It's a new free web-based email (like hotmail or yahoo) except it offers 1 GIG of online storage, and also has a great way of sorting your email, so you can use a Google search to find old messages. Also if you have a lot of messages where the conversation has gone "back and forth"with lots of replies, it saves it as a conversation - rather like a PT thread, making it easy to refer back to previous mails!

Of course getting in early means there is a greater chance that you will get the exact name you want, before all the good ones are taken.