There's a difference between "intuitive" and "useful". GMail has handily exploited the fact that it's brand new, and can introduce a bunch of brand new ideas/paradigms all at once.

Folders in the mail context are borrowed from file systems, where a file inode is "attached" to a parent directory inode to form a hierarchy. Labels work the same way, except now you can have overlapping of folders because each email can have more than one label, and it doesn't have to necessarily be hierarchial, which is BETTER.

Google didn't "pave the cowpaths" on this one and should get a pat on the back for taking a risk. With good search technology, folders become moot. Heck, even labels are a bit superfluous if you can search well. It comes back to the whole issue of getting people to "metadata-ize" their stuff that Joel was talking about last week -- people just don't want to have to do it. People don't want to take the time to organize their stuff into folders or use labels because they are lazy. Give em a good search and they'll be happy.

It will be interesting to see if folders still exist in Longhorn, or if they become moot as well. In a good searchable filesystem, static hierarchies aren't needed -- they should be dynamic depending on the variable you want to make the hierarchy by. Better get used to this, old hats. Google's just seeing the future. :)

Gmail may not be the best thing since sliced bread, but it does have its advantages:

1. As far as I know, ISPs (at least in India) do not give email storage space of the order of gigabytes.

2. A person who accesses emails from multiple computers (e.g. home and work) or even multiple email clients (as I used to -- Thunderbird in Windows and Mozilla Communicator in Linux) will not have consistent access to his emails (leaving the emails on the server is not much of an option when the disk quota is something like 10 MB).

3. IMHO, Gmail's interface is the best of the currently available web-based email services (Disclaimer: I have not had a look at Oddpost yet)

It almost feels as if The Other Road Ahead had Gmail in mind when speculating on the direction of desktop software. It's not fully there yet, but is definitely on the right track.

Re: "GMail has handily exploited the fact that it's brand new"

Actually, it reminds me very much of Pachyderm (because "elephants never forget") email on top of the AltaVista search engine. See for example the March 1997 slides here or the brief mention on pages 7 and 8 here.

For example, no folders as such, but individual messages could be tagged with multiple keywords which could be used in search queries with the results viewed as a virtual folder.

Dan