  Sergey Brin says POP3 capability is coming to GMail: urlLink Google's Brin Talks on Gmail Future : "No, I think that's an important question. And in fact, as we're working on providing forwarding [and] POP3, that's an important consideration there as well. I don't have a great answer; we're still brainstorming. " Also Brin suggests that the beta period will be "3 to 6 months": How long do you think this beta feedback process is going to be?
I think it'll take three to six months or so. We're getting a lot of good feedback; we've already made a number of changes. Probably the big ones are feature requests that we need to deal with, and there are some significant ones there. I don't know how many of those we'll be able to get in prior to making it more broadly available. 
