It's kind of inspiring that they keep innovating or at least try to innovate with such an old product. I wonder how many engineers they have working on Gmail, does anybody know this?

It might be old, but it's certainly very widely used - both inside of the company and out.

Also, GMail is becoming more than mail - it's becoming the new desktop, in a way - with integration into mail, chat, calendar, and tasks... What they're doing with widgets will significantly change things, also. For example, Twitter can be integrated in one of those chat-box-like views.

I used to work on Google Translator, and the GMail team was very close in proximity to us. It's more than 10 engineers but probably less than 30... can't give you an actual count. But I do remember a whole bunch of them crazies running around trying to get us to be in their videos that they record (I'm not sure how many they've released, but I'm sure you've seen the one with the traveling envelope).

Amazing what small teams can do. Digg has more engineers than Gmail...

Off-topic, but seriously, what the fuck is digg doing with all their people and money? They've got a huge team and every time I venture over there, everything looks pretty much the same. Do they realize that digg is a sinking ship and they're all building lifeboats?

Wasting other people's money.

I count 8.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/join_the_team.html

I'm not quite sure what you mean by innovation:

http://www.procmail.org/procmail.HISTORY.html

I personally have no interest in multiple inboxes. It's great that my gmail UX doesn't have to change for others to get this feature. Too often, products make everyone suffer in order to provide a feature that 10% of the users "must have". I only hope they can do the same thing to appease the people that "can't live" without folders.

I deactivated on first turning it on, then next day turned it back on and spent some time.

Right now I have three panes, stacked vertically. One is the inbox, one is unread messages with a particular label (which i really had been treating as a second inbox), and third is starred.

In a morning of using it this way It has been very useful, and I find myself actually using the starring function much better.

Stacking vertically made a big difference for me, as I skim subjects and the horizontal layout didn't leave enough subject.

I agree. I turned the feature on, but discovered I didn't really need it, and that it cluttered the screen.

I turned the feature on, then realized I need more than a handful of personal emails (not newsletters) to actually justify its use.

it feels awkward and unaligned to me... deactivated in a couple of hours as well

Most importantly, their filtering, labeling, and displaying options make a huge improvement on the bane of my internet life: email overload. Finally hundreds of emails a day are approaching manageable. Yes: thank you for continuing development on gmail.

Or you could just add folders like everyone has asked you to since you launched the service, then display the tree like Outlook does for easy browsing while not removing the reading pane. Just a thought.