When Google first introduced their gmail accounts it was difficult to get one and you had to have an invitation from an existing mail user (lucky I had a friend that worked at Google so I got in there reasonably early). These days however anyone can sign up for a free gmail account.

There are many benefits that I can see to having a gmail account and these are:

• Plenty of storage space. The space for your emails is constantly increasing so you are unlikely to have to delete any emails.
• Messages are held in conversations. If you receive messages replying to a thread then they are all held together so you don’t have to go off looking for previous messages in that thread.
• You can forward your email on. I guess a standard setting but you can forward your gmail on to anywhere you like.
• You can prioritise your mail. You can mark certain mail messages as a higher priority so that they will appear on the top of your gmail account.
• The search facility is so much better than Outlook. You can search with various criteria so that you can pretty much always find the message you are looking for – but then you would expect that from Google!
• The spam filter is pretty clever. I find that gmail pretty much catches all of my spam. There is one small issue though – it sometimes catches ‘ordinary’ email into the spam box so regular checking is a good idea.
• Gmail has it’s own online chat facility between you and other gmail users.