Gmail
Excellent email that anchors your whole Google life.
Benchmark review. Giants are reviewed rarely, to show what the tools in the directory are measured against. This one is not listed in the directory or the leaderboard, and it is an example, not a recommendation.
Image from workspace.google.com/products/gmail, taken 2026-10-23. The images belong to their makers and are shown to help you recognise the tool. Ask us to remove one.
Gmail is excellent mail: it filters spam well, stays up and works everywhere. It also anchors your whole Google life, with 15 GB of free storage shared with Drive and Photos, and an address that only Google can host unless you pay for Workspace and your own domain. Until 2017 Google scanned message text to target ads, and its terms still let it analyse mail to power its own features.
You can leave in principle, because Gmail supports IMAP and POP and Google lets you export your data, but your address, your contacts and years of logins stay behind with the old account. Google also has a record of retiring services, such as Inbox in 2019 and the basic HTML view in 2024. Gmail is a good example of a tool that is hard to fault on delivery and hard to trust on power.