Web-Mail Tests Without End

Live Mail is even more exclusive. To use the service at all, you first need to upgrade a Hotmail account by signing in at http://ideas.live.com, then wait anywhere from a day to two weeks for it to be converted. Even then, Live Mail is missing some features in non-IE browsers.

Unlike its competitors, Gmail provides more than minimal access over Internet-connected cellphones. Its mobile-Web version allows you to view most attached documents right on the phone's screen, since Google extracts and displays their text for you -- a feature also available in its full-size identity.

If you want even faster access to Gmail on the go, you can install and run a separate, free Gmail program on many smartphones. Yahoo and Live Mail have nothing comparable.

Finally, Gmail is the only service of these three that lets you download your messages to any standard e-mail program, such as Outlook or Thunderbird, at no charge. (AOL's free Web-mail service, though unremarkable in many other respects, includes this option, too.)

To enjoy all these advantages, you merely need to let Google's computers read through all your e-mail.

While other Web-mail sites serve up large graphical ads on every screen, targeted only in broad demographic terms, Google displays text-only ads to the right of each e-mail -- picked automatically by its software to match the content of each message.

So, for instance, an update from a local farmers' market featured ads alongside for cookbooks, diets and somebody's "Infused Avocado Oil."

Not to depress Google's advertisers, but I had to scroll sideways to read these ads at all -- they're normally cut off by the right edge of my browser window.

The prospect of strange computers scanning your mail to match up ads may be unsettling, even though Google pledges that it doesn't sell or share any of this data with other companies.

But you shouldn't let it bug you unless, maybe, you fall into one category of Web-mail use.

If you only employ Web-mail as a secondary inbox for commercial correspondence -- an address you hand out when you shop online or register at sites -- you're not subjecting any personal secrets to Gmail's automated scrutiny anyway.

If you keep a Web-mail account as a backup for your regular home or work address, the same situation applies. (You might, however, avoid Live Mail in this case: If you don't log into your account for 120 days, Microsoft will deactivate your address and erase your e-mail until you log back in and reactivate it.)

But what if you plan to employ a Web-mail account as your primary e-mail address? That can be a complicated value judgment. Gmail's ads are generally in good taste, but do you want every bit of personal correspondence to arrive with its own marketing payload?

There's also the nagging issue of Gmail's developers not considering the service "done" after 33 months of effort -- thought it may be comforting to learn that Google employees themselves use Gmail.

But the real sticking point may be whether you want to trust your most important messages to any free service at all.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com.