a klog apart raised an interesting idea recently related to Google launching their own e-mail service: a combined blogger, gmail and google search appliance.
Appliance sales. With Google search, weblogs, and email, Google will give Microsoft mail service a run for its money. Watch Google roll out Blogger in a Box this year, the better to clue the Google search engine to intranet content. A year from now, watch the microcontent of email and weblogs continue to converge, especially behind the firewall.
That sounds like a powerful combination for a corporate intranet.
C. David Gammel, CAE 
If Google keeps the “we’ll send you an ad for every e-mail you send” routine, I doubt many people will stick with Google Mail. There are too many other free e-mail services to make this terribly appealing.
But we’ll see – competition is the mother of innovation.
I think it won’t be too bad if they do the ads inline while reading an e-mail via their web-based system. If they send you an actual e-mail with advertising, then I agree there will be problems.
Everyone complained that gmail was indexing their email and then contextually displaying ads based on that. Well I have news for anyone who uses a web based email product that offers search: They have indexed every piece of your mail.