Google’s Gmail development team appears to have been in overdrive over the past few months with a host of new features and  an improved application for mobile phones

For me, Gmail has become the start page and hub for all my web activity thanks to the excellent integration it offers with other services and email accounts.

I get the impression anecdotally, from comments and stories on Friendfeed and elsewhere, that more and more people are making Gmail central to their online activities.

Research data suggests Gmail is making serious inroads on the older and bigger players, Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail. ComScore has Gmail users growing at more than 40 per cent a year, with Yahoo virtually flat and Hotmail usage in decline.

The breakthrough for me came two months ago when the IT department agreed to start forwarding all my FT emails to Gmail.

This finally freed me from the frustrations of Lotus Notes - IBM’s email program ran exceedingly slowly on our network, I was only allowed a 500Mb storage limit and searching across multiple archived databases of emails was impossible.

Now, with Gmail, I have personal and work emails all in one place, with lightning response times in comparison, unlimited free storage and I can instantly find, to give one example, all the research reports, PR company pitches, newsletters and experts on 3-D technology sent to me by email.

I have also been able to reduce my Inbox, from more than 10,000 emails and growing, to less than a 100 at the start of the day and zero by the end of it.

If you suffer from the same kind of information overload and need a miracle diet, I recommend Gmail and three key features that help shed those emails:

1. Labels and filters - this had the most dramatic effect for me. Take a daily newsletter, for example. Once opened, click on “filter messages like this” and Gmail lets you tick boxes for how you want it to be handled. In this case, I would choose for it to skip the Inbox in future and be labelled “Newsletters”, effectively placing it in a folder of that name. Gmail also asks if you want to apply the filter to previous emails it has found with the same criteria, allowing you to clear scores of them all at once from your Inbox. Setting up these filters can become addictive as you watch the Inbox “unread” count rapidly go down. You may even get the urge to go on an “unsubscribe” purge of all those newsletters you never read.

2. Archive - I selected and archived all emails more than three months old. This removes them from the Inbox, but they can still be found under “All Mail”, their labels or through any search.

3. Conversations - Gmail groups the back and forth of emails between people as conversations, so 12 messages exchanged on a subject only occupy one line of your Inbox instead of a dozen mixed in with all your other emails.

There are many other productivity aids in Gmail. I like the canned responses that allow you to insert pro-forma replies to common requests. There are also stars and other symbols to highlight important emails and the spam filter is very effective.

Playing with “Settings” and Google Labs features, I have added Google Docs, Calendar, Tasks and a Twitter window to my Gmail page, as well as swapped between different themes such as the Ninja one pictured above (click it to enlarge). I have video and voice chat, instant messaging and SMS texting too. PDFs can be viewed within Gmail and emails can be converted straight to documents.

Of course, Gmail is not for everyone, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail have been improved, if less rapidly, and they have some advantages over Google’s product.

Gmail does not have preview panes nor drag-and-drop abilities that many email users have come to expect as standard features. Columns cannot be sorted, email file sizes are not shown and attachments cannot be deleted.

And this is free webmail, which means the price you pay is having ads inserted in the emails you view and there is little or no support if anything goes wrong.

Many people may be put off by the non-standard interface of Gmail and the use of labels instead of folders. However, labels are more versatile in that they work in a similar way to folders, but allow you to have the same email in different “folders”.

So, in the screenshot example above, my label/folder for CES - next week’s Consumer Electronics Show - also has items with temporary labels of “no”, “maybe” and “diary” to allow them to be sorted into other folders and letting me view, at a glance, which companies I am interested in and seeing.

All in all, Gmail has brought order to my email chaos, and it is rapidly doing the same for the rest of my work, with its calendar, document and task additions.

Tags: Gmail, google, Hotmail, microsoft, Yahoo

January 2, 2009 6:12pm in Internet, Software | Comment