# 101 things to do with a gmail account

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/101-things-to-do-with-a-gmail-account/251748>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [June 23, 2004, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/101-things-to-do-with-a-gmail-account/251748 "2004-06-23T03:15:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![spectrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9fc29f/32.png) [@spectrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spectrum)\
**Post date:** [June 25, 2004, 6:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/101-things-to-do-with-a-gmail-account/251748/21 "2004-06-25T06:42:29Z")

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More than just being a really conveniently large email system, Gmail is also a major step forward for webmail. It’s all run via JavaScript (or ActiveX for IE users), and thus you can use things like hotkeys. Just press “c” to compose an email, or g then i to go to your Inbox.

It also pulls away from the tired, inflexible “folder” paradigm to a label/metadata system for organizing mail, where you give your emails labels (for instance, I have “Friends” and “Politics” as two of my labels), and you can then sort and view based upon assigned labels. You can give emails more than one label, so you’re effectively “filing” the mail in two different metalocations.

It also includes spellchecking, is totally cross-platform (Safari, Firefox, IE, Mozilla all work just fine), and is beautifully minimalist in its appearance.

Even for folks who don’t have Gmail, it may be something of a boon: In order to respond, Yahoo! and MSN Hotmail have had to up their anemic disk space allotments.

All in all, I’m loving it.

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**Author:** ![Silentgoldfish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@Silentgoldfish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Silentgoldfish)\
**Post date:** [June 25, 2004, 12:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/101-things-to-do-with-a-gmail-account/251748/22 "2004-06-25T12:03:54Z")

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And it’s fast, too. I went over my download limit this month and have had my bandwidth throttled to 28k. If the only page I went to was gmail you’d never notice!

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