Gmail -- best web-based e-mail ever? YES!

I finally got an invite to Google's Gmail, and let me tell you, it kicks all kinds of ass. First off, it's Google (and we all love Google here at BBP).

Second, it's fast. Hella fast. Anyone sick and tired of waiting what seems like years for Hotmail's bloated interface to load will be very pleased with how quickly it loads.

Third, it has an innovative interface. Everyone's done the folders concept to death. Gmail gets away from this whole idea. Instead, there's only three places your mail can be -- Inbox, Archives, and the Trash. Adam, how can I keep my mail organized, you ask? Simple! You can apply labels to your different emails! BRILLIANT! So, I have different labels like "DPPH", "Internet", "Friends", "Family", and so on. I get an email from a friend? I label it "Friends" and then put it in my Archives.

Oh yeah, another sweet interface feature -- conversations. Sure, other clients have done this before, but not as intuitively as Gmail does it. What's a conversation you ask? Let's say I write someone a letter, and then they reply to it, and then I reply back to them. That's three emails. With any other email program, my letters to them would be in my "Sent Items", and their letter to me would be in my Inbox. With Gmail, it keeps all these letters together. So, if I am going through my archives and I find a letter Ann Cary wrote to me, I can see our entire conversation -- my replies to her, her replies to me, and so on, in chronological order. I don't know how I emailed without it!

Fourth, and this is probably the most heralded feature -- 1 gigabyte of space. Yes, you read right, 1 gigabyte. That's such an insane amount of space, most people thought Google's press release about Gmail was a joke! They couldn't believe it to be true. A few days ago, Yahoo! "upgraded" people's accounts to 100 megabytes -- that's still 1/10 of what Gmail offers.

Fifth, and this is the best part -- Google searches of your email. With any other free service, you have to delete your messages all the time to stay within their limits. Not a problem with Gmail, because you have the 1 GB of space. But now, this brings up another dillemma -- how can you find one particular email in thousands? You can do a Google search of your email! Google brings their search prowess to the land of email, so now that you can keep all of your email (instead of deleting it), you can now search for the exact email you need.

Sixth, no banner ads, and no fucking text signatures at the bottom of it. Your emails don't need to be ads for other companies, and now they aren't. That's the way it should be. No pop-ups either.

Seventh, the best Spam filtering on the planet. No matter how many filters I set up in Outlook, I couldn't stop the influx of Spam to my Iowa State email account. I started forwarding my ISU email to Gmail, and in the past three days, only one piece of spam out of 35 has gotten through. Gmail stops Spam better than anything I've yet seen.

Gmail is still in Beta testing at the moment, and you need an invitation to try it out. Trust me, when Gmail arrives to the public, you NEED to get yourself an account ASAP. Even in this beta testing phase, it is so above and beyond what everyone else has done. If you know someone with an account, you better start begging for invite. You NEED Gmail. If you want an innovative interface, tons of storage space, great search capabilities, best-in-class spam blocking and quick load times, you don't need to look anywhere else.

10/10. My highest recommendation.