Gmail

For other uses, see Gmail (disambiguation).

Gmail

Gmail's beta logo Gmail's beta logo
Gmail screenshot Gmail screenshot Gmail Inbox
Developer(s)	Google
Operating system	Cross-platform (web-based application)
Type	POP3 e-mail, Webmail
Website	https://mail.google.com, http://www.gmail.com

Gmail, known as Google Mail in Germany and the United Kingdom, is a free Webmail and POP3 e-mail service provided by Google. It was released on April 1, 2004 as a by-invitation beta, and was opened to public use on February 8, 2007 across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Brazil, Australia, Russia and Japan. It is still invitation only in other areas.

This service offers over 2.8 GB of file storage, a search-oriented interface and a unique 'conversation view'. Gmail is well-known for the use of Ajax programming in its design.

Features

Storage

The service is notable for providing around 2.8 gigabytes (as of February 2007) of e-mail storage space, increased from the original limit of 1 GB. This change was announced on April 1, 2005, and was made for the one-year 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. Although Gmail's storage space continuously goes up, Google is increasing the inbox capacity by 4.5 bytes per second (as of 21 January 2007). The growth rate was faster when the announcement was first made. If the present growth rate continues unchanged, storage capacity will reach 3 gigabytes by the middle of 2008.

Interface

Programming

Gmail makes intensive 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 mask itself as 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 located 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; 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 are 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. Functions for adding HTML code, tables, images and smilies are also included.

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

Gmail offers secure connections to the Gmail servers, reducing the risk of eavesdropping. Most web-based mail systems such as Hotmail only use https during the log-on stage when username and password are sent. With Gmail it is possible to use the secure connection throughout the entire session, including reading and writing of e-mails. For POP3 based access Transport Layer Security (TLS) is used.

Although TLS is used when you send 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.

Addresses

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 "To:" field of the email. However, the original Gmail account can still be traced, as it either appears on a "Sender:" field in the email header, or in the message's subject field. Optionally, a different "Reply-to:" address can be set for each "send as" address.

In addition to adding extra email addresses, Google is [getmail.html rolling out] 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. It is currently being enabled slowly for certain users. Google has not made a statement regarding when the feature will be available to all users of the service. This feature does not work with IMAP synchronization, nor does it support sending messages through an external SMTP server.

Gmail also 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. 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.

Google states that "Gmail doesn't recognize dots (.) as characters within a username. This way, you can add and remove dots to your username for desired address variations." 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.com receives mail sent to google@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.

Underscores and hyphens cannot be included in Gmail addresses.

Product integration

Gmail displaying a chat window.

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.

Soon after Google Calendar was announced on April 13, 2006, it was integrated with Gmail. 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. This competes with Microsoft's Exchange Server.

Gmail is also a google account and provides integration with many google products including:- Google Groups, Google Maps, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Picasa, Google Alerts, Google Co-op, Google Notebook, Google Page Creator and Google Search History

Browser support

Gmail is available on any computer with a supported browser: 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+. 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 PSP and Nintendo DS Opera Browser web browsers, but is not fully supported.

Language support

File:Gmail inbox in Japanese.jpg

Gmail supports multiple languages; here, its Japanese interface.

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, 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 make 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. Now, other Google services have been added to the product, including Google Calendar, Google Page Creator and Google Talk.

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. Gmail mobile isn't officially supported outside the United States (as at December 2006)

Development history

Main article: History of Gmail

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 only available 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. 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 and Africa, Brazil, Australia, Russia and Japan.

Domain name

Before being acquired by Google, the gmail.com domain name was used by the free e-mail service offered by Garfield.com, online home of the comic strip Garfield. This free e-mail service has moved to e-garfield.com.

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/.

Alliance with Sky

On 6 December 2006, British Sky Broadcasting released details of a Sky and Google alliance. This includes a feature where Gmail will link with Sky and host a mail service for Sky, incorporating the email domain "@sky.com".

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.[1] Gmail has drawn many favorable reviews from users because of its available space and unique organization..

Criticisms

Criticism on the web client

The conversation view groups related messages in a linear stack that 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.

Google Calendar is not available through all non-US Gmail interfaces. However, if non-US users change their language to English (US) they can access these services.

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

Criticism on the service

Users have found their accounts disabled for no apparent reason.

There is no automatic reply system for unwanted mail (imitating a mail-daemon message) to let senders of unwanted mail believe the account is not valid.

Gmail does not run IMAP 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 January 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.

Privacy

There has 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."

Most of the criticism, however, was against Google's plans to add context-sensitive advertisements to e-mails by automatically scanning 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, for advertising purposes, raises the risk that the expectation of privacy in e-mail will be reduced. Furthermore, non-subscribers' e-mail is scanned by Gmail as well, and these senders of e-mail did not agree to Gmail's terms of service or privacy policy. Also taken into account is the fact that Google can change its privacy policy unilaterally, and that Google is technically able to cross-reference cookies across its information-rich product line to make dossiers on individuals. However, again the practice is standard across all email systems—it is the only way spam mail checkers can work.

Opponents of these views state that when one's e-mail is checked to see if it is spam, it is being scanned by the same process. Because a human is not reading the message, they say, it is not a problem.

What privacy advocates also consider another problem 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 rights organizations have urged Google to suspend Gmail service until these issues are resolved.

Trademark disputes

Germany

File:Google Mail.gif

The Google Mail logo.

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 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.

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.

On December 14 2006, at a cost of over $4 million dollars, Google obtained the rights to the gmail.co.uk domain and is now accepting gmail.com addresses for United Kingdom users.

Competition

See also: Comparison of webmail providers

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, and finally, in late April of 2005, to 1 GB. 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 (beta) which includes 2 GB of storage over a number of months. 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 example of competition came from 30Gigs who were offering 30 gigabytes of storage, and was also invite only, but now offers free accounts for anyone.

Every account which is inactive for 6 months is labeled dormant, and 3 months later (a total of 9 months), gets deactivated by Gmail. All stored messages get deleted and the account gets "recycled", which means the account name can be used by any other user afterwards. Other webmail services, like Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, have different, often shorter, times for marking an account as inactive. Yahoo! Mail deactivates dormant accounts after four months, while 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.

Between "Google for your Domain" and Google Calendar, Gmail is competing directly with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Exchange Server.

See also

• List of Google services and tools
• Google File System (GFS)

Add-Ins

• PhpGmailDrive
• Gmail Drive
• GmailFS
• RoamDrive

External links

• Gmail
• Jim's Gmail Tips
• Lifehacker's Gmail Tips
• Gmail: The problem with spam mails - shortcomings in the way Gmail handles spam mails