… but I just found out today that Google’s Gmail has this nifty feature of checking POP3 accounts for you. It doesn’t really matter that it’s been around from other providers for years, and Google’s only made it available to some of the customers (for example I only have it enabled on one out of three of my accounts). What matters is that if you add the ability to send e-mails as from that another account (which is already available) – and you can use Gmail as your full-featured POP3/SMTP e-mail. Given that most of people don’t have 2GB of backlog e-mails anyway – very nice trick. The real breakthrough would be if Google made an import routine to upload old messages preserving dates from e-mail programs, such as Outlook/Outlook Express, TheBat!, ThunderBird and others.
Overall – I’m starting to be more and more taken into whole online-office thing. E-mail client, word processor, spreadsheets – and now talks of Google acquiring ThinkFree, that also has presentation creator – all looks very promising. Obviously, I’m not planning to ditch the Office package, however, I’ll think twice before upgrading to the next version. After all – I don’t have a 2.5GB Excel spreadsheet with all the hedge fund transaction history, as some company I was interviewed at three years ago.