I spoke earlier about the .Mac versus Google debate. In the end, I suspect that .Mac will win out six months down the road. Today, however, Google is winning out because it's free and provides the features I'd actually use. Tonight I'm looking at Gmail. I'll leave gCal for another day.

Gmail is Google's answer to email services. Google gives its members two gigabytes of storage - ample space for nearly any user. Its webmail software is excellent, providing many features one would find in a desktop-based application including threading and a separated spam folder.

But what if you, like me, prefer the use of a desktop mail client when it's readily available? Don't despair. Gmail happily provides users with POP3 access. It's not IMAP, and in their FAQ the answer to the question of whether or not IMAP is supported is a very gentle 'no.' I suspect we may see that support some day, though. Not today. In the mean time, Gmail does allow the user to toggle a setting leaving mail retrieved via POP3 in the webmail inbox. Handily, one does not have to leave messages on the server from their desktop client. While I have not yet tested my suspicion, I'll bet users still need to toggle this in their clients to use multiple clients.

Finally a word on labels. Gmail uses labels rather than folders to sort email, leaving everything in the inbox. This is a similar tactic to Mail.app's suggestions when they rolled out Smart Folders. Unfortunately, Gmail doesn't embed any headers in labeled mail like Mail Tags does so your tags don't get transferred down to your Desktop Client. That's a bit of a shame, but all in all no big deal.

I can't think of much else to say about Gmail, so I'll stop here.