If you have not have had the opportunity to be invited to try out GMail, the new email service from Google, now in beta testing, this good article outlines the clear benefits and advantages of this promising service.

GMail turns upside down many of the expectations and habits we have built over time when using standard email applications, but it certainly appears to be heading in directions that allows greater ease of use and extended applications.

"The paradigm shift, however, will be the least of Google's problems. With its search engine advertising practices under constant scrutiny, Google faces myriad new issues by attaching targeted advertisements to emails, potentially a gross invasion of privacy. At the same time, the advertisements for mandolin dealers and instructors that come attached to posts to the mandolin mailing list are almost as valuable as the posts themselves."

And this is the area that fascinates me the most. I am in absolute agreement with this statement about the effectiveness of mandolin dealer ads in a targeted email list and am wondering indeed how to capitalize the exceptional power of such non-intrusive, relevant, contextual ads inside my own text-based and HTML newsletters.

But is Google GMail really the best service to leverage contextual targeted ads inside email-based newsletters? Do they allow uploading of a distribution list of some thousands addresses? Is then Google Groups the possible candidate? What do you see?