Dear Google,

Are you ever more forgiving of one thing over another? For example, maybe you have one sibling who has an annoying habit that you complain about every time he/she does it, but then someone else in your family has the exact same annoying habit but you look the other way? Another one I can think of is how I am ever-forgiving of Nintendo for not coming out with any good games for the Wii, and continuously tell people that the Wii is awesome even though I haven't played the thing for about 7 months.

What I've been finding is that we're a little like that with Google Mail. When Gmail came out it was the coolest thing ever. It was fast. It had conversations. It had chat. It had POP access. It had 2 gb (and counting) of disk space. It had auto-complete for emails. It had a chat log. The search tool was fantastic. It had great spam protection. It used Ajax so it was quick and functional, no annoying page to page screen loadings. I told everyone I knew about Google Mail and encouraged them to join.

3 years have passed and all the great features are still there. The unfortunate thing is, everyone has caught up to them and surpassed them. That's what happens when you sit around and twiddle your thumbs. Yahoo Mail has every single feature except for the conversations feature. It has chat, it has POP, auto-complete, Ajax. The search is there, and spam protection. It's all there. And it's fast, which is something that can no longer be said about Gmail, which seemingly has slowed down to a crawl. I dunno about you guys but I'm tired of clicking on something in Gmail and seeing that "Loading.." thing popup, and you can't even cancel it, you have no choice but to sit there and wait for it to load. On any other application, if you want to cancel, you press Esc or STOP. With Google mail, you wait. And you wait. And you wait.

Why is it taking so long? Is it wrong to assume that opening an email should be faster than the Google search tool which datamines the entire internet and comes up with a result in less than a second?

Did I mention Yahoo Mail has *unlimited* space? And the spam protection has been upped to a notch where I no longer receive as much spam as I do on Gmail. Did I mention Yahoo Mail has a built-in RSS reader? 1-button to erase all my spam?

3 years is an awfully long time for an application to sit in Beta testing. If any other company put out something that sat in Beta for 3 years, they would have gone out of business by now.

I'm ready for an upgrade, Google. I think we deserve one. Years of us telling people how great GMail is, but now I look back at Yahoo! Mail and see a far superior web-based email application. We need something to back us up on our claims that Gmail truly is the next best thing. I don't want to be called a liar.

Help me be honest.

Yours truly,
ebrian