I’ve been playing with Gmail for the past couple of days, and the first thing I’ve discovered is that it’s a lot better for mailing lists than Thunderbird, mainly because of the automatic conversation threading and the archiving capabilities. I’m migrating all of my mailing list subscriptions to Gmail right now. If you want to send me email to my Gmail address, it’s address is [email protected]. One thing I’ll say for sure is that Gmail’s interface is about 100 times better than SquirrelMail.

Update: after using Gmail for a whole day (or most of a day), I’m really getting a feel for how different it is from every other email client I’ve used, especially with regard to how it organizes threads into “conversations.” Basically it treats all messages in a thread as a single message, and condenses the emails you’ve already read if there are too many to display on one page when you click on a conversation. Really, it’s quite similar to how Google Groups organizes Usenet posts, and makes a lot of sense for handling email in a Web interface. It also hides quoted text so you don’t have to bother with it if you don’t need to. Very slick. Most impressive though is that this is the first email client that I’ve used (maybe ever) that does something completely different with email than the dominant paradigm. I’m glad to see innovation of some kind happening on the email front, and I look forward to having a bunch of email in Gmail so that I can get a better feel for how it’s going to scale.