There are two ways to send and receive email. You can use an email program installed on your computer, like Outlook or Eudora, or you can use an online web mail account such as gmail, yahoo or hotmail.

Many people have lots of websites and lots of email addresses to keep up with. For example, you might use one email address for your private email, and another email address for your business.

We prefer using gmail. It’s easy, and you can always get to your email even when you’re traveling. I also like the fact that I can set up gmail to automatically label my email or toss it directly into folders for me. It makes it easy if you can color-code or label incoming mail; sort it in folders and so on.

Lately, I’ve started to use gmail as my GTD organizer. I label things according to actions needed, such as next-action, waiting, to do etcetera. It works well for me.

The rules function in gmail  is just awesome. Some of my customer service requests I automatically forward to our customer service representative for example. My son’s soccer schedule automatically forwards to him.

I used outlook for a very long time, and it has some great functions with mail merge and group emails and so on. But I have to say, that gmail can do most things just as well. I create groups frequently. For example, I have created a group for soccer parents in our car pool group. Whenever I need to send out a schedule change or something, I just send a quick email to the group instead.

Another big reason I started using gmail was the problem we had with spam. When I used outlook I constantly had to spend time fighting the virus problems and sort a lot of spam. The problem with getting viruses on my computer completely disappeared when we started with gmail. Also, the spam filter is excellent. I hardly see any spam anymore.

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