Hotmail vs. Gmail
I have used hotmail extensively before I got a gmail account and I still use it as my primary personal email box for spam purposes. I've yet to receive spam in my gmail inbox, so I've made it a point to use it as wisely as possible. Hotmail has a huge limitation in their free service: 2mb storage. I subscribe to a SalesLogix discussion group which fills up those 2mb in roughly 2 weeks give or take a couple of days. Every so often I would archive all of the messages using Outlook's tie-in to Hotmail and that was the only way I could keep the messages. Sure every email is available through the discussion group's website search but I want to have all emails just in case I need to access them quickly. Add to that the horrific moderation policy and I really wouldn't trust the discussion group itself, though the users that make it up are some awesome individuals to say the least.
Hotmail is going to lose my service soon as my primary personal email provider. The reason is they are charging people to use the Outlook->Hotmail tie in because people were using this to spam from multiple hotmail accounts. Since I believe there's enough advertising on their site to pay for this and anything else they would ever want, I don't see the need to pay for such a “service”. The only way they could keep my service is if I pissed off the moderators of the discussion group so that my email address gets blacklisted. Their extreme moderation policy has made me come close to just that, or unsubscribing to the group altogether but I really don't see that happening anytime soon.
I'll always use Hotmail since I need a passport id/email address to use MSN and access anything and everything Microsoft. I don't see myself never using it, though it will greatly diminish as it's usefulness has slowly faded. The elimination of archiving my messages will be the straw that broke this camels back though one would highly question why someone would want to archive some of the messages I save. The speed of Gmail is a plus in their favor as well, as Hotmail has issues because each click opens up an entire HTML page. Images distort or don't show, font is all screwy until you hit refresh, and a couple of other “bugs“ make it almost useless. Add to that the insanely dumb advertisements that take up most of the real estate and you get an extremely bloated product. You'd think with all of those ads they'd be able to afford giving us free users a little more.
None of this is really my concern any more. The only way I would ever go back to Hotmail full time is if google charged for their service. I don't need 1gb of email, but if I could get maybe 10-100mb it would be 5-50x better than Hotmail. I just don't see the point in paying for something that has enough advertising to cover their costs and then some. Then again that's probably why I'm not trying to make money off advertising.
Gmail Client
I'd like to be someone who thought of this first but most likely I didn't. Back when I first heard of and started actually using Gmail I knew that I would always want to archive my email messages. Regardless of the 1gb of storage, some of those messages deserve to stay on my computer. I want to categorize and store them for my reference only, especially in the event that Google decides to charge an arm and a leg for the service (though I highly doubt they will).
I thought I would be cool and develop one of the first Gmail clients for Windows. I was wrong. There was already a Gmail API specification found here: http://www.johnvey.com/features/gmailapi/. This page has the API and a proof-of-concept application that already has a good bit of functionality. Recently I discovered an application that is bound to be a full-blown client for Gmail. You can find that here: http://gmailerxp.sourceforge.net/. I thought about contributing to the open source project but I realized that my thoughts on the application will never be their thoughts. I'm a little too lead oriented to be given a sideline position and it's taken this long for me to really understand that part of my OCD.
My thought was to utilize the Gmail API developed by Johnvey Hwang and extend it to suit whatever need I have. The API specification is the best I've seen and outlines exactly how Gmail functions under the hood. Most likely I would start out with the API then trim things down to suit my needs a little more closely. I don't like external dependencies that I can't control (more OCD) so I think by the time it's all over with I'll have my own “version” of the API to suit my needs. I've yet to contact Johnvey about it, but that's because I haven't actually started coding against the bits.
I haven't really tried gmailerxp to know how well it works. It looks okay but I suppose it will be polished as it grows and more functionality is added. My thoughts were to make something more like RSS Bandit. The client would house everything, but you could keep IE windows within the client itself. This way if you ever wanted to do something “normally” you could but it kept everything as crystal clear as possible. I guess part of the reason is I use RSS Bandit a lot and making something that has that feel is more of what I'm used to. I may even decide to just code the functionality into RSS Bandit and extrapolate my changes into a plug-in that everyone can use. I haven't quite decided how I'm going to approach it though it's not like I actually have the time to do so right now. I'll probably end up abandoning the idea unless I really can't stand any of the other products out there.
I don't know how licensing plays into any of this. I don't want to violate anything by what I'm doing, but at the same time I believe whatever is in my Inbox is mine even though it is housed on Google's servers. In the end I want a client that I can use to archive stuff in the event that I actually use Gmail from here on out. I don't really want to archive messages just because I'd have to pay for the service, but that is something I would do regardless since I'm such a cheap bastard.