Worth a switch even without the 1000MB email quota!

It's worth switching to gmail even if it just had 100 MB or so of email quota, like Yahoo Mail now does. 

The user interface is absolutely stunning -- if you've been using web-based email for a while, and have occasionally been frustrated by the UI, this will blow you away. Clearly, Google has done its homework. The interface is fast enough and slick enough to make it almost seem like a local email client like Thunderbird.

So... if you use web-based email frequently, beg, borrow, or steal an invite, because gmail is still in "beta" status and you cannot just sign on.

One interesting thing about this invite business: when I was first offered an invite, I declined. I already have 6 distinct email addresses, and having one more was not very appealing. Bad move. By the time I realised the interface was too cool to pass up, sitaram@gmail.com was gone, and I had to settle for sitaramc@gmail.com!

Finally, for those who saw the brouhaha about the loss of privacy due to the targeted ads, which work by "reading" your email: yes it could be a problem. But if you think you have any privacy with any email where the server is not under your direct control, you can continue to live in your paradise ;-) Beside which, most people would trust google a lot more then they would trust the beast anyway; if google says "we wont look at it ourselves, only our computers will", then that is it. They have actually earned that level of trust from normally cynical people!