Gmail, officially Google Mail in Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom, is a free Web-based email (Webmail) and POP3 e-mail service provided by Google. It was released on April 1, 2004 as a private beta release by invitation only, and was opened to all as a public beta on February 7, 2007.

This service offers more than 2,879 megabytes of free storage (as of July 2007), a search-oriented interface and a unique 'conversation view'. Gmail is well-known for its use of the Ajax programming technique in its design.

The service provides over 2800 megabytes of free storage (as of July 2007), increased from the original limit of 1 GB. This change was announced on April 1, 2005, and was made for the first anniversary of Gmail. The announcement was accompanied by a statement that Google would "keep giving people more space forever". All Google will say about this now is that it will keep increasing by the second as long as they have enough space on their servers. Gmail's storage will increase with 145 MB a year (equating to almost 0.4 MB per day). If the present growth rate continues unchanged, storage capacity will reach 3 gigabytes by the middle of 2008. Gmail can also be used as an alternative hard drive.

The Gmail Inbox
Developer:	Google
OS:	Cross-platform (web-based application)
Genre:	POP3 e-mail, Webmail
Website:	mail.google.com

Interface

Programming

Gmail makes extensive use of Ajax (specifically, the AjaXSLT framework), employing modern browser features such as JavaScript, keyboard access keys and Web feed integration, allowing for a rich user experience, while retaining the benefits of a web application.

Gmail offers a "standard without chat" view. This is the regular standard view without the chat functionality. Opera 8+ supports "standard" view, but Gmail requires that Opera report itself to be Internet Explorer to serve the "standard" view with chat.

Organization

Advanced search strings can be constructed, using either the Advanced Search interface, or search operators in the search box. Search options include search for phrases, message sender, message location and message date.

Filters can also be run by using an interface similar to the Search Options dialog (see searching below). Gmail allows users to filter messages by their text; by their From, To, and Subject fields; and by whether or not the message has an attachment. Gmail can perform any combination of the following actions upon a message that meets a label's criteria: Archiving (i.e. removing the message from the Inbox), marking as "starred", applying a label, moving to the trash, and forwarding to another e-mail address.

Gmail recognizes related messages, and groups them into "conversations", where associated messages are listed one after another, with the newest messages at the bottom. If a conversation has more than approximately 100 messages, it splits it into separate sections.

To organize messages further, e-mails can be labeled. Labels give users a flexible method of categorizing e-mails since an e-mail may have any number of labels (in contrast to a system in which an e-mail may belong to only one folder). Users can display all e-mails having a particular label and can use labels as a search criterion.

Contacts

Gmail automatically saves contact details when e-mails are sent to an unknown recipient. If the user changes, adds, or removes information near an e-mail such as the name while sending any e-mail, it also updates that in the contact list. When a user starts typing in the To, CC or BCC fields it brings up a list with the relevant contacts, with their name and primary e-mail address. More information, including alternate email addresses, can be added on the Contacts page. These contacts can also be added to a group, which makes sending multiple e-mails to related contacts easier. Images can be added to contacts, which will appear whenever the mouse is over the contact's name.

Contacts can be imported in several different ways, from Microsoft Office Outlook, Eudora, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, orkut, and any other contact list capable of being exported as a CSV file. Gmail also allows a user to export their contacts to CSV.

Composition

A year after Gmail was announced, Rich Text Formatting was introduced, which allows the font size, color and text-alignment to be customized, as well as the embedding of bullet points and numbered lists.

Autosave is another feature in Gmail - a system for avoiding loss of data in case of a browser crash or other error. When composing an e-mail, a draft copy of the message and any attachments are saved automatically. Although messages begin to be saved once a minute, saving times vary depending on the size of the message.

Security

By default, Gmail uses an unencrypted connection to retrieve user data, encrypting only the connection used for the login page. However, by changing the URL from http://mail.google.com/mail/ to https://mail.google.com/mail/, Gmail can be told to use a secure connection, reducing the risk of third-party eavesdropping on users' information, such as emails and contacts, which are transmitted in plaintext as JavaScript data in the page source code. POP3 access uses Transport Layer Security, or TLS.

