Google is giving blogger users an opportunity to beta test Google Mail because Blogger and Gmail are both owned by Google and they need some people to test it out.

The first thing that catches everyone's attention about gmail is that you'll get a whopping 1GB of storage for free. This is 10x larger than what Yahoo Mail charges $50/year for.

But Gmail is more than just a lot of storage. Gmail aims to change the way people read email. For instance, there is no concept of folders. There are only labels, which are tags attached to individual emails. There are also filters which will change how incoming mail is handled. Filters can archive(which only moves it out of your inbox), apply a label, or trash email.

Eliminating folders and using labels makes a lot of sense. The biggest issue with folders is that they categorize an email into exactly one category, so if I get an email about both poker and java, I don't know what folder to stick it into. Then when I need to search for that java poker email again searching is easier if I know which folder I archived it to. With Gmail any number of labels can be attached to an email solving this problem.

And of course because search is what google is all about, gmail has fast excellent search capabilities.

Gmail is ad supported, and they will send you targetted ads based on your email. People are complaining that it is an invasion of privacy, but I it's not really any worse than other free ad supported mail services in my opinion.

I'm going to cc all mail to me to gmail and see how much I like it. Maybe I'll even switch completely. But I dunno, I have a pretty weird way of reading email so my preferences are not exactly like the average user(I actually read html email with the E-links text browser).