The Internet

It may seem like a minor feature for most email clients, but Gmail getting the ability to drag-and-drop messages and conversations into their “label” structure brings it in line with more fully-featured options. Labels help you organize your messages (even more than the conventional “conversation” structure the Gmail web client already does) better, and now you don’t have to even open the message to organize it.

Check out the Gmail Blog for more information.

Email accounts aren’t easy to get rid of - they store information you might need in the future, and the fact that most of them are free means it’s easier to just keep it and go on using it. I’ve still got my 12-year-old Hotmail account, even if I mostly use it as a send-your-spam-here account. If you’re ready to make the switch to Gmail from, say,  AOL or another service, the good folks at CNET note that Google provides a tool to help you move everything over to a new Gmail account. You’ll be able to take advantage of all the features and convenience of a Gmail account with everything you had at the old account.

Even if you don’t want to give it up now, you can point your account to Gmail and run everything from there. Choices abound.

Whether you’re leaving school or a job, eventually you’ll have to give up an e-mail address.  It’s always best if you get some kind of warning, but that period of time may differ depending on the institution or the company (and the circumstances of your departure).  No matter what, there are a few steps you can take to make sure you don’t lose any e-mail information.

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Google’s Gmail has been rolling out offline access for Gmail and Calendar for a week or so, and the results have been working fairly well.  The question, though, is “Why is this such a big deal?”  Wireless internet access is fairly ubiquitous at this point, and Gmail isn’t terribly useful unless you[’re connected to the Internet.  Neither is syncing your Google Calendar.  So take the time to do it?

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Google’s Gmail is one of the more fully featured webmail accounts available, and the price of free usually fits well into everybody’s budget.  For me, one of the most incredible functions of Gmail is how easily it integrates will mobile devices, and not just the usual suspects like the iPhone or Google’s own Android phone software.

The latest addition is the ability to send free SMS (”text”) messages to other phones via the Google Chat window.  Here’s how to use it: (more…)

Now that you have your lucky computer recipient set up with virus protection, you can move on to getting them an email account.  This may sound old-hat for many readers, but if your recipient hasn’t had a lot of experience with computers yet, you’re starting at square one with them. (more…)