GMail Me

Yay! Thanks to my very cool friends at Photo Friday, I now have a GMail account.

Why am I so excited about this? Well, first off, I'm excited because I am so friggin' in love with Google. Plus, the very idea that you can't just sign up for GMail (while it's in the beta phase, you have to be invited) made me want it more. Then there's the fact that it's called GMail and that sometimes people call me G. Get it? G mail? And finally, as everybody knows full well, AOL sucks.

The main benefits of GMail are a ton of storage, enough that you would never have to delete an email ever again, plus the use of Google's search powers to find what you need among your archived emails. There's more to do with filing and grouping messages and replies, but I'm still figuring it all out.

Google in general and GMail in particular do have their critics. The web-based GMail service is free. That's because Google makes money by serving up ads based on keyword searches of the email messages. Although this is all automated (no one's actually reading your email) some people find that a little creepy.

But I'm of the mind that people have a right to run a business. If you don't want to see advertisements, don't use Google's products. I hate pop-up and pop-under ads. So I try to avoid sites that have a lot of them. Simple as that.

Google ads aren't that bad anyway--they're pretty unobtrusive. I have some on this site and I suspect few people really even notice them. Blogger, which I use to create Gienna Writes, is totally free, by the way. And you don't have to put Google ads on your blog. If you choose to, though, Google gives you a small amount of money every time someone clicks on one of the ads on your site.

Anyway, I'm still getting used to the GMail website. I've been using sucky AOL for so long that I have to retrain my brain and muscles to learn a new system. I'll report back later on whether or not I like it. I'm not totally ready to give up AOL just yet. Sucky as it is, I only pay a couple of bucks a month for it. (I just have the web-based email, they're not my service provider, thank God.)

You can read more about GMail here and there's an excellent New York Times article by David Pogue that explains the pros, cons, and nuances of GMail here. I had trouble getting the page to display, so you might try clicking here for the no frills version (free login required). By the way, if you'd like to get your own GMail account before all the good addresses are taken, you might try this site.

And you can now GMail me at GiennaWrites at GMail dot com. Yay!