[summer]

Thank you for comments there. Hotmail drives me crazy because it takes forever and I also can not stand many of the advertisements - they seem pornographic almost. It's very annoying. I used to like hotmai a lot more, when it first came out. It seemed less cluttered.

[appeal2]

Another nice thing about Gmail is the ability to use it as a POP3 server. You can simply configure outlook to pull the mail right off of it. You can do this with yahoo too, but they charge you money. With Gmail everything is free.

[unsycophant]

http://www.hello.com/

[kingu]

We have three servers for our enterprise right now; none of them host e-mail. We use gmail for all of it now. Occasionally we have to dive into the spam folder, but it is much better than the previous systems, plus it reduced a tremendous load off of our servers.

We use the gmail extension for firefox so that the e-mail boxes can be monitored for activity, and we've stuck pretty exclusively to the web interface because it is quick and responsive. The e-mail boxes are standing at 2.6gb of space available, and generally increasing at about a gigabyte a year which is plenty of expansion for us.

Just in case, if gmail was to die tomorrow, we've used the pop3 service to download to an archive machine every e-mail and response we've sent out. The conversation features also make it really easy to keep track of what you responded to a customer.

If you use a pop3 program (such as outlook) and use the e-mail relays that either your ISP or google provides, there is no reason for any consumer to know that you use an external server service. Much easier, of course, to do this on yahoo, but you pay for the privilege. (Which I do.. Ghads, I got e-mail coming out my nose.)

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

I fricking hate Hotmail. Lamest email service out there.