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I was rather shocked to find that when browsing through old messages that it's been just over two years I've been using Gmail. It's been a good journey to see it migrate from this clunky, somewhat unreliable system to the pretty damned smooth setup that they have now.       Obviously it and Google Maps are the main reason for the AJAX craze and with good reason. They're tight, efficient applications. As a recent visit to my mom's house with her dialup connection proved, they don't run all that fast outside of broadband, but such is life I guess.       I'm trying to think of all the things that have come about in the last two years of this system, but I suppose that beyong small feature requests, the two that were the most remarkable were the chat function and the recently released, improved phone client. Neither of these I use of course, which goes to show that even for a total web geek, just having a basic email system I can rely on, is all that I really need.

GMail is a pretty damn good webmail system. I've been using it for some time and have been quite happy. To have automatic virus scanning is great. To have automatic spam blocking is even better and has been a very useful thing for me to have.       Like any good quasi OCDer, I used to delete all the spam that would collect in my spam folder as soon as it was there. Then, upon realize that they deleted it after 30 days, I just thought, "Screw it. That time could be spent laughing at fat squirrels trying to climb trees." I started letting it collect and it was pretty amazing to see how much spam I would have received had I let it pass through. As it sits currently, there are about 1,010 spam messages sitting in that folder. Yeah, that's right, I get over 1,000 spam emails a month. And this is to an email that isn't listed anywhere. It was brand new about a year ago and this is how much junk hits it a month.       It's proof that you really need some kind of spam filter on your email and also proof that every piece of spam legislation (specifically CAN-SPAM) has been a waste of time and tax dollars. At least we get cutsie names for said programs.