Although TLS is used when one sends email via an email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird, it seems that it is not used when the email is sent from the Gmail servers to the destination domain's mail exchangers, so at some stage your email message will still be transmitted in plaintext.

Gmail offers a spam filtering system. According to Gmail, messages marked as spam are automatically deleted after 30 days, but there have been reports on Gmail Help Discussion of spam mails staying in the spam folder for months.

All incoming and outgoing e-mails are automatically scanned for viruses in e-mail attachments. If a virus is found on an attachment the reader is trying to open, Gmail will try to remove the virus and open the newly cleaned attachment. Gmail also scans all outgoing attachments, and will prevent the message being sent if a virus is found. Executable files are automatically blocked by the Anti-Virus system.

Gmail is also one of the first major e-mail providers to sign outgoing mails with Yahoo!'s DomainKeys signatures.

Server

Gmail runs on the Google GFE/1.3 server, which is hosted on a Linux Operating System.

Addresses

Gmail supports plus-addressing of e-mails. Messages can be sent to addresses in the format username+extratext@gmail.com, where extratext can be any string, and will arrive in the inbox of username@gmail.com. This allows users to sign up for different services with different aliases and then easily filter all e-mails from those services. However, a significant number of services do not support email addresses containing plus signs.

Gmail allows the user to add other email accounts to be used as optional sender addresses on outgoing email. A verification process is performed to confirm the user's ownership of each email address before it is added. "Plus-addresses" can also be added as sender addresses in the same way. Moreover, any of the additional addresses can be set as the default address.

When using this feature, the address chosen will appear in the "From:" field of the email. However, the Gmail account used to actually send the message is easily seen, as it either appears on a "Sender:" field in the email header, or in the message's subject field. Some mail clients will write "From: Sender@gmail.com [mailto:Sender@gmail.com] On Behalf Of..." upon reply, making it very obvious.

Optionally, a different "Reply-to:" address can be set for each "send as" address.

Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within a username. Instead, it will ignore all dots in a username. For instance, the account google@gmail.com receives mail sent to goo.gle@gmail.com, g.o.o.g.l.e@gmail.com, etc. Likewise, the account goo.gle@gmail.comgoogle@gmail.com. This can be useful in setting filters for incoming mail. However, when signing in, it is necessary to include any dots used in the creation of the account. Also note that this does not work in Google Apps for Your Domain. In Apps, each username variation must be entered as a nickname by the domain administrator. receives mail sent to

Mail fetcher

In addition to adding extra email addresses, Gmail has a feature called "Mail Fetcher" that allows users to add up to five additional accounts to retrieve mail from via POP3. The configuration is relatively simple, and offers many options. Once accounts are added, the user is asked if they want to create a custom sender address (see above) automatically if they have not yet done so manually. This feature does not work with IMAP synchronization, nor does it support sending messages through an external SMTP server.

Product integration

Google Talk, Google's service for instant messaging, can be accessed through a web based interface on Gmail's site. The web based interface does not support voice calling. All messages are archived to the Chats mailbox in Gmail unless 'Off the Record' is enabled in Google Talk. Another Google Talk integration feature is voicemail, where the message is sent to the recipient's Gmail inbox; as well as synchronizing contact pictures.

Google Calendar offered Gmail integration soon after it was announced on April 13, 2006. Events can be added while writing a message that get stored on the main Calendar interface. Recipients who use Gmail will then receive an invitation to the event, which they can accept or decline. Furthermore, Gmail attempts to recognize event dates and locations within e-mails, and gives users the option to add the event to a calendar, similarly to Microsoft's Exchange Server.

Further integration is offered with some other Google products. Documents, spreadsheets and presentations can be opened using Google Docs & Spreadsheets, without downloading the file to a hard disk first. Also, pictures can be sent directly from Picasa using a Gmail account.

