Peter Griffin: Cheaper, easier email at the touch of button

When you stump up $15 a month for a dial-up internet connection, or $30 for an entry-level broadband connection, you tend to measure the value for money in how fast your connection will be and how big your data download cap is.

You tend to think less about the services that are thrown in for free, such as webmail and spam and virus filtering for email and webhosting.

Webmail is the most popular value-added service, but we've been poorly served in this area. The webmail services of local internet providers have generally had puny storage allowances and ugly user interfaces. But it's slowly getting better.

Orcon has a good mail interface and offers a 10MB webmail account called Freemail, and you don't have to be an Orcon customer to sign up. Slingshot has recently revamped its webmail features and offers a calendar service.

Telecom's internet provider Xtra claims it has spent $20 million upgrading its mail services. Storage for Xtramail customers has increased from 12MB to 100MB and spam filtering has been beefed up.

Most internet providers allow 25MB-30MB of storage, although some of the smaller ones are matching Telecom's 100MB allowance.

I use Gmail, which costs me nothing, allows 2.7GB of storage - 27 times what Telecom is offering and charging me for. Gmail supports POP3 (post office protocol) mail, which means I can download my email directly into Outlook Express without having to log into webmail. You don't have to be connected to the internet to check your email.

When I'm travelling I use Gmail's webmail interface, which I find much faster and easier to use than the internet providers' email services and webmail interfaces.

I'm an avid user of the fantastic new Google Calendar service. I can chat with friends from within Gmail using its chat client and make internet phone calls using Google Talk.

The best feature of Gmail is the search bar, which allows you to search your entire email inbox in the same way that you would enter a query into Google's search engine. I use Gmail as a type of personal database, emailing myself phone numbers and important documents. It also means that I'm practising what Google suggested when it launched Gmail - never delete another email.

I've used 1GB of my storage allowance but have an excellent resource that I use every day. The spam and virus filtering is also very good.

We shouldn't be asked to stump up for services that are being provided for free and with better features by the internet's large web-mail players.

Gmail requires an invite from an existing member to join up. If you'd like to try it out, drop me an email and I'll send you an invite. You won't be disappointed.