I'm going to let up on the beat-down for today, and instead give you a heads up. There is a company (and a service) that's been quietly kicking Google's butt (if you can believe that). The butt being kicked is not Google itself, but rather GMail, Google's wildly popular email service. I have an embarrassing number of GMail accounts myself and I love it. I have to admit, though, that I am one of what I am sure is a few users who doesn't like the sorting concept, labeling messages instead of just moving them to folders. I find it cumbersome.
However, what easily makes up for that inconvenience is the nearly 3GB (and growing) of storage space. There are also little programs you can download that will allow you to store files in your GMail space (these programs turn files into attachments and basically emails them to your GMail inbox). Nice, but still rather cumbersome.
So, all of a sudden...
SSLLAAPP!
Along comes something I have been using for over a year now, and very few people I know have even heard of it. It has gotten steadily better and more feature-rich over time, and right now it just plain boots the booty of GMail, in my opinion. Look at what you get:
- An email address with 5GB (that's right, five gigabytes) of space.
- An integrated Calendar and Task List
- An online Photo Gallery
- A Memo (notes) tool
- A file system to which you can directly upload files (no email attachments)
- A Contacts Management tool
Now, granted, all these services share that 5GB of space, but still, this is a lot to get for FREE, and also, you have FOLDERS for your email (a personal victory for me). If you don't use the photo album feature, and if you don't have a lot of large files you need to keep online, then you're getting email space that Google will need to speed up its little counter in order to even match.
Of course, you could argue that even the nearly 3GB of GMail space is far from being stuffed, but still, it's just the idea that impresses me. 5GB. Wow.
So, who's doing all this? It's a service called Inbox.com (Click Here), and I strongly encourage you to check it out. There are no ads (not even text-based, "contextural" ones), and the interface is smooth and easy to navigate. I don't know how they're doing it, but I like it! I think you will too.