Browser support

Gmail is available on any computer with one of these supported browsers: Internet Explorer 5.5+, Mozilla Application Suite 1.4+, Firefox 0.8+, Safari 1.2.1+, K-Meleon 0.9+, Netscape 7.1+, Opera 9+. It works well in the AOL 9.0 browser, but may have problems with earlier AOL browser versions. Gmail also offers "Basic HTML view" to allow users to access the Gmail messages from almost any computer running browsers that do not fully support the more advanced features, such as Internet Explorer 4.0+, Netscape 4.07+ or Opera 6.03+, or users with JavaScript disabled. Gmail's Help Center provides a list of fully supported browsers. Gmail has recently also become available as a downloadable application for mobile phones as well as WAP-enabled mobile phones. It also works on the PSPNintendo Wii's Internet Channel and Nintendo DS Opera Browser web browsers but is not fully supported. and PS3,

Language support

The Gmail interface currently supports 40 languages, which include most of the US English features, including: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK), English (US), Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Applications

Google has developed several smaller applications, with attempts to increase user productivity, expand into business sectors and making Gmail available on mobile devices.

Gmail Notifier, an official tool offered by Google, displays a small icon in the notification area (see Taskbar) in Microsoft Windows and on the right-hand side of the menu bar in Mac OS X, indicating the presence of new mail in one's inbox. It also has a feature that makes Gmail the default mail client for mailto links. It does not, however, download new messages. For Linux there are several unofficial notifiers available. It should be noted that the Gmail Notifier does not work with Gmail For Your Domain.

On February 10, 2006, Google introduced Gmail For Your Domain. All companies who participated in the beta testing were allowed to use Gmail through their own domain. Since then, Google have developed Google Apps, which includes customizable versions of Google Calendar, Google Page Creator and more. With various editions available, it targets enterprises as well as small businesses.

On November 2, 2006, Google began offering a mobile-application based version of its Gmail product for mobile phones capable of running Java applications . Those interested in using the application can download it from gmail.com/app directly from their mobile phone. In addition, Sprint Nextel announced separately that it would make the application available from its Vision and Power Vision homepages and which will be preloaded onto some new Sprint phones. The application gives Gmail its own custom menu system, which is much easier to navigate than a Web-based application would be on a cell phone. Gmail's message threading also shows up clearly, and the site displays attachments (like photos, Word documents) in the application.

Development history

 

Announcement

Gmail was a project begun by Google developer Paul Buchheit years before it was ever announced to the public. For several years, the software was available only internally, as an email client for Google employees.

Gmail was finally announced to the public in 2004 amid a flurry of rumor. Owing to April Fool's Day, however, the company's press release was greeted with skepticism in the technology world, especially since Google already had been known to make April Fool's Jokes (such as PigeonRank). However, they explained that their real joke had been a press release saying that they would take offshoring to the extreme by putting employees in a "Google Copernicus Center" on the Moon. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of products, was quoted by BBC News as saying, "We are very serious about Gmail."

Registration

When Gmail was first announced, access to the service was limited to those who have an invitation from an existing account holder, from Blogger, or through their mobile phone. Creating a Gmail account without an invitation required a text messaging-enabled mobile phone. Initially however, account holders received their invitations after being on a waiting list previous to the launch. Google stated that the invitation system intended to initially reduce the amount of abuse, as spammers are unable to make a large number of accounts. When the invitation system was in use, account holders were given up to 100 account invitations to send out to other e-mail addresses.

On August 9, 2006, Gmail registration was made available to anyone in Australia and New Zealand, in Japan since August 23, 2006 and in Egypt since December 3, 2006.

On February 7, 2007, Gmail registration was made public in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Russia, Japan, and Hong Kong.

On February 14, 2007, Gmail registration was made public globally, so anyone could register for a Gmail account.

Domain name

Before being acquired by Google, the gmail.com domain name was used by a free e-mail service offered by Garfield.com, online home of the comic strip Garfield. After moving to a different domain, the service has since been discontinued.

