Half of my friends switched to gmail soon after it came out, but I resisted for more than a year. The other day I discovered that they added one of the features I found most lacking (I can now have my non-gmail address in the “From” field on my outgoing messages, so that nobody gets confused whether my address is @stanford or @gmail), so I decided to finally switch. The other motivation has been that Thunderbird + IMAP combination becomes really problematic once you have 11,000 messages in one of the folders. Even opening such a folder is complicated, never mind searching. So, I switched to gmail.

Today I discovered another great thing: gmail can spell-check Portuguese! That’s a true blessing, giving that I do a good amount of email-writing in Portuguese and my Portuguese spelling is even worse than English.

There is still a “bug” in gmail that annoys me: there is no way of opening a message or folder in a different tab or window. This means that if I am writing an email and decide to go and check what someone else wrote to me, I need to open a new tab, go to www.gmail.com there, then look for the message. I wish I could just control-click on the “Sent Mail” link.