I'm realizing a really bad flaw exists in the GMail setup. How do you find old mail where you know the contact, but don't know the words. I e-mailed myself a photo sometime in February of last year, but I have like 2000 e-mails to scroll through to get back to it. Gmail doesn't allow you to select a set of dates to go back to, or isolate messages by sender. Its all about search (of course, because if I'm not searching then they can't place as many ads against it). Now that I think about it, searching my endless archive of mail is just as inefficient as searching the internet with Google. There's no context to anything... dates or otherwise.
Now... perhaps if there was a technology that adds user generated context to content... [cough] ta-ahhem...tag-ahem... tags [cough] [cough].