our first product allowed you to create personal and brand icons - we're not there yet with this one. we hacked it together after going down the stand-alone client path for almost a year
I could write about that experience for days (for all you folks dead set on building a new client)
You can actually use Gmail's native features to hack our product to make it more powerful - i'll be posting about that next week...we also plan to gamify. So much to do, so little time.
Stick with us...