2005-02-21
Is G-Mail good?
Got the following question from my Dad, and figured a reply was worth posting here.
Tom
As I recall you were beta tester for G-Mail. Is it any good? Should Mom and I sign up? IF it is free, how do they make money?
I got an invitation from them this weekend.
Dad
I've had an account on Google's g-mail since their early beta testing last year. To be honest I haven't used it very much, as it's yet another place I have to check for new messages.
What I have seen doesn't seem that particularly better than Yahoo's free mail service. Google does have a larger mail box, 1000 MB vs Yahoo's 250 MB. But Yahoo has more integrated services, like calendar, groups, virus scanning, etc.
At this point I wouldn't make any particular recommendation one way or the other for Yahoo vs G-mail, unless you're trying to protect a particular user name.
These days I'm using Mozilla's Thunderbird, for most of my e-mail and Yahoo as a secondary.
If I decide at some point that I don't like Mozilla's Thunderbird, I may direct more of my soot-n-smoke.com e-mail to g-mail and give it a better testing.
As for how does g-mail make money, the short term answer is they sold a whole bunch of stock last year. The longer term answer is that they will probably sell search keyed advertising when you search your e-mail. I suspect that they'll also offer various premium services much like yahoo does.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License.
