You know those unbearable intersticials at Yahoo Groups that get in the way of reading a message every 4 posts or so? Just subscribe your gmail address on a post-by-post basis, and you no longer have to bear with them to browse list archives. I don’t want to clog my own POP3 accounts with discussion list archives, but Gmail looks just fine for that purpose.
Another neat feature I’ve seen is "show original", which shows you the email message including its full headers, and nothing else. I don’t know how well it will scale with millions of active users (probably well judging by Google’s history, though as of late I’ve sometimes witnessed slowness on Usenet) but right now this is amazingly fast. I wonder whether the spellchecker, which is the next best thing to Word’s behind-the-scene underlining, will make it into Blogger. One thing I’m surprised not to see is a contact import tool (see for instance how LinkedIn does it), though that will probably be added later down the road. The search feature works similarly to the familiar web interface, including keyword highlighting which seems obvious once you see it, and as far as I know doesn’t exist in the Outlook environment (that would be nice if Lookout, which I have yet to install, would do this).
