OK, I’ll be the one to say it. I don’t think Gmail is all that great.
Yahoo Mail is better, but I don’t use either all that much.
I’ve been using Hotmail for probably 10 years or so. I’ve had no reason to change. No problems with service, good spam filtering. YMMV.
Joe
Gmail wins, hands down. Nothing else compares.
I had a Hotmail account long before Microsoft corrupted it… probably 11 years ago. Last year I decided to drop it and switch to Gmail. I haven’t looked back since.
I’ve had Hotmail (an abomination), Yahoo! (pretty decent) and gmail (since it pretty much started)… and I can hands down say that the latter is by far superior to anything else I’ve ever come across.
I love, love, LOVE it. Or, what everybody else but Justin is sayin’. 
Another Gmail vote here. It’s not perfect, though. Becuase it’s AJAX rather than plain HTML, Firefox’s in-line search (using the slash prefix) doesn’t work. Searching merely returns a list of email threads. So if you want to find part of a long thread where somebody mentioned x, you have to look through the whole thread. I suppose you could switch to HTML mode or out of conversation view, if that’s possible.
It also seems to be impossible to paste images into an email. I use Gmail at work, and the one time I fall back on Outlook is when I want to do that. And lately it hasn’t been handling attachments very smoothly. When I open an attachment, the Gmail window goes blank and I have to reload it.
Gmail far and away… I’ve tried a lot of them. I still maintain my Yahoo address but hardly ever use it.
It’s shocking, I know, but: GMail.
For one thing, it’s the only one of the top three that actually takes you to your Inbox when you log in.
It’s not perfect, but it’s far and away the best of the bunch.
Me too. Man do I love those Google products.
GMail:
- 20MB file allowance. (I.e. you can send/receive files up to 20GB)
- 6.9GB storage space.
- Easy archiving and great indexing for the hereditarily awesome search engine.
- Continuous improvements.
- Google Documents lets you use Gmail as a document server and edit it on the fly. (I use it to backup documents, logs, etc)
- Built-in IM client.
- Built-in PowerPoint (slide) presenter.
- POP3 server. (All my 6 personal e-mails are routed to my Gmail account.
- Good/Great phone client service.
- Virus scans for content.
- Contact back-up.
And that’s only the features I’m particularly enamoured of!
The best thing, though? Despite all the built-in features, it looks great. Intuitive and comfortable.
I avoid Gmail because I’m afraid of any one company having too much info. I don’t want them to have all my searches AND all my emails. I’ve never tried it. My biggest gripe with Yahoo is that you have to pay for a premium service in order to download and archive all of your emails (without doing it by hand one at a time.)
I’m not being snarky–what’s the big deal about this? I just have a hard time caring whether or not Google knows what I search for. My life is pretty mundane, if anyone really does do much monitoring of my emails etc I’m guessing they are bored to tears.
So can you help me understand why this is a deal breaker for you? You aren’t the only person I’ve heard express this sentiment so this time I figured I would ask why.
I wish I could use Gmail for all my email needs.
At the time I use 5 accounts: two Gmail ones (one for family, friends and fun; one for professional stuff) and 3 business ones. All the business ones work through Outlook, all three have the problem that I can only access them through the web and no archiving unless I can do it through a “local desktop” (ie, in my case, no archiving), all three have no threads and Not Enough Space for all the bloody unzipped colorful files my coworkers send.
Is there any way to convince Bloody Big Corporations to just set everybody up with Gmail?
So wait, you are all saying that you loathe Gmail with a pure bright flame akin to that cast by a thousand yellow stars?
I’m in. Thank you for the feedback, I thought it would be a good choice !!
Have yet to explore the document/storage features, but look forward to it.
There is a kludgey way.
Also How to Add HTML Signatures with Images to GMail Email Messages
Another inevitable vote for Gmail.
Another cool Gmail feature is you can create aliases by putting a plus sign (+) after your user name, they can be up to 8 characters. Suppose my e-mail address was abc@gmail.com (it’s not), and I wanted to sign up for the Straight Dope Message Board, but wanted to track if they shared my e-mail address or not. I’d sign up with:
Then if the SDMB shares my e-mail address with anyone, I’ll know.
You can also use dots in your user name; a.b.c@gmail.com, abc@gmail.com, and a.bc@gmail.com all are equivalent.
Oh, is THAT why I also get emails for a username like mine, but without dots in it? Hmmmmm. I set up as firstinitial.secondinitial.lastname@ gmail, and I’ve gotten email sent to firstinitialsecondinitiallastname @ gmail.
I wonder what your credit cards look like. 
I went with the gmail account.
Why do I feel the urge to announce in this thread that by comparison I do not own an iPhone ???
Because a Gmail account is “cool” and everybody is doing it. Gmail is however much easier on your wallet than an iPhone, and works everywhere.
There is some concern over Google being the central database for damn near everything. Right now I could, if I chose to, use them for all my email, documents, spreadsheets, pictures, searching, and so on, all at no cost to me. That’s a lot of personal and/or business information to be putting in one place where Google can easily access it or lock it off if they suddenly decided they wanted to charge users. Google has yet to show themselves to be Evil, and I think they’re genuinely committed to the course they’re on, but they could get a lot of people by the balls very easily if they wanted to.