Gmail revisited

It's time to talk about Gmail again. Why? Well, because some of you still don't have a Gmail account and because it's gotten better. How could it be better? Well, while it's tough to improve on free, Google actually has. Here are some of the improvements:

• Storage has increased from 3 GB to over 7 GB (7.3 at this writing and always increasing)
• Built-in Google Talk provides chat (keyboard, audio and video)
  
• Chat now allows you to log into your AIM (AOL Instant Message) account and chat through it to your friends on AIM
  
• Themes (more about this below)
• New features in "Google Labs" -- 3 dozen so far

You get all of this for free in Gmail, and you can easily use the parts you want and ignore the rest. Some of the new features are definitely eye-candy. But, let's face it, the "face" of Gmail was, to say the least, kinda plain. It is now almost anything you want it to be. And yet the 31 themes they give you don't tend toward the garish or overly colorful. A few even vary with the time of day and weather in your location. But when it's raining outside, I don't want to see rain clouds on my computer screen.

Some of the cool stuff in Google Labs includes:

• Offline operation (read and compose your email without an internet connection)
• Custom keyboard shortcuts (but still no "send" key)
• Mouse gestures (the coolest one, I think)
• A tweak to put your signature between your email and the ones included below it (without this, your signature goes way at the bottom, which is confusing)
• The forgotten attachment detector (no more embarrassing emails without the attachment you just described)
• Tasks (a to-do list that is integrated with your email)
• Canned responses (for sending automated responses)
  

I have tried all of the above, except the audio and video chat, and I like mouse gestures the best. When reading an email, you hold down the right mouse button and drag left (to go to the previous email), right (to go to the next) and up to go back to the in box. I was ho-hum about this until I tried it and now I'm hooked.

It really seems like Gmail is creeping up on Outlook and certainly the other online email providers (Hotmail and Yahoo, among others) with all their new functionality. The offline operation, integration with the calendar, tasks, reader (aggregator) and features like filters, canned responses and some recent tweaks to the way labels are handled each have made Gmail more like Outlook. While there are probably things you can still do in Outlook and not Gmail, none come to mind--and that says a lot.

Plus Google has added viewing PDF (portable document format) and PowerPoint (slideshow) files right inside Gmail. These, and a dozen other things, push Gmail in to areas where other email programs don't go.

With all these new features, you'd think Gmail was finally out of Beta (a test version, as opposed to a final product), but no, it still proudly says BETA under the trademark. And the Labs features are proclaimed as likely to break and not "really ready for prime time." (Mouse gestures has been broken for over a week.) But that's Google's mindset. They'd rather give you something cool that might fail than wait. Having said that, I have found the basic email service to be quite reliable. There's even a paid, corporate version.

I suppose I could live without Gmail, but I wouldn't want to.