well, gmail and yahoo mail are the main mails that i frequentely used in daily life, i have exprienced in using yahoo mail for most 3 years, and use gmail for just one year, i begin to use gmail when gmail just release by google in beta stage, in my opinion, gmail is more innovative than any other free/commecial mails, first gmail is base on AJAX techlogoly, doubtless gmail is the first one that build mail system on ajax, though yahoo, microsoft follow this way later. the more important that why gmail make me to use it is that it give me totally different experiece when composing or view messages. and i like the simple and clean user interface, not like some other mail be fulled with a lot of advertising. i'm afraind you don't know gmail very well, how can you say gmail don't have a powerful spam filter, in my experience gmail has high precise during find spam mail than others. anyway gmail is the most active group during production develop i always believe that, so maybe some other feature gmail not support currently, i believe they will come soon in gmail. as i know gmail invation has no time limitation. ps, any one wanna gmail invation, just send a simple message to me, with the subject "invitation require" to derickkoo@gmail.com