Well I SWEAR by Gmail. I absolutely love it. You have basically unlimited storage space so you can keep all the emails you want. Attachments are super easy to send/receive. Also, Gmail groups similar emails, so if you send someone an email and they reply, it comes into your inbox with your sent email attached, so the whole conversation stays together. Gmail has some fun gadgets and stuff, but I don’t use them much. There is an option to “undo” sent mail right after you sent it in case you changed your mind… lol. But i think it only works on some emails. It’s super easy to set up folders and tag emails to different folders so you stay organized. Also, Gmail has a calendar. There’s a function called “Documents” You can upload a paper or whatever to it and give someone else with a gmail account access to it. That way you can both get online and modify the document. Works especially well on group projects that I had to do in high school. I haven’t used it for awhile, but the one draw back to it was that it refreshed fairly slowly…. With gmail you can download gmail notifyer so if you get an email, even if you don’t have your email open, a small window in the bottom right of your screen pops up and shows you the subject line and the first line of the email. To use this you do have to be logged into your account, but if you click stay logged in or remember my password (i forget what the option is exactly called) you can close your browser window and still get the notifications. There are a bunch of fun backgrounds and color palettes for you to customize your email. Gmail also has a chat function, like facebook has – similar to AIM – so you can chat or video chat with other people who use gmail.
As far as spam goes, I haven’t had any problem with it. Gmail is pretty good about sorting out the spam into a spam folder. No there is no “homepage” per say, but personally, I hate opening my email and seeing all that junk. I have a separate yahoo account for when i post things on craigslist, and honestly, I can’t stand using it because of all the stuff that comes up when I open my email. There’s something called gmail reader – I havent used it, but from looking at it briefly, i think it’s similar to an email homepage, you can pick pages for it to display and you can go there to read articles. Oh and I just found this, you CAN create a homepage called iGoogle. If you’re logged into your email account and then go to google.com and click on iGoogle in the top right corner of the page it’ll walk you through the process. The calendar and reader and documents functions are listed in the top left corner of your email page, so you don’t have to go anywhere else to get to them.
If you have a gmail account and if youre logged in (but you dont have to have your email open) and use google search, your gmail/google account will track your searches and the pages youve clicked on. There’s a way to turn that off i think, but ive never had an issue with it, im not searching anything I shouldn’t be =P Also, you can go through and individually delete any of the searches.
Anyway, Gmail has a lot of functions and if you poek around you can find them, they’re all pretty self explanatory, so I would definitely recommend Gmail!