I’ve been a long time advocate of Gmail, being a heavy user of both Gmail and Gmail for domains. I was lucky enough about 2 months ago to be invited to participate in the private beta of Gmail Paper which was announced publicly today.
In summary, it’s a free service which allows you to archive your emails in paper format. It’s great for legal record keeping and the ultimate backup, as well as reading emails offline. I’ve ordered two batches of paper archives in the last 2 months.
The boxes arrived quickly (about 3 days later) in nice Gmail branded boxes. The paper quality was a bit funny – it had a kind of plastic-y (for want of a better word) feel to it, but I guess that’s a side effect of the extreme environment friendliness they have taken.
The print quality was good and the ads on the back of the paper were relevant. They direct you to a special Google URL before redirecting you to the advertiser, presumably the advertisers are paying “per click” so to speak.
All in all, a good service, and another innovation by Google well worth investigating. No doubt we’ll see a “Windows Live Mail Paper” in the next few months.