Become a GMail Power User

Gmail—also called Google Mail in countries where there were trademark issues with the name "Gmail"—is Google's web-based email client. As with many other Google services, it's free to use, but comes with context-sensitive advertisements in some places.

Gmail made quite a splash when it arrived on the scene on April 1, 2004, not only because of its then 1 GB of storage, which many people first believed was an April Fool's hoax (Microsoft's Hotmail, in comparison, had only 2 MB at the time), but also because the interface reinvented some aspects of what we usually expect from email clients. Today, Gmail has:

• A conversation view that sorts replies to your mails into a singsle thread.

• Built-in chat functionality, allowing you to switch between email and Google Chat.

• An inbox that instantly displays after signing in (other email clients often show the inbox only after an extra click).

• Labels instead of folders, meaning that you can attach multiple keywords to a single email.

• An expandable storage plan, where you can buy some extra gigabytes if in need (and share the extra storage with other Google applications, too).

• A search function that returns results within split-seconds. Paul Buchheit, one of the inventors of Gmail, said "Everyone here [at Google] had lots of email. This company is a little bit email crazy. I get 500 emails a day. So there was a very big need for search."

While Gmail can do a lot already, people expanded it over time with homemade tools and tricks. One popular approach is to use Greasemonkey scripts. A Greasemonkey script expands your Firefox browser to get a web page to do more than its makers intended it to do. You can also hack Gmail by adding a user stylesheet. And there's an abundance of advanced native features that you can use, like the Gmail search operators—useful even if you get fewer than 500 mails a day—and third-party tools that connect to Gmail.

To sign up for Gmail and get an address in the form of janedoe@gmail.com, go to http://gmail.com and log in with your Google Account.