Gmail, or Google Mail, is Google's very nice implementation of web-based email reading/sending utility. It has a very good spam filtering system, better (in my experience) than Yahoo's web-based mail or Microsoft's Hotmail system.
Spam Filtering
Gmail automatically runs a spam filter on all incoming mail, and marks any messages it believes to be spam with the designation "spam". You can click on your "Spam" folder to access those messages, flush them all at once, etc.
Gmail is the best web-based email system I have seen yet. It has extremely good spam checking, as good (if not better) than its competitors at this point.
Mail Forwarding
Gmail has a number of advanced mail features that are unavailable (or cost money) in the other systems. For example, mail forwarding is free (with Yahoo you must sign up with Yahoo Plus, for some monthly charge). Now, most people understand the idea of mail forwarding - you can set up a rule that basically says,
This gives you the ability to point multiple email accounts to a single email address where you prefer to read all your email. Nice.
Reading Gmail via POP
If you're used to client-side email reading software such as Outlook, Outlook Express or Firebird, Gmail can cooperate with them. You can set up POP access so that the mail reader on your computer can talk directly to Gmail's server system and download the mail right to you!
Gmail will already have spam-checked every message, and categorized it appropriately.
There's even a way to set up secure email retrieval, so that only you could ever use POP to get at your mailbox. It's called TLS, and is a security and authentication system. To use it, you enable it in your client mail reader when setting up the POP connection.
Combination
Gmail will even let you combine these two ideas: Forward all incoming mail to a mail address you specify, and store a copy for you to read via POP the next time you check your mail.
How Do I Set It Up?
For specific info on setting this up in Gmail, read this article:
Summary
Gmail has a modern "tagging" system to let you categorize your mail (each message can have more than one tag; like the two tags "bicycling, jokes" can be added to a message that has to do with bicycling, but is also a funny joke. With advanced features like POP access and Forwarding for free, Gmail is easily the best system available today.
You should check out Gmail - even if you don't want to log into Gmail to check your email. Just knowing that if you dislike it later on, you can forward it to any new email address you create, can give you some peace-of-mind today.
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