Not only can the be another Gmail, but there's also a huge need for it. Gmail lags quite a lot (even on fast connections), and the price you have to pay to get it for free is the fact that Google builds a huge database on your person/interests, and that American authorities have easy access to your data because of the Patriot Act.

I'd much rather pay a small sum of money to a provider in Europe ( = better privacy laws).

I disagree with your view of CodeIgniter. It's one of the best documented frameworks out there; it's quick to learn; and it doesn't require a lot of typing/coding. It's best suited for smaller projects, I would say, but for those projects it rocks.

CodeIgniter's documentation is indeed very good. Much better than Symfony2's, at least. I'd agree with you on that.

CodeIgniter also has no conception of how to actually work in PHP5.3. Perhaps CodeIgniter will acquire that down the road, but right now it's a poor routing kernel surrounded by a lot of inconsistent and very ugly modules that are duplicated or improved upon in the other major frameworks in common use.

"Doesn't require a lot of coding" is nonsensical; I can build a Symfony2 application to do nontrivial task in less time, with better and more reliable code, than I can the equivalent in CodeIgniter. And I used CodeIgniter since around the time of the original release. There are not many cases where something is top-to-bottom dominant in its field, but aside from documentation, which is being improved upon incrementally, Symfony2 really does fit that bill.