For those using Gmail who wish they could schedule their messages for future delivery Boomerang is for you.  You can write that email now and schedule it to automatically be sent at the date and time you choose.  You do not need to be logged in to Gmail, the internet or have your computer on at the time scheduled.  An advantage of this is when sending an email to someone outside your time zone, you can make sure they receive the message first thing in the morning their time.  Say you're emailing a friend/customer in London during the early evening your time.  You can schedule the email to be sent 8AM their time so they receive it during the start of their day while you are asleep. It will be closer to the top of their inbox.

You can design a birthday card, anniversary card, etc. attach it to an email a few days prior and have the email sent to that person on that special day. You may forget to send it but Boomerang won't.

While you can use Google Calendar for reminders, you also can use Boomerang as an email reminder service. You can set an email to be sent to you reminding you of a meeting, to pay a certain bill, etc.  Further if you receive an email confirming an event, you have the ability to send it to Boomerang.  Boomerang will remove it from your inbox and put it there at the time you designate to remind you of the event. If the confirmation mentions a date and time, Boomerang will suggest a date and time to send the reminder.

You can also set up a reminder for you to follow up on a message you send. You can set it to remind you to follow up if the person you sent it to does not respond or regardless if the person responds or not. The reminder will go to your inbox at the top and is marked unread.  You also can use this feature for a cleaner inbox. Boomerang will store a message on their server and return the email to your inbox at the time you note that you need it.

Go to http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ to download the program.

One of the biggest products from Google is Google Mail (Gmail).  As of December 2009, Gmail had 176 million users on a monthly basis and with good reason. Once you are used to the interface which is a conversation type of view, Gmail has some very good features beginning with 7.5 GB and increasing storage. You also can attach up to 25GB of files. Where does one start?  Let's start with the contacts list.  You can sort by first or last name as you can do with most contacts.  What I noticed is for business contacts, not all webmail sorts correctly by business name.  Gmail's contact list sorts businesses properly regardless of the sort. 

Have you ever sent an email and right away realized that you forgot to include an attachment?  Enable "Undo Send" for Gmail labs and you have the ability to undo a sent email for up to 30 seconds after hitting "Send".  Recently, Google implemented Google Voice which enables free calling to the US and Canada using Gmails Google Chat interface. 

When composing an email, has there ever been an issue where your browser crashes?  The autosave feature of Gmail automatically saves a copy of the email you are working on.  It starts saving once  minute and then varies according to the size of the message.  No more having your browser crash and losing an email that you have been working on for the past 15 minutes. 

Gmail also works with your Google Calendar.  You can accept an invite received on a Gmail and post it directly to your calendar in Google. 

If you receive email from someone you do not wish to receive it from, you can easily set up a filter so that it does not go to your inbox (usually Trash). 

Searching within Gmail is very easy.  There is a search bar in the upper left of the Gmail page and put your search term in.  Searching for a person or an email address is done the same way and again very easy.

In all once you learn to use the interface, you will appreciate how powerful and good an email toolGmail is. 

A note that future blogs will look at the webmail for AOL, Windows Live Hotmail, and Yahoo.