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What's the best online email service? They're all wonderful in that they let you access your email from a Web browser, which means just about any computer anywhere. So what it comes down to for me, having had a Hotmail account, and still using Yahoo!, Gmail and even Netscape/AOL accounts, was how well each site worked, how fast they were, and what features they offered. And over the years, I've slowly migrated all of my email from Gmail and would not think of looking back. I keep the Yahoo! and Netscape/AOL account just because I've had them forever, so I check them once a month, but Gmail is running on at least two of my PCs at all times.

Why Gmail? For starters, it's fast and always available, and even on the rare times you get an error, you usually get a funny message that will give you chuckle while you hit the reload button and it goes away.

What's nice about Gmail is how powerful it is if you have Javascript enabled. It automatically adds anyone you send to or receive email from to your address book ("Contacts") which you can also add/remove entries by hand, and has a nice "Frequently Used Addresses" which gleans the hundreds or thousands of addresses you'll end up having saved down to the two dozen you use the most.

The other big win with Gmail is that its spam filters are by far the best, although it's nice enough to save all the spam in a folder in case you accidently get a message filtered that wasn't spam. I've been using Gmail since the original Beta launch and was one of the first 1000 users, and I've never had a message sent to the spam filter by accident. Reporting spam is easy too - just click a box next to the message or open it, click the "Report Spam" button and away it goes - and by everyone doing that, the system helps catch spam before you see it. I only report about one piece of spam per week, although 80% of the mail to my two accounts is spam. I don't even have to delete it - I can laugh as it piles up, and Gmail automagically deletes anything older than 30 days. Plenty of time to find something accidently filtered, but no need to actually delete anything by hand. Perfect!

The last killer feature is the labeling method. Google rethought the whole idea of putting messages in folders - after all, when I order something for my home business from an online site, should I put it in the "Online Orders" folder, the "Taxes" folder (in case I need to show a receipt for my tax write-offs), my "Work" folder, or my "Technical" folder, since it's for

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