I just spent 15 minutes drafting an email to someone in GMail, and my browser crashed. I was going to the CNet site and checking out reviews of laptops to refer to in the email, and one page of the CNet site crashed Safari (and did so twice more when I tried to access it again). Damn, I thought–fifteen minutes of writing gone. I had failed to save what I had written (though when do you make saves of web-based email drafts?).

But I got a pleasant surprise: when I restarted Safari and reopened GMail, expecting to have to start from scratch, there was my prior draft! All nicely saved as a draft by GMail, automatically. Even typing which I had finished no more than one minute before the browser crashed was still there. Very, very cool. Do Hotmail or Yahoo do that? Maybe I should experiment…

Add to that the newer features available with a GMail account, including Calendar (now I can share my schedule with my students more easily, allowing them to sign up for appointments better) and Google Analytics (a more detailed report on that coming sometime soon). Now, if GMail could only check all the POP email from my various domains as well…