All this storage talk is making my head go spinning..... Sure, gmail offers 2GB at the moment ( my account at gmail now has 2100MB i.e. 2.1 GB of free space), but as rightly said by some one its all messy.... I have used many free GB email providers, but Yahoo, i feel, rules the competition . True enough, gmail is still a beta version provider, but generally and overall, i wd go in for a yahoo ( it opens on any browser version - unlike gmail which makes a lot of fuss in this regard). And who needs 2GB of space anyways .. 1GB is more than enough...

welcome infinite+1 bytes in my gmail inbox, hotmail survives only for the msn messenger service, if it's true the messenger google's service byebye msn & hotmail.

AH MAN!! OH NO!!! i finaly got my display to read your using 2% of your 1gig limit now it says your using 0% again :(( life is rough I need more friends...

Does it really matter? There are so many hoops to jump through tho get a Gmail account, who would bother? All they keep doing is keeping their name in the news without really offering anything to the vast majority of internet users. Offering 2GB to a handful of users is hardly a big deal. I'll get more excited when Gmail finally gets real.

To make labels more like folders, all you have to do is quickly apply a label, then hit the 'archive' button. You then only see the message from within the view of that label (like with a folder), and you still get the functionality provided by labels.

I use labels and stars all the time!

The difference between labels and folders is that with folders you can only put the message into one folder (unless you make a copy of the message), whereas with labels, you can apply multiple labels to the same message.

I'm surprised that gmail is slow for you - for most people it is lightning fast! Far faster than Hotmail... True, it takes a while to load in the first place, but when you get into it everything is (almost) instant!

what's the difference between labels and folders apart from the fact that the labelled messages can still be retrieved from anywhere?

Labels are much much better than folders - for example, you can put multiple labels on a conversation. But really really really ......the key is to search for your email rather than (folder--sort--scan!)....I shudder to imagine what it would be to go back to yahoo etc.

Stars are pretty useful for example, to mark emails you have read, want to reply but not replied.

Gmail is okay. Sure the space is nice, but their lack of folders for organization when you have a lot email is a real pain. Instead you have to archive messages and then search for them later. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it, google it. But still, my kingdom for customizable folders!

Does anyone really use the Starred or Labels features? Bah, too much extra work! Labels are the closest thing to having folders, but all the messages are still displayed in a single area, forcing you to search for messages unnecessarily.

Gmail is also slow for some reason. Maybe due to the indexing??

My tip, use Gmail for archiving. Yahoo is still the best for day to day email. Hotmail is just okay, they sorta ruined it when they changed the interface and made you perform an extra click to get your messages. It used to be so much better.

What's Google doing withthe social-networking site Orkut that it bought?

Seems the storage fight between Yahoo, Google and Microsoft's MSN is never going to end.

||| Are they just using massive NAS/SAN? Are the messages themselves stored randomly across many systems with each user just having a common index of messages? |||

Great questions. Hopefully Google will monitor this thread and reply?

MSN Hotmail is dead now surely.

Good for Google! (Good for us all.)

What's the technical architecture used that allows so many users to access lots of front end web servers and reach a common set of backends where the email messages are stored? Does Google at least keep a given user's messages all in one location, or does it have some sort of distributed email message storage system for a given user?

Are they just using massive NAS/SAN? Are the messages themselves stored randomly across many systems with each user just having a common index of messages?

I already have a G mail account. If it isn't Beta soon, will I have to fight over my username again?