After dealing with the relative horrors of Hotmail for far, far too long, I’ve gone and changed my personal email address to a Gmail account (from the wonderkids at Google). So far, it’s the best email I’ve used#–with a bit of a learning curve (and no spam). The only way to get an account is to be invited by someone else (thank you Dan at the Moxie) or by using your cell phone to sign up.

I’ve actually had my account for some time now (thanks to Dan), but only signed up out of curiosity. I didn’t expect to turn it into my main email account for personal mail. But then the other day I signed into my Hotmail account (after a two day email hiatus) and had to wade through several hundred emails just to find things my friends sent me. Not my idea of a good time. So I started reviewing that Gmail thing that Dan sent me months ago and low and behold it’s the answer to all my email dreams#–a web-based email system that I can: access anywhere, download messages from into my computer (and Outlook), and use to store archived messages online as a backup (with the bonus that emails stored on the system are easy to search through with Google’s interface).