What’s the deal with the whole “invite” thing, anyway? Why can’t people just go to gmail.com (or where ever) and subscribe on their own?
Originally it was a limited Beta and there were only so many invites out there. Now, I guess they just do it to be different. Their way of trying to make it seem like more than what it is I suppose.
As has been said, I think we can safely forget about the coolness factor. I don’t know why they persist with the invite nonsense. I got my gmail account a year or so ago (when it was ALREADY no longer hip), and I think I was allocated something like five invites to hand out, and I only got those after a few weeks. These days I have a hundred. I’ve actually used a couple of them for people who wanted one, and it seems to go back to a hundred pretty quickly. So the laws of supply and demand have definitely destroyed any coolness factor, and have done so a long, long time ago.
All that said, I love it. I have never liked web-based email. I only ever used it to check my POP mails when travelling (I had a Yahoo account for this).
But Gmail has converted me. I love the interface. I love the lack of spam (one or two per week at a steady rate for the last year. versus 150 per day on POP - and my Gmail address is published on the web). Now, firing up a stand-alone email program just to check the day’s mail seems terribly archaic. I also use the Gmail drive software to turn my gmail account into a virtual drive on my machine for storage purposes. I have two Gmail accounts, and I’ve got loads of files backed up there.
I love it. I’m not a diehard Google fan - I don’t hate them to the tinfoil hat level that folks like Googlewatch do, and I don’t think they are evil, but I am upset with what they did in China, and I certainly do not think the sun shine’s out of Google’s arse. However they do some things very well, you gotta admit. Search is one, and now email is another.
Gmail’s bloody great. Love it!
I’ve got a hotmail account. I don’t need another webmail account. If I did, I’d use my yahoo mail.
So “Don’t got one, don’t want one” for me.
I had one. My roadrunner email account works so much better.
Gmail isn’t anything special. I really didn’t need a gig of email space, and as far as I can tell not many people do.
I no longer use the email my ISP gives me. I might switch at any time, and it’s not all that great anyway. I lost several years of email when my last computer crashed. Had I been using Gmail the whole time it’d all still be there. I had hotmail, Yahoo, etc. for the longest time, but compared to Gmail it all sucks.
Gmail works great both on the web and via the regular POP email program on my home computer. It’ll stay with me no matter who my ISP is. My friends can send me all the home pictures they want, and they don’t have to clutter up my hardrive. Gmail all the way, baby! 2.7 gigs & counting. It slaughters spam.
Who wouldn’t use Gmail?
I haven’t got one. But I don’t really want one either.
Stock spam seems to have been sneaking through (2 or 3 every few days) for the past week, but other than that, I’ve had maybe 20 spams make it to my inbox in the 2 years I’ve had my gmail address.
yup.
Don’t see the point and don’t like the loss of privacy. Not that other vendors are any more likely to protect me, but why set yourself up with the biggest target? For the same reason I use a Mac, all the viri head for the big fat targets and not me.
So no, I use one of the many free email accounts available on the internet.
One nice thing about all that space is it’s a quick and easy way to back up documents. Zip 'em up and email them to yourself, and archive it. Bam, you have free, easy off-site backups. I have many versions of the source code to most every software project I created in the past year there, and that plus using it as my primary email account I’m still only at 9%.
I don’t have one, don’t need one, don’t want one.
My school’s email account set up through Entourage is good enough for me. I don’t email much - just my mom and I get crap from school, etc. I do all my correspondance with friends through AIM, Facebook and MySpace.
I never use any sort of POP3 email because I really don’t want email being downloaded to my computer in any shape or form. The exception to this is the email system at work, but there’s a lot more security in place there than I have on my PC.
So, that leaves me with web-based email and Gmail is by far the best I’ve ever used. I can see why switching might be something long-time users of any given service wouldn’t want to do. I had another web-mail service prior to gmail that I just set to auto-forward to Gmail. Eventually after a few months of replying to emails using the gmail address my contacts seemed to have just made that the default for reaching me.
Anyways to repeat something said above this is why I think gmail is better than any other free webmail service out there:
-Enormous storage space
-Deleting emails is difficult
By default you just archive them. And since you have virtually unlimited email space it is now big deal, and it makes it very unlikely you will ever experience “crap wish I hadn’t deleted that email” syndrome a few weeks later.
-Managing your archives is efficient and easy
You can star important emails to quickly and easily make sure you don’t have to wade through any “junk” emails you have (I mean non-important emails not spam which is always filtered.)
-Search feature, already explained
-Dynamic features
I order something from Amazon.com, I get the “Your item has shipped email.”
Gmail notices the UPS tracking number in that email, and then places a convenient icon to the right of the message “Track this UPS Number” one click and it opens up that number’s tracking page
It also detects my address in the body of the email, and a dynamic “map this” comes up.
Basically pointless for when it’s my own address, but very convenient if you book a hotel online because then you can easily bring up a map when you get a confirmation email from that hotel as they almost always list their address in the body of the email.
If none of these features matter to you, then there’s really no reason to care about gmail, though. Just that simple.
I have one. I use it for you to e-mail me about problem posts.
They show up instantly upon opening the browser as Google is set for my home page, with the personalization option.
Yes, I have my own domain, but since it’s my last name I decided against using it for SDMB business.
I thank you. I thank you, ma’am.
Well, they are. I’m sure Microsoft (the entity that owns Hotmail) has plenty of tiny little disclaimers about keeping files you can’t afford to lose in a free email account.
Thanks to everyone who explained for me. I appreciate it.
Let’s see…2 invites sent, 37 posts…at this rate I’ll have half of my invites left once the thread is on page 7. 
Btw the 50 invites refreshes nightly - lol. Or something close to it as I recall.
I have a gimail account. Does that work?
Tripler
It’s in my profile.