More reasons to love Gmail

Gmail's claim to fame at its point of inception was the large storage (one Gigabyte) it offered its users. It prompted other major email providers to announce their higher storage services and quit bugging their users to pay money for more room. Remember the old 2-Meg Hotmail limit?

I had blogged about all this previously, and as compelling as the move to Gmail was, once Hotmail came through with their 250-Meg storage, I decided to stay with it, although I utilize my Gmail account occasionally.

But now I am finding that competition between providers has created a real boon for the end-user and so far Gmail is ahead of the pact. One of the greatest features offered by Gmail is the ability to forward incoming emails to another account. This is truly a test of confidence on the part of Gmail, as users could simply forward their emails to Hotmail or Yahoo! if they so choose. The other feature is pop-3 email download. This allows those of us with email clients, such as Outlook, to download incoming emails to our local boxes. It would also allow Hotmail and Yahoo users to pull in the Gmail messages as well, if they choose to do so.

The forwarding and pop-3 features would have never been offered by the other guys as they'd fear users skipping their email sites and read their messages elsewhere. Gmail should be applauded for offering these services so fearlessly, allowing their users to interact with their services on their own terms.

Two other Gmail features that are also useful are Gmail Notifier (the tray icon that notifies user of new messages) and the RSS/XML feed of newly arrived messages. Many people utilize RSS readers today, so the RSS/XML feed comes in real handy.

Gmail has sure made it tough to go with any other provider, not necessarily because of technical advantages, but more due to a better understanding of their user base.