What's the attraction? In short:

- It's the best web-mail interface out there, significantly faster and more usable than any IMAP front-end, and they even support SSL.

- Yes, I'm hesitant to trust Google with all my private e-mail, but I trust them more than I trust Microsoft, Yahoo, or anybody else. That said, if Google were to license GMail as an intranet appliance that you could run internally, much the same as their search appliance, then I'd be harassing our admins to license it yesterday.

- Did I mention how fast GMail is? Several of our students here have made GMail their exclusive e-mail client.