The Gmail Experience - Note: there's no hyphen between "G" and "mail" - some habits die hard :)

Things I liked:

1. Conversations - when someone replies to a message, it is grouped with the original message. As a new message comes in, it gets stacked, which makes it easier to read and associate. For a free-mail system, this is a good feature. Consumer is the king and it rules!

2. 1 gigabyte of storage - I hate seeing that "you are currently using 80% of your storage" - please upgrade to blah blah..for a mere 6 MB of storage space in other mail providers.

3. Text box for "Searching mail/web" at the top of the page.

4. "Delete forever" option is indeed there (contrary to the rumors), though not very obvious to one. Once you move a mail to trash and choose the action "Delete forever", the messages get deleted. On deletion, this message is displayed - "No conversations in the trash. Who needs to delete when you have 1000 MB of storage?!" - which is true. But as a user I expect to have the rights of doing whatever I wish to.

Things that I didn't like:

1. The user interface is not very intuitive, which is surprising as Google is a master in simplistic design. "Compose Mail" at the top left corner doesn't stand out.

2. There is no link in the "Compose Mail" page to use the "Auto-address complete" feature. I hope they don't expect users to remember it.

3. The "help" links and other links on the help page open in a popup window. If one click on the "inbox" link, the mail opens up again in popup window. Guess it isn't all that bad as I sound - probably the effect of working on ADA compliance.

Not sure how efficient the anti-spam software is that Gmail uses. If it is anything like Yahoo!'s, it is not great. Having all those junk spam mails in the spam folder will be annoying. And I hope there is no limit on how many mails you can report as spam if you are a free user.

It is nice to know that there is someone else who uses "Search Options" too. Advanced Searching options for mails in Gmail is called "Search Options".

Otherwise, it is great. Go google! Time for Yahoo! and Hotmail to catch up and get those mass storage servers.

More stories on Gmail at:
Gmail Saga
Gmail still sparking debates