What Is Email – Why Gmail?

We used to send letters to our friends and family as well as letters for office and business purpose. In fact today also most of us send letters thru posts. In a very simple language, email is a letter and it functions in a very similar way as a letter. Email actually stands for Electronic mail i.e. a mail or letter sent in digital format. You could understand it better by the following illustration:-

The above illustration explains email in a very crude language, and I hope it has built a basic understanding in your mind how a email sent by you can reach to the desired recipient.

There are many free email services currently available. In fact, you can have your own email ID specific to your domain name or domain name of your business like [email protected]

Here we would discuss some free email services who provide free email accounts and what are the factors that you should consider while going for a free email account.

5 good free email services (free email accounts)

1. Gmail
2. AIM Mail
3. Yahoo Mail
4. Windows live hotmail
5. Zoho mail (You can try it, it looks good and can open multiple mails in tabs, good facility)

How to decide best free email account for you

1. It should be very simple to use, because you should not keep on fighting the system rather than managing your mails effectively.
2. Look that if you can send the mail in your language too as it would be sometimes necessary.
3. There should be a very good spam protection, i.e. you should get very minimal or no spams in your inbox.
4. You should be able to retrieve the deleted mails in one click as sometimes you would have deleted it mistakenly.
5. You should be able to save your drafts that you wish to edit later and then send mail
6. You should be able to manage your mails by putting them in different folders depending on the sender or the subject
7. You should be able to search your mailbox effectively to find out the required mail that would be in your inbox received some 100 days back
8. It should have a good password recovery facility in case you forget yours some time or other
9. It would be good if you get a facility to mark some messages as special in one click so that it would be easy to find them in the future
10. There should be mail archiving facility.
11. Check if it has POP and IMAP access
12. It would be a bonus if you get a chat facility and some other features like calendar or a note taker in the mail account
13. Now—days many free email services are offering mobile services like accessing the email account on mobile. Check if you need it
14. There are some other features like you can change the look of your mailbox (themes) or undo send for  mistakenly sent mails, offline mail access etc.

Why we think Gmail is the best amongst all

1. Gmail is fast and simple, you can believe it as it is based on Google approach to the email
2. It has almost unlimited amount of storage (currently I get more than 7.3 GB)
3. It has powerful email search and web search inside the mail box
4. It has almost all the features that I have discussed in the “How to decide best free email account for you” section.
5. Most of all, what I feel nicest is, you can integrate many Google products like Google Calendar, Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Youtube, Picasa and lot more available and under development into your single Gmail account.
6. And I am sure, Google is on a continuous path to add many more coolest and hottest features to your Gmail account, if you have that.

So, if you wish to go by Gmail, let us see how to create a Gmail account.