Prelude:
My initial thought "Jus' b'cos it offers more space it does not have to be good". It was jus' another mail account, the only difference "1GB"! [the marketing team of google has got my attention :-)]. I Started using gmail with some initial reluctance, as the loading time was much similar to yahoo. The user interface :-( was not catchy enough, to get the attention of first time usres.

The "speed" was something that caught my attention first. These guys seemed to offer the service over a scalable grid. I did not see anything new there!. Then the labels feature was something hmmm hmm... it kind of aroused my interest. Still I was apprehensive whether it would scale with 10,000 mails.

After this, I started to play with it, enabled the stars, applied the labels etc. The user interface response was very good! The threading of mails as tabs was also good! Now,these guys seem to be serious about what they are doing. The archiving of mails was quite Ok! but I was not completely impressed. The provision to revert back from archive was very thoughtful.

Here is a list of features, I felt was useful:

* Automatic additions to contacts.

* Auto storing of sent mails was good. ( In yahoo you need to check a dumb checkbox!)

* Messages when no mails are there, are amusing "Hooray, no spam here!" etc...

* Automatic search results when we create filters was impressive. 8-)

* Keyboard short cuts are cool!

* Delete account info is thoughtful,this is something I have cursed some mail providers for not having! Having it just gives you that sense of freedom,to break free from something :-)

* Actual message along with the subject is pretty useful

Some drawbacks:

* Initial loading time is slow

* No support for draft mails ( now they are supporting drafts of mails)

* Delete options is hidden under more options (two costly web clicks... yuk!)

* Some javascript errors (harmless, I guess, as all the actions performed seemed to work)