As of June 22, 2005, Gmail's canonical URI has been changed to http://mail.google.com/mail/ instead of http://gmail.google.com/gmail/.

Awards

Gmail was ranked second in PC World's "The 100 Best Products of 2005", behind Mozilla Firefox. Gmail also won 'Honorable Mention' in the Bottom Line Design Awards 2005. Gmail has drawn many favorable reviews from users because of its available space and unique organization.

Criticisms

Privacy

Google automatically scans e-mails to add context-sensitive advertisements to them. Privacy advocates raised concerns that the plan involved scanning their personal, assumed private, e-mails, and that this was a security problem. Allowing e-mail content to be read, even by a computer, raises the risk that the expectation of privacy in e-mail will be reduced. Furthermore, e-mail that non-subscribers choose to send to Gmail accounts is scanned by Gmail as well. These senders of e-mail did not agree to Gmail's terms of service or privacy policy. Google can change its privacy policy unilaterally, and Google is technically able to cross-reference cookies across its information-rich product line to make dossiers on individuals. However, here again, the practice is standard across all email systems—it is the only way spam mail checkers can function. When one's e-mail is checked to see if it is spam, it is being scanned by the same process.

What privacy advocates also consider problematic is the lack of disclosed data retention and correlation policies. It is possible for Google to combine information contained in a person's emails with information about their Internet searches. It is not known how long such information would be kept, and how it could be used. One of the concerns is that it could be of interest to law enforcement agencies. More than 30 privacy and civil liberties organizations have urged Google to suspend Gmail service until these issues are resolved.

There has also been criticism regarding Gmail's privacy policy, for example the clause "Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems". Google continues to reply to this criticism by pointing out that Gmail is using mostly industry-wide practices. Google later stated that they will "make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical."

Service

Users have found their accounts temporarily unavailable from time to time.

Gmail does not run Internet Message Access Protocol services.

When sending emails from Gmail accounts, the error "Message rejected for Sector 5 policy reasons" can occur. This has been occurring to Gmail users since May 2006. As of April 2007 there is no explanation of what these reasons are.

The sending limit of 500 recipients or the use of an undisclosed but low (under 25) number of broken email addresses as recipients results in a hold on any account that violates the policy. No sending of email is allowed during this period of at least 24 hours. No warning or other notification is given.

From time to time, the join feature joins mails with nothing in common, and unjoins mails from the same thread.

Gmail does not allow users to send or receive executable files, or archives containing executable files.

In Basic HTML mode, large text-only messages are not displayed in their entirety.

Web interface

When the conversation view groups related messages in a linear stack, they can be expanded and collapsed. There is no option to differentiate messages that branch off from the original thread. This can occur when mail is sent to multiple recipients who respond individually, or when someone changes the subject line of a message he or she is responding to.

Support for entering bi-directional text is currently available only in the Arabic and Hebrew interfaces.

There is often difficulty to submit e-mail addresses from the Gmail address book to the addressee line on the compose e-mail window. The "Autocomplete" feature is problematic and does not work under all browsers or operating systems. If an e-mail address begins with a different character than the first letter of the addressee's name, then a sender must try each alphanumeric character until the correct address is prompted. However, it is possible to open the composed message in a new window so the address book can be opened, or another instance of gmail can be opened in another window to access the address book. Gmail's current documented help on this issue states: "While Gmail doesn't currently support the functionality to open your Contacts list while composing a message, we're testing many new features to improve our service."

Although Gmail's advertisements are often praised for being unobtrusive, they can actually take up more space than flash-based banners when up to six "sponsored links" are displayed next to an email. Additionally, opening emails makes the Web Clips RSS-feed bar (if activated) display another sponsored link. Often the amount of advertisements displayed in the Web Clips bar outnumbers the number of RSS feeds the user has requested. However, when a gmail message is sent to another email address of a different provider, there will be no advertisements in the message like most other email providers.

