I've been using Gmail. I was invited to be a beta tester a few weeks back.

The promise of a gigabyte of storage was quite alluring to me and as a Google fan I wanted to see just what they had in mind.

When I first read about gmail I was very concerned about privacy issues. That has not changed, but I never saw where there was much privacy in any email system for that matter.

I've been using Gmail to write myself. Once I had written a sample exploit demo script for my then boss. While it wasn't a big deal, it did make for quite an impressive demonstration for sales purposes. Two years later he wanted it, could not find it, and asked me for it. Of course I could not possibly remember what computer, harddrive, or back up drive it was on. I remembered this experience when I signed up for gmail!

Many times I might be passed some interesting tidbit of data, some new exploit, tool, or fact that I know I will eventually want to reference again. With some information of this nature it might be up for a day or two and then removed. Its happened many times. What I've been doing is copying that information and emailing it to myself via G-Mail. Now I can search for this stuff no matter where I am at or what computer I am using. I am also emailing contact information there that I might need.

So far I am having a great experience with Gmail. The user interface is very intuitive, the inbox refreshes automatically, and it has excellent labeling and search capabilities.

The search capabilities are great - just what I expected from Google.

I doubt seriously that I'll be using Gmail for a lot of private communications, but if I ever did I'd be using GPG anyway no matter what my mail client was.

I've yet to see one text ad in my mail. I'm sure that will happen one day as they intend the service to eventually be a commercial application, but I've not see evidence of that yet.