I got an invit­a­tion to join Gmail the other day (thanks Sara). Of course, I decided to take a look. So far I’m quite impressed! In order to test it without too much risk I have set two of my email accounts to for­ward to my Gmail account. That way I get a decent amount of email to play with.
I’m very impressed with the inter­face. I like the fact that so much is done on the cli­ent side. It makes things very slick without hav­ing to round trip to the server all the time. Strangely, I have been think­ing about fat web cli­ents recently. I’ve been think­ing that quite often you really don’t want to take that round trip to the server to pro­cess a single click. I think I really want an oppor­tun­ity to play with the the won­der­ful 204 HTTP response code so that the server can still know state changes.
Any­way, back to Gmail. I think that the labels are a great idea. Much bet­ter than folders, though I worry about the stuff I don’t label but which I do archive. I can no longer see it, other than in ‘All Mail’. Of course I can search for it, but I can’t really browse it. Unless I’m miss­ing some­thing? I like the ‘con­ver­sa­tion’ view. It seems slightly more intu­it­ive than Moz­illa Mail’s (and every one else’s) tree struc­ture for threaded emails.
I like the fact that it knows to apply the same labels to all mails in the same thread. That helps to com­pensate for the paltry 20 fil­ters. I hope they increase that num­ber soon. In Moz­illa Mail I have 36 fil­ters set up just for the two mail boxes I am echo­ing to Gmail. There are more in my other accounts!
Of course, I love the fact that they have so many access keys set up. Far less mous­ing around allows me to work quicker!
There are lots of things I need it to do before I could con­sider it a suit­able replacem­ement for a decent fat mail cli­ent like Moz­illa Mail. For instance, I need to be able to set lots of dif­fer­ent from/reply addresses without hav­ing to edit pref­er­ences each time. I need more rules like ‘BCC to <email address>’ auto­mat­ic­ally, or request receipt, I need to be able to sort my mails! And backup! I must have backup. And import; the tools knock­ing about the web at the moment are no good for me as I must pre­serve dates, and folders. Mind you, one giga­byte wouldn’t be enough if I were to import all my email archives!
I think I like the way it deals with spam. I’ve noticed that it catches a lot and fil­ters it to the spam folder, but I like it less that it’s silent about it. That is, I see no indic­a­tion that I have spam to check through for false pos­it­ives. I also noticed that it bounces some spam.

Still, first impres­sions are favour­able so far.