  I sat on one of those treasured invitations to sign up for Google Mail for some time before finally setting it up this weekend. GMail, as it's known, has been getting lots of attention in its beta phase, for a few reasons: Google is going public; we're fascinated with Google right now; the mail service offers some new approaches to mail handling; and, oh yes, there's been a great deal of handwringing about privacy because of Google's plan to place ads along the side of your browser based on the content of your email message. More on that later. GMail is different. The interface is simple, much like the renowned Google search page. It's free, and Google smartly gives you a gigabyte of space for your mail.
That's a lot of space, compared to the miserly 2 MB you get from other free providers like Hotmail. Those of us with Hotmail or Yahoo accounts always have one eye on the little meter showing us how much space we have left. Of course, you can get more space, but it will cost you. So GMail blows the roof off of this artificial limitation, acknowledging that we get a lot of mail and we also get large attachments. GMail also gives you that space for another reason. It wants you to save your mail rather than deleting most of it and squirreling it away in folders where you can't remember it.
I won't go into great detail on this, but I think you understand the value of keeping mail, "pasting" labels to it and then using the smart Google search engine to find what you're looking for. It's probably the way programs like Outlook will handle mail in the not-too-distant future. And it is somewhat similar to the new ways of managing, storing and searching for content that we'll see in the next generation of Windows. Alright, enough of that. Here's what I think: I like it a lot. The interface is easy to work with, it's smart - just like you'd expect Google's Mail to be, and I like being able to keep a large volume of mail.
Is GMail going to become my main account? No. My work email and most of my email correspondence flows through Outlook and that's the way I want it to be, so I can archive it. Yes, GMail archives stuff in your giant gigabyte-sized bin. But, GMail isn't compatible with any email software right now. And that limits its usefulness.
Still, I've found good uses for the account. I have one Hotmail account that serves as the receptacle for the dozens of email newsletters I subscribe to, and all non-work, personal business. That stuff, I've been transferring to GMail, where I have more space for all of it. Only time will tell how much I use the search function to look at the stuff I'm archiving. Now, to the privacy issue. Yes, sometimes when I open a piece of email, a few small ads appear on the right-hand side of the screen.
Truth be told, I don't look at them and I don't even see them. I'm blind to them, in the same way that I'm blind to the little ads on the Google search results page. Maybe I'd be more concerned if I was using the account for lots of private email. But I can't get worked up about some giant computer parsing my email newsletters from CNet or email for weblog readers to send me an ad for a new PC. Who cares. The question now is whether GMail will force other providers like Yahoo and Hotmail to dramatically increase the space available to users.
The other question is whether GMail will take the next step to allow integration into email software. For now, though, it's my newest software toy. 
