10 reasons to use gmail and not hotmail/livemail

Reason 1: No Spam

Your gmail account has efficient spam filters. In hotmail, i time and again got spam, and yahoo is even worse. In gmail, spam messages in my inbox are rare.

Reason 2: Better filters

Im gmail, you can set many autofilters which are not available in hotmail. True, with hotmail/livemail you can create a filter to automatically move an email to a folder. You can search the topic or the addressline. I dont see an option to search the body of an email.

Reason 3: Labels

In gmail, you can attach one or more labels to an email. Labels are different from folders. An email can be in only one folder, but may have more than one label. For example, if you are a member of a political party, and also an environment acivist, you would have to sort emails which concern both in one of them.

But then it is out of your inbox, and out of sight. With gmail labels, you can automatically attack a label, or autoarchive it, just as you please.

Gmail can automatically add labels based on both the topic and the contents of an email.


Reason 4: More Space

Hotmail gives you 5Gb, and Gmail 6.x (at the moment of writing) and growing daily.

Reason 5: Threading

Gmail groups emails in threads. In your inbox, you see the names of the threads (subjects of your emails) and the number of messages in the thread. When you open a thread, gmail displays all old messages as collapsed, while the first unread message is showed open. A great time saver.

Reason 6: Less is more.

Gmail has less distracting adds, it has less chrome, less images, less colors and is thus easier to use. Your mind is less distracted and has to search less.

Reason 7: Archive, dont delete.

With growing archive space, Gmail encourages you to arcghive instead of deleting messages. Virtually all hotmail users i know delete their messages instead of moving them to folders.

Reason 8: Dont expire.

Dont use your hotmail account for a month and you have lost your emails, including those holidy pix, including that valuable family photo, including that emailed password. No doubt Gmail has some expiration limit too, but i havent seen my emails deleted when i forgot to access my account for 1 month.

Reason 9: Variations in name.

If your emailaddress is JohnJohnsson@gmail.com, you can send an email to JohnJohnsson+testexpert@gmail.com and it will arrive in your normal email box. But you can use that extra "+testexpert" to automatically attach a label. Sending the same to hotmail results in "it was rejected by the recipient domain". This is also very convenient when signing up for a service somewhere on the web - you can find emails related to their service in your normal archive by searching for this email address.

Reason 10: Better security.

Need i say anything?

No ads

Live mail adds advertisements to the bottom of your email - gmail doesnt