5 THINGS…YOU CAN DO WITH GOOGLE'S GMAIL THAT MAKE IT THE BEST FREE E-MAIL SERVICE.

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Author: Mann, Merlin

Gmail is still in beta, so you'll need an invitation from a member to open an account. Don't know one? Visit the Gmail Invite Spooler (isnoop.net/gmail) to score one of the spare invites donated by current Gmailers.

With your account's massive two gigabytes of space, you can mail yourself file attachments up to 10 megabytes each, or just download the Gmail Drive shell extension (viksoe.dk) to mount your account like a hard drive and drag files into it.

While most e-mail services force you to file everything in folders, Gmail gives you labels. The difference: A message can have multiple labels (for example, "joke" and "mom"). You can even set up filters to automatically assign labels upon arrival.

No surprise: Gmail has superior search ability baked right in. So it encourages you to throw all your e-mail into one big pile and search by sender, subject, date or content to pull up the messages you want. You can even use complex search strings that combine categories, such as "from:Jon label:family in:anywhere before:2005/5/21."

Finding Gmail's design aesthetic a bit austere? Use Firefox and "skin" the site however you please with a custom style sheet. Download new styles from persistent.info/archives/2004/10/05/gmail-skinning, or learn CSS (style sheets for Web pages) and tweak the site's appearance any way you like.

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By Merlin Mann