You've heard about this Gmail thing that Google announced a couple of weeks ago, which is a free web-based email service with 1 GB of mail storage per account that has all those privacy watchdogs freaking out about what the company's going to do with your only-sort-of-deleted messages. We hadn't mentioned it until now because it's been pretty off-topic even by our standards (or lack thereof), but now we see that Alex Salkever over at BusinessWeek has turned Gmail into a viable Apple-related plot point by insisting that it threatens to render Apple's own .Mac service "obsolete."

Now, we want to be perfectly clear, here: we fully support everyone's right to his or her own opinion, no matter how patently absurd said opinion might be. Likewise, for the most part we feel that each person's choice of whether or not to use recreational pharmaceuticals is his or her own business, provided it's done in the privacy and safety of their homes so it doesn't endanger others.

That said, it's our personal opinion that Alex Salkever should consider upgrading to some higher-quality crack.

See, Salkever's claim is that while .Mac subscribers get "a veritable bag of goodies" for their 99 clams per year, most of those goodies are eclipsed by Gmail's massive-storage email account. For instance, iDisk: "when Google adds the capability to download Gmail to desktop clients," iDisk becomes redundant because "most people store files as email attachments anyway."

Um... yeah. So, can we get a show of hands from all those people in the viewing audience who, for example, finish editing a big iMovie project, email the project files to themselves, and then trash the originals just so they can find all their files as attachments to messages in their inbox? Anyone?

We're not seeing a lot of hands, here. And maybe that's just because, well, we can't actually see any of you, but somehow we don't think the results would be all that much different if we could. And yet Salkever also claims that Gmail can replace .Mac's free copy of Virex, too, presumably because, again, you'd store all your files as email attachments, so Gmail can scan them for viruses for you. Which makes perfect sense provided you "store files as email attachments anyway" and never, for example, download a file from a web site instead of from an email message. Right.

Personally, we happily shell out $99 a year for a .Mac account-- and we literally don't even use the email. We consider .Mac well worth the price for its tight integration with Apple's iApps; select a bunch of snapshots in iPhoto, click a button, and bam-- instant live web page. Ditto for sharing iMovies. And call us nuts, but an auto-synchronizing locally-stored iDisk built right into the Finder strikes us as an online storage and distribution system that's a whole lot less hassle than this insane concept of storing all our files as email attachments. Meanwhile, what about iSync? We've found it invaluable to maintain the same contact info, calendars, and bookmarks across our several Macs, iPods, and Palm-based smartphones-- and we can even get to all that same data from any web browser if we need to. Virex and Backup (plus some free software now and then) are just icing on the cake.

Not that we're opposed to Salkever's suggestion that Apple explore the possibility of an Apple-branded version of Gmail, because who knows? Maybe it would be a good match; it never hurts to explore. But we just don't buy this whole premise that the imminent coming of Gmail somehow makes .Mac irrelevant-- maybe not even from an email-only perspective, because, privacy issues aside, the thing doesn't even support Safari yet.

Somehow we have a feeling we'll be renewing with .Mac come September...