Gmail by Google beta logo. Courtesy Google. A year after it launched its Gmail beta on April Fool's day, Google has released some significant upgrades to its Gmail e-mail service (no joke). The most notable of these new features is the addition of a rich text formatting tool that effectively transforms Gmail into a simple word processor. The features match or best those Microsoft offers with the WordPad software included in Windows.

One very nice feature of the rich text formatter is the Remove Formatting button. You can remove some or all text formatting with one click. The feature is a little buggy as it doesn't always remove all of the formatting of heavily-styled text on the first attempt but it's an excellent feature from a usability standpoint. It sounds so simple and logical that a user should be able to select any or all text and remove the formatting with a click but, as far as I have been able to determine, Google is the first to implement it.

Google has also doubled the amount of storage it provides to two gigabytes (GB) and has said that it will continue to incrementally increase that amount over time.

Just Launched!

G is for growth
Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn't mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we're giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able. We know that email will only become more important in people's lives, and we want Gmail to keep up with our users and their needs. From Gmail, you can expect more.

We're not in the plains anymore
Fonts, bullets and highlighting, oh my! Gmail now offers rich text formatting. And over 60 colors of the rainbow. Discover a land of more than just black and white. Learn more

The one-upsmanship comes barely a week after Yahoo announced it would increase the amount of storage it provides its own free e-mail accounts to match Gmail's previous 1GB. Yahoo and Microsoft Hotmail increased their free storage limits from a miserly 2-4 megabytes (MB) to 250MB in response to Google's GMail launch last year.

I'm waiting to see how Microsoft responds to its biggest competitors in this space.