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I haven't made a secret of the fact that I've never really delved into Google's Gmail, even though I automatically have an account due to my much heavier use of Google Docs and previous use of Google Groups.

All that changed in recent weeks due to my ISP DSL Extreme's decision to transfer all of its mail accounts from its own servers to Gmail.

I mainly use my DSL Extreme e-mail address for mailing lists. I have my OpenBSD and Debian mailing list traffic — which can be considerable — on that e-mail address just to keep it separate from the rest of my mail.

I never did like the DSL Extreme Web mail interface, and the fact that it's going away in a week doesn't bother me one bit.

But since DSL Extreme allowed users appropriately extreme flexibility in handling their mail, I've used it consistently, just not in a Web interface.

Instead I've used external mail clients — particularly Thunderbird in Windows — to process the mail, accessing it via IMAP and filtering it into folders that live on the server.

Since the connection to the mail servers can be fully encrypted and of the IMAP or POP variety, I've used my account fairly regularly.

My "lifestyle," whatever that means, makes IMAP work way better for me than POP, which downloads mail to a single computer, and since I'm in front of a half-dozen different computers in different places, POP doesn't work for me at all.

I was worried that the transition to Gmail for my DSL Extreme account would mean that POP and IMAP access would be gone, and I would be limited to the unfamiliar Gmail Web interface only.

But that is not the case. I can read the mail via POP or IMAP with any mail client software, and now I have a lot more space — about 7 GB, even though I can't ever see needing that much.

And I've discovered a few rudimentary things about the Gmail interface that just might have me using it more and more — and dumping traditional mail clients entirely.

Right now, the reason is organization. I've relied on the folders and filters of Thunderbird to bring some semblance of order to the heavy volume of mailing-list traffic I receive.

I'm limited only by the folders themselves. A message can only be in a single folder at a time, and that makes finding things difficult in some instances.

But Gmail uses labels instead of folders, and an individual e-mail message can have as many or as few labels as I wish. So I can, for instance have a message from the debian-user mailing list begin its life with the labels INBOX and Debian. I can delete it if I don't need it, and that's what happens most of the time. But if I want to save that e-mail, I can remove the INBOX and Debian labels and effectively archive the conversation by giving it a Debian Saved label.

The other way Gmail helps me with mailing-list messages in specific, and the rest of my e-mail in general, is by grouping messages that are replies to each other together when I read one of the messages in that particular group. I think this is what Gmail refers to as "conversations," but again, I'm so new at this that I'm unsure of the terminology.

What I am sure of is that this labeling and grouping, which at first looks more than a bit forbidding, is in fact quite useful.

Another thing Google does with Gmail is bring together all of the Google services I use (and many I don't but just might try).

I'm already using the Google Chrome browser to access Gmail, and when I click a link called Sites, I have the option to create secure Web pages, gather information on them and control who has access to them. In short, it's a great, free tool for collaboration over the Web. In that way, it's a valuable extension to Google Docs (also easily navigable to from the Gmail interface), which is already performing very well as a collaborative tool used by many of us at the Daily News.

I'm trying to use Google Docs to bring some kind of order to my own documents. I'll have to get back to you on that one. I finally do have offline access to Docs (via the Google Gears API), and I'm less than impressed with its reliability and speed on my Gateway 1.3 GHz/1 GB RAM laptop. Gears and offline Docs are both still relatively young, so there's plenty of room for improvement.

One more thing: Chat.

Since I've been guesting in the Op-Ed department for the past week and a couple days, I'm not on my own PC, and as a result all my usual apps, from Pidgin to Thunderbird to Notepad++ and Filezilla are not installed.

I did add Google Chrome after Firefox 2 started acting up on me. And on this PC, Internet Explorer 7 has actually been less of a dog than I remember. I did get the installer for FF 3, but I've yet to do the install.

I said I was going to get to chat ... and I am.

Since I didn't have Pidgin, which I use to bring my Yahoo!, AOL/AIM and Google chat accounts under one app, I switched from the "Classic" Yahoo Mail Web interface to the "All-New" version of Yahoo Mail, which is designed to look and act like a traditional local mail client, with drag-and-drop capability.

The reason I haven't been using the "new" interface until now is that its relatively large graphical load doesn't play well with some of my, ahem, older hardware, and the speed of the "old" Yahoo Mail is very much needed on those creaky laptops and desktops.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, I opted for the "new" Yahoo Mail so I could use the integrated Yahoo Messengher client. When you want to chat with one of your Yahoo contacts, all you do is click on their name, and a chat window opens in your mail interface. That way, you can use Yahoo Messenger without needing to have the application installed on your computer.

Now I'm bringing things around to my point, which is Google. Google's chat service — Google Talk — has a "gadget" that mimics a standalone IM applications but can be used on any PC with a compatible Web browser. That way you can use Google Talk from just about any Web-connected PC without worrying about individual clients or Pidgin.

I only have one person who I use Google Talk to IM, so I'm probably better off using Pidgin if I can, but it's nice to see so much innovation in chat from Google and Yahoo. For all I know, AIM has the same capability, but since I've probably checked my AOL mail ... maybe once or twice ... since I first signed up for AIM a few years ago, I know nothing about it. I also remember AOL Mail as offering IMAP and POP to its users, and for that reason alone it might be well worth investigating as a mail solution.

Note: I remember hearing that Google was "rolling out" IMAP access to Gmail users and not granting it to all at once. Since my DSL Extreme account is not part of the regular Gmail throng, I appear to have both IMAP and POP as part of the deal between DSL Extreme and Google.

Summing up: A bit long and rambly, don't you think? I'm just trying to think out loud about how deep I'm getting into the world of Google and its services.

There's been a loud, long argument in the free, open-source software community (and at LXer in particular) about what cloud computing means for open-source software, users, freedom and all of that. For me, the freedom to have my files live in the cloud and be accessed from anywhere I'm networked is trumping almost everything else.

I'd love for the Google Docs interface to get more sophisticated about things like indented paragraphs and smart quotes — two of my typographical pet peeves. The technology is there, since Docs is based on HTML and CSS and can do anything that those two sophisticated technologies allow (and that is quite a lot).

And as I've said more than a few times recently, having the option of working with my cloud-based files either through Web interfaces or via the same kinds of locally based applications we all use today is something I'm very interested in seeing happen. It's kind of ironic that the company I see buying into this concept (although their plans and offerings are presented in such a cryptic way that I can never really tell just what they're planning) is Microsoft.

Yes, Microsoft's dependence on traditional apps like MS Office and the billions it brings them has profoundly affected the company's strategy for cloud-based data and apps. At the end of the day, a melding of local client apps that are not necessarily Web browsers could very well be more efficient than doing everything through the browser. (Or not; it's too early to tell at this point).

The more data we have, from text files to images, audio and video, is increasingly hard to get a handle on. We need help storing, backing up, categorizing and utilizing all of this data. In my mind, it all points to the cloud.

Depending on how you look at it, it's a little "Matrix"-y, "HAL 9000"-ish, "Neuromancer"-like

All I know is that Sun's "The Network Is the Computer" mantra is becoming more true every day. Some of that will be good, some not. And that goodness/other will differ from person to person, application to application and entity to entity.

We won't be limited to the huge cloud providers. There will still be traditional servers everywhere, along with clients in more shapes, sizes and guises than you could imagine. And the lone-PC-in-the-wilderness won't go away, just as paper itself has survived in this most computer-infused of ages.

But the cloud model is real. And it's growing.

Companies that understand this will prosper, others not so much.