There is a great misconception that the only reason to switch to Gmail is to get 1000 MB of space for free. Though this is a very nice feature, I don't believe that it's the best feature. My old account had virtually no storage limit and IMAP support, yet Gmail instantly got me to switch.

I think the main selling point of Gmail is the ease of navigation — above all else, the conversation system.

Gmail automatically compares quoted text in order to group all e-mails and replies together, so that you get the entire conversation on one page. The quotes themselves are hidden unless you click on a Javascript link that instantly shows the quotes.

Then, to make things even better, old e-mails are hidden from view, only showing the title of the message. This greatly conserves space, so you don't have to do a lot of scrolling to get to the most recent message. You click on the message title to expand the message.

If you have a very long conversation thread, the old messages will be collapsed even further, so that only the very tops of the message boxes are shown. You can click on the group to expand all of the titles, and then you click on the titles to expand the messages like before.

All of this is pulled off through Javascript and what I call operation frames, which are hidden frames used to load content from the server, which is then sort of pasted onto the viewable page through Javascript. This method makes the interface much slicker, and your browser doesn't have to load the entire page again whenever it does anything.

Another nice feature of Gmail is the label system. This is a lot like a typical folder system, except that e-mails aren't restricted to being in just one folder. You can apply multiple labels to a single message. This is particularly useful for message filters (which are used to automatically sort different types of e-mail), because a single e-mail may be a match for more than one filter. Usually, in this situation it would only be handled by the first filter, but Gmail allows it to be properly handled by all of them.

There is also a sort of a build-in label, called the star, that you can apply to messages. You star a message to mark that it is important. This is different from the traditional importance attribute in e-mails, which has been greatly abused by spammers and is now considered a useless feature, in that the importance is determined only by the recipient of the e-mail. That means you star it yourself — you never receive pre-starred messages.

Not only does the star feature provide convenience, but starring a message is easy itself. By each message title, both in the message lists (Inbox, etc.) and the conversations, is a white star icon. Click on it and it instantly turns yellow. That means that the message has been starred. You can now open the Starred folder and the message is shown there. It's as simple as that.

Another convenience is the message summaries in the message lists. By each title is a snippit of the message itself, so you can eyeball it and tell whether or not it's something that you want to read in detail before you even open up the message.

Gmail also supports keyboard navigation, which means that you can change folders, reply to messages, etc. just by pressing a couple keyboard shortcut keys. As a matter of fact, with keyboard shortcuts enabled, you can do virtually anything without touching a mouse at all, all with just a few keystrokes.

Finally, unlike most other e-mail services, the interface isn't a distraction. You don't get image advertisements all over the place, and you don't get sharp, bold colors everywhere. As I've said many times in the past, I don't consider the sponsored links to be advertisements in the same sense as the ads you get on Yahoo! and Hotmail, because the sponsored links are small and off to the side, the text is actually smaller than your e-mail text, which means that your eye is naturally more attracted to the e-mail itself than the sponsored links, and also the links are relevant and useful in many situations. I personally consider them a feature rather than an obtrusion.

So you see, there's more to Gmail than just a lot of space. It's the interface that won me over, and I believe that they have definitely set new standards in the realm of e-mail services.

I don't use GMail for the ammount of space they offer. I mean damn, Yahoo! offers 100mb, Hotmail now offers 200mb, and my previous e-mail address on Zeuxworld.com was unlimited. I use Gmail simply because it's new, and I have not yet heard anything bad about it. It's that simple.

A problem a number of my colleagues are having is that Gmail seems to gather messages into conversations by their subject, so if two people independently send me an email that happens to have the same subject, it is hard to see that they are really unrelated emails, since Gmail puts them in the same conversation. This is sometimes quite inconvenient and confusing. Over time this could be even more problematic since subjects are bound to recur but not necessarily be related to earlier conversations.