Gmail encourages top-posting by placing the cursor above quoted text when replying. Regardless of how a received message is formatted, Gmail's conversation view defaults to showing only unique content, in chronological order, making posting style irrelevant to the Gmail user.

Unlike most other webmail services, Gmail's default mode does not allow for emails to be opened in a new tab or window. But this can be done if one switches to the "Basic HTML" mode.

Trademark disputes

Germany

On July 4, 2005, Google announced that Gmail Deutschland would be rebranded to Google Mail. From that point forward, visitors originating from an IP address determined to be in Germany would be forwarded to googlemail.com where they could obtain an email address containing the new domain. Any German user who wants a gmail.com address must sign up for an account through a proxy. German users who were already registered were allowed to keep their old addresses.

The German naming issue is due to a trademark dispute between Google and Daniel Giersch. Daniel Giersch owns a company called "G-mail" which provides the service of printing out emails from senders and sending the print-out via postal mail to the intended recipients. On 30 January 2007, Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market ruled in favor of Giersch.

On April Fool's Day 2007, Google made fun of G-Mail by introducing "Gmail Paper", where a user could click a button and Gmail would actually mail a hard copy.

Poland

In February 2007, Google filed legal action against the owners of gmail.pl, a poet group known in full as Grupa Młodych Artystów i Literatów abbreviated GMAiL (literally, "Group of Young Artists and Writers").

United Kingdom

On October 19, 2005, the United Kingdom version of Gmail was also converted to Google Mail, because "Gmail" is trademarked by another company in the UK. Users who registered before the switch to Google Mail faced no problems whatsoever—they were able to keep their Gmail address, although the logo in the top-left corner of their Gmail page appeared as Google Mail. New users would sign up with googlemail.com address. Again, a proxy would be used for those wishing to sign up with a gmail.com account. If the user had signed up with Google Mail, e-mail sent to their equivalent address ending in gmail.com would still be received (as with the other way around).

Mainland China

In mainland China there is an IT company named gmail.cn which supplies yourname@gmail.cn  addresses.

Competition

 

After Gmail's initial announcement and development, many existing web mail services quickly increased their storage capacity. For example, Hotmail went from giving some users 2 MB to 25 MB (250 MB after 30 days, and 2 GB for Hotmail Plus accounts), while Yahoo! Mail went from 4 MB to 100 MB (and 2 GB for Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts). Yahoo! Mail storage then proceeded to 250 MB,in late April of 2005, to 1 GB. Yahoo! Mail announced that it would be providing unlimited storage to all its users in March 2007 and began providing it in May 2007. These were all seen as moves to stop existing users from switching to Gmail, and to capitalize on the newly rekindled public interest in web mail services. The desire to catch up was especially visible for MSN Hotmail, which upgraded its e-mail storage erratically from 250 MB to the new Windows Live Hotmail which includes 2 GB of storage. As of November 2006 MSN Hotmail upgraded all free accounts to have 1 GB of storage. In August of 2005, AOL started providing all AIM screen names with their own e-mail accounts with 2 GB of storage. Another source of competition came from 30Gigs who were offering 30 gigabytes of storage, initially through invite only but now available publicly.

Every Gmail account which is inactive for 6 months is labeled dormant, and 3 months later (a total of 9 months), may get deactivated by Gmail. All stored messages would get deleted if that were to happen. Other webmail services, like Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Hotmail, have different, often shorter, times for marking an account as inactive; Yahoo! Mail deactivates dormant accounts after four months, and Windows Live Hotmail deactivates free accounts after two months (previously one).

Other than the general increase of storage limit, there has also been an improvement of the e-mail interfaces of Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail after the launch of Gmail. Gmail's ability to have an attachment size of 10 MB was also matched by Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail during 2005. Following the footsteps of Gmail, Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! Mail Beta service and Microsoft launched Windows Live Hotmail, both now incorporating Ajax interfaces. Google increased the maximum attachment size to 20 MB in May 2007.

With Google Apps, a hosted package that includes Gmail, Google is competing with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Exchange Server.