I think the labels work great. Just set up some sorting options and mail gets redirected to whichever label you want.

In the morning or when I'm away for a while, I go through my email by clicking "unread" this selects the unread messages. Then manually un-click anything you want to actually read. Delete the rest.

Did anyone else mention gmail's excellent search capabilities? I love being able to search my email texts. Can't remember who sent you something, but you remember a few words of the email? Search for it, there it is. And vice versa, "what restaurant did I eat with Sally at last year?" search for mail to/from Sally, oh, there's the email thread where we made dinner arrangements last March.

I only delete junk mail. There's so much storage, I just keep most everything else for archival purposes. I've been on gmail since July 2004. I just checked, I'm only using 10% of my storage allotment (plenty of attachments received and sent as well). At this rate, I'll have to clean up my account in 40 years! I think I might be dead by then.

Love gmail! Need an invite?

Why does it still say "Beta"?

This can be done using most web-based email solutions. I have Outlook configured to access my Gmail-hosted account. I can do everything I want to offline and when I reconnect it syncs back up. But I can also access the account from my BlackBerry or from any web browser. It is a very flexible solution.

Agreed about the labels. The purpose of having labels instead of folders is that they are so much better! The Google engineers are the best in the world and Gmail could easily have folders if desired, but Google engineers agreed that being able to tag any email with any label as many times as you want is much better than just clunking around with a bunch of folders.

I did a summer internship at Google last year and we were told that many/most Google products like Gmail, which are perpetually changing, will stay in beta indefinitely, or at least until they are clearly the dominant product in the particular market. It's an interesting approach and it has certainly changed the 'beta' philosophy in software design. If nothing else, the fact that Gmail is still in beta makes all of its users feel (correctly) that more updates and innovations are just around the corner! (recent examples like Gmail video chat, automatic attachment reminder, and Google goggles come to mind)

By the way, I'm happy to see all the comments about Google Apps on here. Inside Google, we all used Google Apps extensively and it was actually a really efficient way to organize a large organization. Everyone's Google calendar was linked so you could book meetings very easily; a variant of Gmail chat was used to get in touch with anyone in the company who was sitting at their computer; Google Docs was used so that employees could collaborate on a document without emailing around dozens of versions that all get mixed up; etc. I'm surprised more companies don't scrap Microsoft Office, Outlook, whatever Calendar software they use, and coordinate everything with the Google Apps suite...

Using that method, however, the GMail address *will* be visible to the recipient.