Matt Cutts of Google had a couple of ideas about further improving Google's mail service that will certainly give the dev team a run for their money. Not that they'd be very difficult to implement, but they'd completely change the face of email as a product. How would you feel about an option to send an email a bit later, as would be if you lagged hard, just in case you noticed a typo in a very important message?
That feature would also be most welcomed in case you happened to send the email
with a "snarky" comment amidst it and, just as you sent it, you'd have second thoughts. Matt was thinking about a two-minute delay, dubbed an "oops" filter, that would attend to both of the above issues. I wrote about this a while ago, but the person who suggested it was a Xoogler, so his word would not necessarily be heard.
The second feature that he'd like introduced would be the option to delay the answer to a non-critical email, just to prevent a conversation that will be most likely unnecessary from happening. Just select how long it would be until the email to be sent and then relax and move on to the next one. Another use for this I think would be the apologize email, or those related to shame (shame is the number one reason for people committing suicide, by the way). You see the other is online and you don't want him to answer right away, this is a life saver.
The third and final option would actually be an application of the previous one, the ability to program an email to be sent after a pre-determined period of time. Handy when dealing with birthdays of people you don't really want or have to call. I would love to have this as I often remember anniversaries the day before and forget about them the next.
All in all, if the dev team introduced this, I think that they'd step Gmail ahead of Yahoo! Mail for good and in a hurry. Current predictions have Google's email service catching up to Yahoo's in 2010.
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