2 more reasons to be exact - IMAP IDLE and double the storage (now at ~4.5GB).

GMail certainly shook the free webmail arena not too long ago. Remember the 10 - 20 MB of storage we were getting? And the ridiculous charges for POP access? Thanks to competition (read: GMail), we now have features that is comparable to those of paid email services. In fact, I suspect that GMail’s uptime is better than some of the paid email services. That’s why I don’t use my hosting’s email anymore. I’m also sorry to say that GMail walks all over my company’s email services. Uptime, speed, features, ease of use, better interface, you name it. But what I’ve found most invaluable is that even though I’ve got close to 1GB of email stashed right now in GMail, I’ve never had an issue with retrieving a particular email thanks to the search functionality. Most of the time however, I rely on its excellent and intuitive labeling. Imagine categories on steroids. So if you find email is your poison, check out GMail.

P/S: I cheated. I admit the plain vanilla GMail can be improved. And it has been (Firefox only).