For those who want the gigabyte's worth of email space without ads, there's a way to do it: buy a domain, get a mail server going either on your own PC or via a webhost. However, that costs money - just as it costs Google to offer a gig's worth of email space. In otherwords, there's no such thing as a free lunch. However, there are cheap lunches, and Google's getting to be about as close as it comes.

What Google's Gmail Means for the Web
By: Bill Royle