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Gmail changed all that. Google’s free Web-based e-mail service offers a so-good-you-forget-it’s-there spam filter, multi-gigabytes of storage, custom addresses, and more, all for free.

On the Gmail Labs settings page (click on Settings, then select the Labs tab), you’ll find a list of more than 40 experimental Gmail features which you can selectively enable or disable. Google warns that these features may “change, break, or disappear” at any time, but I think a few of them are well worth the risk:

Canned Responses If you find yourself typing the same message over and over, you can instead type it once, save it

toggle that behavior in Finder Preferences

Previews in Mail If you check your Gmail messages in Mail, you might tire of clicking on links to get to the videos and photos friends and colleagues send you. Several Labs features let you preview media stored on other sites within an incoming Mail message when the sender includes only a link. Examples include YouTube Previews in Mail, Picasa Previews in Mail, and Flickr Previews in Mail.

Filter your messages more effectively Gmail offers a basic but highly useful filtering system, which examines incoming messages and then takes some action based on each message’s characteristics. For example, filters can apply a label to all messages with a certain word in the subject, or from a certain sender; they can also archive messages (keeping them out of your Inbox), mark them as read, and take other actions. Although these filters aren’t as powerful as the rules features of programs such as Mail and Microsoft Entourage, they have the advantage of being able to presort your mail even when you’re checking your messages in a Web browser or on an iPhone or other mobile device that doesn’t have its own filtering capability.

To enable IMAP, log in to your Gmail account, click on the Settings link at the top, click on the Forwarding And POP/IMAP link, select Enable IMAP, and click on Save Changes. You can then click on the Configuration Instructions link to learn how to set up your favorite e-mail client to access Gmail via IMAP. (To learn more about the ins and outs of using Gmail via IMAP with Mail, see “Achieving E-mail Bliss with IMAP, Gmail, and Apple Mail”.)