It just struck me while playing around with Chrome that I have been using Gmail for more than 4 years.

At the time, I thought "I'll never use up 1 gig of mail storage", but luckily, Google has been steadily adding to my quota - faster than the rate I'm using it up.

I primarily use my Gmail account for mailing list subscriptions, as it is really fast for scanning and reading mailing list posts, and still has the nicest interface for reading conversation threads that I have seen. As most of my mailing list subscriptions are "read only" (I lurk, without posting), Gmail is my own private little search engine over the mailing lists I subscribe to.

Fears of instability, data lock-in or data loss have so far been unfounded. There have been occasional issues accessing Gmail, but none that have caused me undue distress.

All in all, I'd say a pretty good 4 years.