Some people look at an email like an sms message. It's useful but transient. Read, reply, delete, do a little dance. I keep pretty much every email that gets sent to me... I have these hoarding instincts that make me protect my communications like little tasty chocolate treats with bits of honeycomb in them. I still have my emails archived from when I first started work. Perhaps even when I first started using email.

I see these communications as a kind of alternate diary. No matter how impassionate or automated a message may be (other than SPAM of course) they capture a meme of what was going on in that particular moment of your life. While this hasn't proven useful to me yet, I'm holding out against the day...

I just deleted this whole rant about how none of my email clients were providing what I was looking for and how gmail offers this new... well, I found myself about to say something like paradigm and that really stopped me short. That would make me some kind of marketing person and that just will not do. So I'll cut a long story short here and just say that I'm trying to get all my emails redirected through gmail, for various (usability) reasons [1].

Skeptic that I am though, I must point out that there have been privacy concerns with the service. Although Google try to asuage everyone's fears, they are getting their profits by having bots scan your emails for key words to create a profile for individually targeted adverts. You gotta keep a constant eye out for sneaky bastards...

I just want to spread the love. So to that end I have 6 accounts to give out, so if anyone wants one, email me at cechner /at/ gmail /dot/ com. You want one. You need it. Until recently these things were traded for impressive sums of money (and other things) in what became a kind of black market. Google added clauses to the licence restricting the sale of accounts for money or for-profit ventures, and eventually just decided to flood the market with accounts, dropping the bottom out of the gmail trading business altogether.

[1] For posterity, the coolest features of gmail (that come to mind) are:
- No stupid 'folders' that you have to come up with neat filters to push your mail into. Folders are a pain in the ass to manage and search.
- Emphasis on email archiving. You don't just read-delete-read-delete.
- Conversations. The way gmail handles threads of conversations (email backing and forthing with the same subject line) is really intuitive and tidy.
- Sweet key bindings that allow you to navigate without using the mouse.
- Of course, the 1 Gig disk space is also sweet. And by sweet I mean totally sweet.