An Invitation to Gmail

These days, what would people do without e-mail? I rely on e-mail the most to correspond and communicate with friends, family and work. In fact, while I was recently away at basic military training for a couple of months, I was going through some serious technology, and especially e-mail withdrawals not being able to get near a computer. I can’t count on one hand the number of e-mail addresses I own. I have at least five for personal use and two for work.

Out of all my e-mail accounts, my favorite is Gmail, a free service offered by Google, the popular Internet search engine. Gmail was launched in 2004 and is offered to users by invitation only. I got mine thanks to my brother, who sent me an invite after I did some serious begging.

The web-based Gmail offers me a whopping 1GB of storage space! This gives me ample room for my messages and attachments without worrying about filling up my computer’s hard drive. That leaves me plenty of room for all of my important stuff such as music files, digital pictures and games.

With Gmail, you don’t get any of those large, annoying pop-up ads. You’ll still see some text ads, but they’re small and unobtrusive. Gmail automatically scans the message text and displays ads that are relevant to the message’s content.

For those of you a little creeped-out about your e-mail content being scanned by Gmail, there’s always the other two popular free e-mail providers: MSN’s Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. Both offer 250MB of storage, and you don’t need an invite to join either. Both services have fairly decent spam filtering and virus scanning, but you still need to put up with the obtrusive ads. If you don’t need a whole lot of space, or can’t seem to get your hands on a Gmail invite, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail are more than sufficient.

Gmail is by far the best free e-mail service you can get out there. Once invited, your new account will give you five invites, and after being a Gmail member for awhile, you’ll receive more and more invites over time. That will make your Gmail-wanting friends very happy or you can sell them on e-Bay. Yes, e-Bay. G-mail is so popular that people are actually buying and selling invites on e-Bay.

E-mail me if you want an invite to Gmail, but you better hurry because I only a few left.