Yes, I know the news came out right near April Fool's day.. but it's true! Google is soon to be releasing an email service! You can read all about it on the GMail = Google Mail site.

Quick overview...

Don't use folders to organize anymore... they are slow and clumsy anyway. Just "Archive" your messages and use the speed and power of Google search to call them back on demand! :) I've been using an internal alpha version of this product for awhile now and I have to say, it really does kick ass. I thought the concept was a little strange at first, but it's remarkably liberating.

While Yahoo and Hotmail give like 2 MB or 4 MB of storage... GMail comes with 1 GIGABYTE of storage! WOO!!!! It's because the concept of search based mail is that you never delete anything. Just let it get indexed and hidden away until you need it. Why delete it?

We've announced it publicly, but it's not open for signups just yet. We'll start getting the ability to invite people soon and when I get that ability I will try to invite some people, but there are a lot of restrictions on who can be invited and whatnot during the BETA testing phase, so forgive me if you don't get one. :)

Other bad news is that it doesn't support Safari just yet, but I'm personally working on it! :) In the mean time, you can use something like FireFox which is a nice little browser based on the Mozilla browser (which is the sibling of Netscape).