Ok, this is neither news nor particularly clever-monkey opinion writing.
But Gmail has been opening up full IMAP access on accounts, and it is truly a beautiful thing. Web mail is fine when it's all you've got, but whether it's stripped down (Gmail, old Yahoo! interface, etc.) or supa-deluxe JavaScript (new Yahoo!, Hotmail, er, I mean Windows Live) it can't beat the smart client.
And email clients are the original smart client: rich client with offline capabilities + access to network resources.
I'll still use the Gmail web interface sometimes, so it's not like Google won't get a chance to present me with plenty of ads, but having access from Outlook and especially Outlook Mobile on my Windows smartphone (sorry, guys, it just works better than the J2ME Gmail client) is absolutely killer.
I didn't think the free-online-email game was going to change a whole lot at this point, but this is a game-changing move by Google.
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