Google’s recent announcement that they’re supporting IMAP has finally convinced me to move off of a desktop email client, Thunderbird in my case, and use Gmail exclusively.  Google’s spam filters, enhanced by the many-eyes of collaborative filtering (I mean the “report spam” button), are so much better than T’bird’s.  I was wasting too much time each day sifting through the dross for the pearls.  I’m sure I’m giving up something, but searching is faster and the new features are coming fast and furious.  iPhone integration is great; I don’t know that the IMAP announcement would have made as much of a difference if I didn’t have an iPhone.  Since I travel a lot, keeping POP email sync’d up was a hassle; I’d come home from a week’s trip and have hundreds of spams to deal with after the filters had done their work.  I’m hedging my bets by downloading everything on Gmail to my local machine, but the cloud computing vision just got one giant step closer for me.