Google quietly added a small feature to Gmail this week called Mail Fetcher. When that feature launched, Gmail became perfect.
Mail Fetcher allows users to access non-Gmail email accounts from within the Gmail interface. If you have a Yahoo email account, and a work email account, etc., you can simply access that email from within Gmail, using POP settings. Gmail will now work in a very similar way as Outlook does on the PC desktop.
This is something I have criticized Gmail for in the past. I went on and on about this issue here when discussing the new Mac web mail product. It was the one feature that Gmail lacked that, in my opinion, kept it from being the perfect webmail application.
Every other webmail service is now inferior to Gmail. Gmail offers more storage than any other free service. They offer free POP access to Gmail from other email applications like Outlook (Yahoo and Microsoft charge for that). They offer access to other email accounts within Gmail (only Yahoo offers that). Gmail’s mobile client is killer (although not yet available for most phones). And only Gmail allows tagging of emails for categorization under multiple topics (I just wish it was a quicker feature).
I am seriously considering switching from using my desktop email client to Gmail. Since I work from multiple computers, using web mail eliminates the syncing problem. If Google implements an offline version of Gmail, in a similar way as Scrybe or via Adobe’s Apollo platform, it will become even more compelling.
Kudos to Google for finally implementing this. It’s just awesome.
