Did you realize that Gmail is still in beta? Have you noticed that you still have a limited number Gmail invites? Huh?

You can call an application "beta" all you want, but when thousands of people (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) depend on it on a daily basis, it’s no longer beta. Gmail has been launched by consensus which means it’s time for Google to tighten it up.

Rather than continuing to add features, I would much rather see Google bulletproof the features they already have and officially launch it so I can stop dealing with issues like these:

• A surprising number of errors. Yesterday, the attachment scanner wasn’t working. Today, clicking emails in my inbox is sometimes a NO-OP. I often have to click send several times to actually get an email to send. These are basic operations, no?
• Since the recent update, only my Gmail contacts auto-complete in the "to" field. I don’t know if this is a bug, or if this is designed to make me try to convince all my non-Gmail contacts to switch to Gmail, but it’s extremely annoying, and it’s not how it used to work.
• If you have Gmail configured for multiple accounts, and your reply to a message that wasn’t sent to your Gmail account, the new message always defaults to being from your Gmail account rather than the account the email was sent to.

None of this is to say that I don’t like Gmail. Quite the contrary, in fact. I switched to Gmail after years of using Yahoo! Mail, and I’ve never looked back. And their new IMAP support was just what I needed to make getting mail on my iPhone bearable. However, whether Google likes it or not, Gmail is no longer in beta. So as we say in the software industry, lock it down, bake it, and ship it!

Update: Thanks, Soheil, for pointing out that Google has addressed the third point about the from address. That just made my day!