No more folders, filing or fumbling to find your mail

Email is supposed to be a productivity tool. So why spend time filing messages, then later trying to remember where you put them? And why delete important mail just to stay within some arbitrary storage limit?

Gmail makes email easy. With more than 2,500 megabytes of free storage, you never need to throw messages away. And with a powerful built-in Google search engine, you no longer need to set up folders, file your mail, or remember where you stored your messages. Just search for what you want. You'll not only find the message you have in mind, but all the other messages that are part of the same conversation – arranged in chronological order so you can easily put everything in context.

(1) The secret is search
Google search is at the heart of Gmail. Fast, efficient, effective. Just type a few keywords into the search box and your message appears. You don't have to remember where you put your mail. That's our job.

(2) It's all in how you look at it
With Gmail, you'll see your messages in context. If there was a reply to a message you sent or received, Gmail will automatically display it in chronological order with the original. This conversation view continues to grow as you respond and new replies arrive, making it possible for you to follow the whole back and forth discussion in one place.

(3) Never lose a message again
You never know when you might need to see a message again. So why delete it? With Gmail, you can store your messages instead. A single click of your mouse moves messages out of your Inbox into a secure archive where you can quickly find them with a simple search. With more than 2,500 megabytes of storage, you can even keep all your back issues of the Lemur Lover's newsletter.

(4) Filing email is not the best use of your time
Storing mail in folders with subfolders and nested sub-sub folders is not a productive way to spend your day. What's the point? With Gmail, you can find an entire email exchange organized as a conversation, just by searching for keywords that appear in any one of the emails that's part of it. If you want, you can further organize your messages by creating labels for them.

(5) Frying your spam
Google continues to work on spam filters to keep unwanted messages out of your inbox. However, spammers are deviously clever and adaptive. Defeating them will require your help. If you see a spam message, use the Report Spam feature to squash it. The spam will automatically be removed from your inbox and information about it will be reported to our quality team.

(6) It has ads. But only good ads.
Gmail isn't a traditional webmail account. There are no pop-ups, untargeted banner ads or warnings urging you to buy more storage. Gmail, however, will often place a few highly relevant, text ads adjacent to the body of your email. You'll also see links to related web pages you might find of interest.

These ads and links are displayed automatically using the same technology that powers our AdSense system, which delivers targeted ads to thousands of sites across the web. Computers scan the text on a given page, perform a mathematical analysis on it and match it to ads in our extensive database. No humans are involved in this process and no one reads your mail. You may find that hard to believe when you see how closely the ads match the topic of your message.