Gmail sounds so much like email it must be all you could ever need

                                                                                                                                                                   Electronic mail.  Who'dda thunk it, I mean thought it, not all that long ago.  And now it's almost "out of fassion", or so I read.  All joking aside, it is falling aside to text and IM.  In our researching for 104, I read that some major universities are no longer issuing student/staff email accounts, citing lack of use and outright resistance by said populations, though I can't recall what source it was.  Anyway, electronic mail.  G-lectronic mail.

  With a name like gmail?  In all truthfulness, yes, Gmail is email, and I don't mean that as a simple statement in grammer.  I am surely coming from a personal point of view on this, I make no excuse or counter-claim.  I have been using Gmail for approximately 3 years; a very, very short time in comparison to the vast majority of email users and web-denizens alike to say the least.  But as to web-related usage of anything, as you come to need tools, you learn how, yes?  

  I bought my laptop three years ago for the primary purposes of job hunting and education.  In today's world, electronic communication is almost always required for all job searching, and is always required for educational purposes.  After bundling my internet/telephone/television, and establishing a small footprint online, I opened three email accounts; Yahoo, Microsoft, Google.  I had not much of an idea what I was doing.  Looking back to just that short time ago is enlightening, how much I have learned.  Gmail gets some credit because of all the features and it's simplicity.

  I really didn't use my Yahoo account much at all.  Outlook I did use though, because I hadn't learned just how far Microsoft had fallen in the grand scheme, the negative connotation connected to most things Microsoft other than Windows.  Anyway, it works, and for simply emailing it will suffice.  But I noticed most accounts I communicated with were Google accounts. 

  It's hard to just talk about Gmail without mentioning how it links up with Drive and the office suite.
  As email goes,  the interface is simple, and options lets you set everything up how you want.  I like how the mail is filtered into categories.  I just use the four basic ones, Primary, Social, Promotions, and Updates, but you can add more.  That's real convenient.  Or, you can set it all up totally different ways, like I was saying.  I switched mine back to  the 4 categories pretty quick.
  The files column on the left is fine to work with.  The real bonus is in the Chat category. You have your standard chat capabilities in an email service, but not only that, it lets you dial phone numbers and then transcribes for you and dictates for your contact in real time.  Awesome!  The arrows in the picture indicate the chat area, with contacts.  The highlighted area is the dial keypad.

  I do assignments in the Compose window all the time.  You basically get the features of a Word tablet as far as I can tell.  You know, Bold, Italic, etc.  So that covers that need, at least for my wishes.

I highlighted that feature above.

  Right now, Gmail is all I use to communicate.