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Over the past week I’ve reviewed the top three Web Based Email Providers, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Live Mail/Hotmail. In my opinion they are all good providers have their pluses and minuses. For example; Hotmail/Live Mail is the most user friendly and has the most stylish layout, whereas Yahoo! Mail has unlimited storage space, although with a gmail account you can use loads of great features like Calender, Documents, Photos, Reader, Images, Maps, Books, Shopping and much much much more! In this last review I’m going to do a comparison between the three providers. To save all the confusion, I am only going to refer to the free editions unless I mention otherwise.

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We are now on the penultimate of the Web Based Email Review series. I’ve previously reviewed Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail/Live Mail, now its time for Gmail. Gmail is one of the many applications that you can have for free with a Google Account. Google Accounts are completely free and worth while!

There are many useful features you can get with your basic Gmail account. On their site they have made a list called ’10 Reasons To use Gmail’.

1. You don’t like spam. Neither do we
2. Search your mail instantly
3. Organize replies into conversations
4. Chat is built right in
5. Labels, Filters and Stars…oh my!
6. Get your mail on the go
7. Lots of space (and counting)
8. We have ads, but only the good kind
9. Save time
10. All this is free?

To find out more on these features and to see the details of the list click here.

Gmail have made some cool new features for all their users. Some new features include:

• Group chat
• Instant messaging
• 20MB attachment limit
• Emotions
• Contact Groups
• 6.732016 GB email storage per account and the amount it always increasing!

Click to see a list/information on all 35 updates/new features.

You can also upgrade to either Premier or Education Edition. An Education Edition is free to accredited not-for-profit K-12 Schools, Colleges and Universities which are described in the terms and conditions. It provides the same features as the standard edition but also includes:

• Conference room and resource scheduling
• APIs to integrate with your existing infrastructure
• Email routing controls for dual delivery (Coming November 08!)
• Email migration tools
• 24/7 assistance, including phone support for critical issues
• Third-party applications and services
• 6.732016 GB email storage per account and the amount it always increasing!

Click to find out more about Google for Educators or to Compare Packages.

The Premier Edition is by far the packages which supplies the most but it does come at a price! It costs £25 a year. With in the Premier package there are two versions, one geared more towards Enterprises and the other Small Businesses. The package provides all previously mentioned features from the Standard and Education Editions, plus:

• 99.9% up-time guarantee for email
• Policy management and message recovery by Postini (Coming in November)
• 25 GB email storage per account

Click to compare the package with the standard package.

Gmail has everything that most people need from their web based email account and you can also use so many great applications with an account. Although in my opinion it isn’t as user friendly as other providers.

Do you use Gmail? What do you think of it?

Over the next week I am going to do a series of reviews. I will be reviewing the three of the most popular web based email providers; Hotmail/Live Mail, Google Mail and Yahoo Mail. On Sunday I will write a conclusion to the series of reviews, comparing all three email providers. The first review of the series is Hotmail/Live Mail.

• Each account has 5GB Storage Space. By having more storage space you can store more emails and pictures etc. Also on Live Mail, you can send up to 10MB worth of attachments.
• Microsoft Live Mail has exactly the same features as Hotmail. Although as Live Mail is newer there are many email address names left, where as in Hotmail the amount of address names is getting less and less by the minute.

There are hundreds of great features that the service offers, here are a few:

• Microsoft have put together a great interactive tour of Live Mail which gives you a glimpse of the layout and features it provides.
• One great feature is that you can link Live Mail and Outlook together, this means that you can import contacts to and from each other and view your mail in both Outlook and Live Mail.
• Hotmail/Live Mail are also both very good for speed, you can either select a version which is suited to a fast Internet connection (broadband) or for a slower connection (Dial-up). Both versions make the most of the Internet connection, ensuring that they run at the best speed possible.
• Modern styling. You can also personalise the account by changing the colour etc.
• You can search your message using the search bar from the top.
• Finally, the most important thing is that all of this is FREE!

Live Mail/Hotmail is a very good free web based email service provider which has pretty much anything that an average user would need. However, the downside to it is that there aren’t any upgrades/different packages to suit other peoples needs.

What do you think of Microsoft Live Mail/Hotmail?