My Gmail Experience So Far.
Gmail went to 2 GB of storage today. It was interesting to watch as the mailbox size listed on the inbox page slowly grew as the day went on. As of now I have 1855 MB of storage and I am using all of 4 MB.
I have so much space on my hard disk to store email, that the 2 GB is not really and issue for me. However, I do find that like many people I have a need to access my email from places other than home. Even if I have my laptop with me when I am away there are complications in accessing my mail. For example, I cannot use my ISP's SMTP server if I am not at home, and many networks block the use of other SMTP servers. This forces me to use a webmail client.
I have a Yahoo account and it is not bad. I use Outlook Web Access (OWA) to get to my work email, it is the most clumsy webmail client I have ever used. My ISP provides access to Horde or Neomail to get to my email that is still on the the server. They are better than OWA but that is all the praise that I would give them.
Gmail have a very slickly written web client. It is very responsive. It does not seem to have to go back to the server all of the time. It seems like it sends more info that you see most of the time and it shows you different views of that info as you request it. I have used Gmail for about two weeks. It is not as powerful as mutt, the mailer I use at home, but it closest I have found to web mail client that I can stand. I will keep testing it out. It may become my primary mailer.
Gmail would be a great alternative to my work email that uses Outlook and Exchange. I have only 500 MB of storage on the exchange server so Gmail wins there. The search function in Outlook is positively brain dead compared to Gmail so far.