For any web developer, designer, or IT guy, e-mail is more critical than a phone, snail-mail, or other forms of face-to-face communication. Though, for most of the time, we aren’t really happy with what we have. Whether you’re starting your own blog, designing a website, helping your grand-mother get e-mail, or just fed up with slow 5-minute searches through your inbox, you know how bad email solutions can really ruin your day. Try finding an email solution that lets you access email from your phone, search for messages in less than a couple seconds, or access multiple email accounts from a single point anywhere. It simply can not be found, except for one provider.For most of you, GMail is nothing new. As a matter of fact, many of you already use it as your primary e-mail. But GMail offers certain features that you may not be aware of. Nonetheless, several features must be mentioned, as they will solve many headaches for those of you that are not yet aware of all the features.

1. Fast searching! This is a definite selling point for me. Given that I access my e-mail from various computers, I am really forced into using either webmail from my e-mail provider, or an email client with IMAP. Both IMAP and webmail really lack in one front: fast searching. IMAP intrinsically cannot support fast searching, and so, searching becomes less responsive as your inbox size grows. With GMail, however, you can notice the difference. Any search is in the order of seconds, and not minutes.
2. Organization! As your inbox grows, having 1235 messages in one place can be quite a headache. And who has time to manually sort through each one to organize? Never mind that. Start using filters for labeling, moving, deleting, and all that other good stuff, and suddenly, you will have nice labeling and organization.
3. Hidden email addresses! Seriously, you can create email addresses without signing up for a new account. For example, suppose you are example@gmail.com, then you may also use example+school@gmail.com, example+work@gmail.com, example+march15party@gmail.com, etc. and it all goes directly to your inbox. The secret is in the ‘+’ (plus) sign. Anything after the plus is sent to your original e-mail “example@gmail.com” account. You can then use filters to do whatever you please with these messages.
4. Multiple accounts from one location! Ok, so this has definitely been done before, but there is a fine detail here, which is overlooked for most other providers. If in your GMail account you wish to check another IMAP account, GMail will correctly mark the messages from your other server as “read”, instead of automatically deleting them from your original server. A simple feature, but really quite useful if you wish to stop using GMail later on, with no regrets.
5. Hosting for any domain! This is my favourite feature, and probably will be for a lot of web developers.You can sign-up for free and host up to 100 emails for any domain. This is a great little feature to have for all of your website clients who would like several emails for their own domains. And this feature gives you much control over what you can do, such as custom webmail URLs (mail.mydomain.com), custom logos for your email, and various other features that you will not find elsewhere. Better yet, it all runs on GMail, so you get all of the above as well.
6. No SPAM! So far, I have experienced a myriad of e-mail software, such as Outlook, Media Temple webmail, SquirrelMail, Thunderbird, etc., and although they all use some form of anti-SPAM, I have always lost e-mail at some point in time due to mis-interpretation of what is SPAM, and what is actually my recipient using unusually large red text to make a point across. GMail, on the other hand, has never mis-interpreted any of my messages and I have not once received SPAM messages in my inbox. They are always correctly forwarded to my SPAM folder, and what a relief that is.

If you are not yet convinced, then sign me up for whatever it is that you’re using! It must be fantastic if it beats this list.So now we can spend a little more time on other fun stuff—like debugging and teaching our grand-mothers how to reply to a message—and a whole lot less time being frustrated with e-mail.