Anybody report their experiences with this? I had an option to use GMail but turned it down because it was Google’s.
My ISP uses Google as their mail service. It seems to work fine with no outages. The spam filter that’s built in seems to work pretty well. It’s automatic filing system (if you want to use it) works fine as does the threading of messages. To read mail and my contacts however, I use Outlook. I know have a back up of all my messages on line which I didn’t have before. The only time I use the Google portion of this is when I’m not near my computer or laptop and want to look at my mail and when I check my spam filter to see what was caught that wasn’t supposed to be stopped.
GMail is an excellent service. I use it (through Google Apps) for all my email.
It’s fast, efficient, scans attachments for viruses before I ever download them, is accessible from any computer, and has a wonderful spam filter.
It syncs with my Blackberry, as does Google Calendar, and doesn’t hog resources the way Outlook does. I can us GMail while compiling a video or working on a website with no loss of speed on my computer. With Outlook I experience a noticeable loss of speed.
If my computer is down for maintenance or repair, I can still access my email. If my computer crashes, I can still access my email.
That being said, I find that Outlook is a wonderful program for backing up my GMail to my computer. Utilized over night, it doesn’t interfere with my work by hogging resources during the day, and because GMail supports IMAP, I can sync my GMail accounts with Outlook for peace of mind in case Google ever goes bankrupt.