Gmail

Gmail is Google's email service, offered free for personal use and as part of Google Workspace for businesses with custom domain addresses, security and management controls, video meetings, eSignature and migration tooling on the higher tiers.

The difference between free Gmail and Workspace Gmail is administration rather than the mailbox, and it is what a business is actually buying. A company account can be created, suspended and recovered by an administrator, its data retained under policy and its access revoked when somebody leaves, none of which is possible when the mailbox belongs to the individual.

Search rather than filing is Gmail's original and still defining design decision, and it changed the product category. Every prior email client assumed users would organise messages into folders; Gmail assumed they would not and made finding anything fast enough that it did not matter, which is why conversation threading and labels replaced hierarchies.

Spam filtering is the capability that is hardest to appreciate and hardest to replicate, since it improves with the volume of mail observed and Google observes an enormous share of the world's, which is a structural advantage a smaller provider cannot close by engineering. Workspace plans start at 7 dollars per user per month.