Last week I luckily got a gmail invitation and created a new account for myself. I have been played it around since then. It's super clean, fast and I love it!
Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, along with many other free email providers, offer only free 20-50M of mailbox. I know many corporate email systems also have a limit size of 100M for employees. Google sets the bar to 1G and it's free. It definitely is a big hit.
That makes sense. Google has expertise in building huge distributing system with commodity Linux boxes, and they could provide the same capacity with much lower price.
The only thing is the maximum size of attachment is 10M in gmail. How great it's if 20M or even 50M could be supported? I may consider using gmail as my personal online storage not just an email account.
