Omaar said:
anyone checked this out?
gmail is great but the text scanning/matching to advertising content thing is dodgy as - though somehow less intrusive than the graphics used in the advertising on other webmail services. don't like the direction it's taking advertising though.
Actually, most major email programs do this - they just don't talk about it. It is also robots/spiders scanning for keywords, not humans reading your mail, so the content isn't necessarily reaching anyone. It may be dodgy, but Yahoo and them all do it too.
I like Gmail because it's visually very simple.
There are still some kinks (the contacts book and lack of address lists is lame), but it's easy to use, and quick too.
My favorite feature right now - I have several email accounts set up to fwd to my gmail, and gmail has an option where you can send emails as if they are from other addresses (that you own) - the from and reply-to are both the non-gmail address.. this is handy for more official correspondence. It's still not perfect because it defaults to gmail when you reply to someone who wrote to the other email.. but it's pretty handy even so.
the most dodgy feature (although I'm also not sure other services don't do this) is there's no way to find out how your emails are stored on google's servers - there seems to be some evidence that they don't delete ANY of it, even if you do, which is creepy.