You probably know Google as the makers of one of the worlds best search engines or to use the correct term, search portal.

What you probably did NOT know was that they are reinventing the way we do email. They are running a Beta site for email that will give us more than 2 Gbyte of storage on their server and also offer full POP service - all for free!

If you compare this with the measly 2 to 5 Mbyte most email services offer, you get an appreciation of the benefits. No more bounced email because your mailbox is full. No more having to delete email when you are traveling etc.

What this means is that we can now have a free email service that we can access from anywhere in the world and never have our mail box overflow!

I opened an account chris.ftl@gmail and gave it a test drive. I was very impressed with the nice clean interface and the ability to download this mail to outlook express. However uploading from outlook express still has some bugs in it.

Nothing however is entirely free - there is a small amount of advertising. This is how goggle will get a return from the service. In fact the advertising is very small but very targeted, so I did not find it annoying.

When this service is out of beta, and available to everyone, I believe it will revolutionize the way we use our email.

If anyone out there is interested in trying the beta system - send me an email and I will send you an invitation. Yes at this stage membership is by invitation. All the geeks are busy getting cool email addresses!