Kerkia

Background

Everyone today has an email address. And most people have a work and a personal email address. Sometimes even more of those. So pretty everyone at some point wonders what service they should use in order to get their new address.

Recommendations

For personal usage, we recommend Gmail. The reasons are the following:

• It supports all major email access protocols, including notably IMAP and secure connections over all protocols, which other email service providers offer only for a fee (e.g. hotmail/MSN and Yahoo). This in particular allows using your account with a desktop email client such as those recommended by Kerkia.
• The interface allows you to check emails from other accounts through POP3.
• Storage space for free is huge, several gigabytes for most users.
• The application is very well integrated with Google Office, which allows opening documents, spreadsheets and presentations right from the web interface.
• The spam filter is fantastic, arguably the best one that can be offered today.
• The user interface is free of any kind of add and very easy to use; arguably the new Yahoo! email interface is a bit better, albeit not well integrated with calendar and contacts, but the Gmail interface is efficient, simply, and can now be skinned to look even better to your liking.
• Not to anybody’s surprise, the Gmail search feature is very powerful, both fast and producing the best results.
• Last but not least, new features keep coming, that you can typically tried by enabling them in the Labs section of the Gmail settings.

For business purpose, we also recommend Gmail. This is no longer free unfortunately, not even with a kind of basic plan as they used to have, but the cost is quite reasonable for any business size (50 USD per user per year), and certainly much lower than other server-based solutions you may be considering. In this configuration, Gmail adds the support for your own domain name, offers 25 GB per account, supports the integration with Outlook for both email and calendar, sync with a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and of course includes other Google Apps such as Google Docs as well as additional security features, a large range of APIs and free support.

Web links

GMail

Web site: http://www.gmail.com