> GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. I'd say that its search-first paradigm to mail handling (and related to

> GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. I'd say that its search-first paradigm to mail handling (and related to that, labels) was rather unusual at the time, and for the most part it still is. Disclosure: I work at Google and get my regular exposure to GMail from there. I run and use my own mail server for everything that is not work.