Google had announced that they were adding POP support to Gmail. I just received that feature on my account today, and I am excited. Not that I'll actually use it — I prefer the Gmail interface to any other e-mail client. But it's still cool. What's even better is that they announced, and I quote: POP access is free for all Gmail users and we have no plans to charge. That was quite a surprise to me, since they originally hinted that they may eventually charge for it.

Furthermore, they announced the same thing about the automatic forwarding feature that previously added. When the feature was first made available to Gmail users, they said that it was only free during the testing period. But now they announced that, like with the POP support, they have no plans to charge for it.

Believe me, this kind of generosity is not something their competition wants to compete with. Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail are pactically dead in the water.