I think, today the best E-Mail-Solution with most advantages free of charge is the combination of UNLIMITED AOL Web-Mail Archive (IMAP) with Mozilla Thunderbird as a User Interface, which has nearly all useful features, that the professional commercial product Outlook has.
For detailed Information about 6 disadvantages of Web-GMail compared with Thunderbird/Outlook/AOL mail see: http://gsfn.us/t/btop
In Addition to this GMail has the little mistake: By the GMail filters, which delete mails AND place a label, the label is substituted after some days with the empty label "".
Details and voting-possibility see in German: http://www.googlewatchblog.de/wishlist/wish/561/