not immediately familiar to me, and I have to actually open it and read it to find out, before I realize it is spam and delete it. GMail offers a handy snippet of text from the message body alongside the email subject, so this would help me quickly identify and eradicate the garbage from my account.
My twenty-third reason is related to flagging. This is another one of those features that takes me back to the days of Lotus Notes email when I could flag messages with icons for whatever reason I required. No surprise that Hotmail doesn't have this feature, and neither does MS Outlook so I'm stuck when I have 20 email messages all with the same sender, subject and date but want to mark one as more important than the others to avoid opening each one to check if it is the message I wanted. GMail allows messages to be marked with a star, so this would solve my needle in a haystack scenario.
Reason twenty-two discusses filters. I use Microsoft Exchange for my work email and my favourite feature is the Rules Wizard. Without it, I'd be forced to be constantly moving messages manually. Of course Hotmail doesn't have this nice tool. GMail does have it, in the ability to apply labels via filters on incoming mail.
Reason twenty-one is related to money. Plain and simple, I have no intentions of paying to use any email account unrelated to my ISP. Hotmail taunts me with automatic messages advertising extra features for, if I remember correctly, $19.95US/yr. As if I am going to pay Microsoft to bombard me with annoying flashing banner ads all over the screen! All of those extra features are available as standard with GMail, for free.
Reason twenty discusses attachments. In the past I have attempted to send zip files to people, usually containing photographs, but I've always had to send them spanned across multiple messages since Hotmail won't allow attachments larger than 2MB. GMail allows up to 10MB which would be more than sufficient for any of the files that I ever need to send.
My nineteenth reason takes me back to the old days when I used to have a corporate Lotus Notes email account. Overall I found it bloated but there is the ability to create views of emails, which I personally found more useful than folders. Sometimes I have an email that logically belongs under two traditional Hotmail folders but obviously I can only put it in one, or make a physical copy of the email to place in the second folder. That's a waste of space. GMail offers the ability to "label" messages, which would nicely emulate the Lotus Notes functionality of views.
Reason eighteen covers e-billing. I still receive my local service bills via snail mail and I would like to convert to e-billing. After a few months of archived bills, this would fill up any normal email account but if I had a GMail account, I would be able to keep all of the emails for easy reference and comparisons.
My seventeenth reason is a simple one. In the last year or so, I have encountered more and more websites that refuse registrations from so-called anonymous email providers such as hotmail.com and yahoo.com. With GMail, I could register on those websites, at least until those websites decide to lump GMail into the same category, which hopefully would not happen.
My sixteenth reason is quite a geeky one. Sometimes I have a page of code or a document that I would like to work on at home and trying to find a floppy these days is like a treasure hunt. I'm certainly not going to waste a CD to burn one file that may only be a 100kb in size - even if I had access to a CD burner at my workplace, which I don't. With GMail, I wouldn't have to rush to get the file out of my email account to free up the space when I got home.
Reason fifteen relates to website registrations. If I had to guess, I probably register on maybe half a dozen websites per month. I try to use the same username and password on every site but sometimes it has already been taken or registration requirements are somewhat different and I'm forced to use an unusual username. That many registrations adds up relatively quickly and I just can't afford the space to keep all of the confirmation emails containing my login credentials in my current email account. If I had GMail, I'd be able to keep each and every one for fast reference when I need them.
Reason fourteen relates to long email conversations. Sometimes I partake in long email conversations with friends (instead of using MSN Messenger) but after a few messages, it would be nice to be able to look back at the entire conversation as though it were a chatlog. Apparently GMail offers this feature, which would make these longwinded threads easy to read, all visible at once.
My thirteenth reason is related to mailing lists. It has been several years since I last subscribed to any mailing lists for the simple reason that they fill up my email account way too fast. I wouldn't have this annoyance with GMail.
Reason twelve came to mind after I thought of reason eleven. After applying for a job opening and including my email contact information, there have been many times when I have worried that perhaps the employer attempted to contact me via email only to have their message bounce due to too much unwanted junk in my account. With GMail's size allowance, I would never have to worry about this happening.
My eleventh reason is related to my resume. Over the years I have ended up with copies on just about every pc and laptop I have worked on, along with multiple copies of cover letters. Obviously after trying to keep all of the email applications with attachments that I have ever sent for job openings, I quickly realized none of my accounts were large enough to accomodate them. With GMail's extraordinary size limit, I would easily be able to keep all of these important emails and be able to quickly find them when I need them for a template for a new version of my resume and cover letter to be customized for the intended employer.
My tenth reason deals with spam filters. I have huge issues with how Hotmail filters spam. I have tried to confiure my filters and blocks to be effective but spammers are still getting through day after day. For example, if I have a friend with a @yahoo.com account and I only want that one yahoo.com address to be allowed into my account, there is no way to block all of the millions of possible variations of @yahoo.com. The only way to do it is to block the entire domain, which would also block my friend's email. In my opinion, their filtering/blocking is useless. I've read that GMail is serious about blocking spam and I dearly hope that is true, because I am so tired of receiving ads for mortgages, pills and porn that do nothing but fill up my account.
Reason nine has to do with reliability. It seems that over the last few months, Hotmail servers are becoming less and less reliable. It is very frustrating to encounter "Server too busy" messages when I try to access my email, sometimes for hours. I have never encountered downtime on Google or Google groups, so I would expect to see the same server uptime with GMail.
Reason eight concerns Outlook Express. Currently every month or so I have to fire up Outlook Express which is connected to my Hotmail account, and move all of my online mail offline. While it does help to be able to do this, and clear up room in my email account, it then makes it impossible for me to access any messages I need to if I am not at home. The GMail feature of never having to delete an email would be extremely useful and make offline storage irrelevant.
My seventh reason may sound slightly odd to some but I would like to assist in the beta testing. I have a knack for finding bugs in software and have previously found bugs in Hotmail but Hotmail didn't care when I contacted them with the details. I would hope that Google development actually welcomes constructive criticism.
Reason six is that I would like to share invites with a few friends who would also like GMail accounts.
Reason five is that I need an easy way to transport my massive PST files from work to home. They are filling up my pc and I have lots of room at home.
Reason number four is that I would like to keep my scanned artwork in one reliable location that I can access from anywhere.
My next reason is that I have a few hundred songs I listen to all of the time in my car on CD. I would like to burn these and have them available wherever I go in order to listen to them without having to waste CDs.
My second reason for desperately seeking a GMail account is that I have a few friends that love to send me jokes. I dearly love these friends but it is very frustrating to login to my current little email account to find my account is full, 100% full, blocking any other email.
Here's the first way I would use my GMail account. I would use it as a miniGoogle. What's that you ask? Well, I seem to collect urls like some people collect stamps and I have them everywhere - floppies, cds, work computer, home computer. I want them in one place I can access from everywhere.
My first idea is to email Blogger support to ask if anyone has a GMail invite to share. Hey, it's worth a try!
Sounds like my first step. Anyway, I'll be honest. I'm going to try blogging many times in the next couple of days because I really want a GMail account. I have so much junk mail and when friends try to send me a funny joke once in a while, it ends up filling up my little Hotmail account.
