gmail goodness

I had been waiting to sign up for Gmail ever since I heard about it earlier this month. I didn't really care what features it had, mostly I wanted to pick an email address that I really wanted (like one with my name in it), rather than one I had to think up because your previous ten choices were already taken. I went to the Gmail site, but you couldn't just register as it was still in beta stage.

Then I logged in to Blogger today, and what did I see? An offer to help test Gmail! Woo! Thank you Blogger. So I got a new email address (just my name. Kinda boring, but I didn't have any real neat ideas), and I have to say I was pretty impressed with Gmail's features. I'd heard about the 1 gig space and the 10 mb attachments, which I didn't particularly care about since my SBC/Yahoo DSL account gives me 75 megs in Yahoo, which is way more than I need. But what really impressed me were these two features: email conversations and labeling system. Email conversations group together the back-and-forth replies in one topic so that everything you and another person is under one "thread" instead of scattered all over. Kind of like an online forum thread. I remember one time wishing that email did this, so it was a pleasant surprise. The labeling system is a different way of organizing your mail. Instead of dropping messages into different folders, you group them by labels, and each message can have more than one label. [added later: When you delete a label, the messages with that label don't get deleted. Yahoo, on the other hand, requires folders to be emptied before deletion.] I guess the usefulness of this feature depends on how you sort your own mail, but all in all I like their innovations. Good job, Google.