According to CNET News.com, Google will soon offer you the ability to do just this:
“The idea is that your mail can stay in there forever,” said Wayne Rosing, vice president of engineering at Google. “You can always index it, always search it, and always find things from the past. […] The way we’d like to say it is that part of our mission is to organize and present all the world’s information, and e-mail’s part of that information that currently is not well organized. That is the rubric under which we offer this.”
Great idea. The catch is, you have to get your email through them. Wouldn’t it be great if you could google your email from any email account, without having to lock yourself into an email provider?
The word over at Slashdot is that this might be an April Fools joke.
Though this tends to make it look like it’s pretty serious: http://www.gmail.com/
Makes perfect sense to me. If this is their idea of a joke, then they’re a joke..