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Gmail

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For the Norwegian email systems vendor, see GMail (X.400 vendor).
Gmail's beta logo
Gmail's beta logo

Gmail is a free webmail service, currently in beta testing, created by Google.

For more than a year after Gmail's initial release on March 31, 2004, access to the service was restricted to those who had received an invitation token from an existing account holder.

While Gmail is not entirely open to the general public yet, most Gmail users have many invites to spare, as Google has lately been giving quite a few of these out. Gmail invites are also given away at random through Google's home page.

The service is notable for providing over 2.1 gigabytes of storage space—an increase from the former limit of 1 gigabyte. This change was announced on April Fool's Day 2005, and was made for the one-year anniversary of Gmail. This also occurred partly because its competitor Yahoo! decided to give users 1GB of space (starting May 2005). This number continues increasing, and all Google will say is that it will keep increasing as long as they have enough space on their servers. Gmail makes intensive use of modern browser features such as JavaScript and keyboard access keys, allowing for a richer user experience, while retaining the benefits of a web application (most importantly, immediate availability of the service on any computer with a supported browser).

File:Gmail inbox.png
Gmail inbox
The main inbox view, as rendered by the Mozilla Firefox browser. Rather than showing individual emails, Gmail groups emails into threads, with the number of messages in each indicated by a bracketed number. In this image, one thread, shown with a white background and bolded text, has an unread message.

Features

Gmail includes a number of original features as well as improvements upon those standard to web mail services.

File:Gmail threaded.png
Thread view
A number of messages in the same email thread are shown. The user can expand and unexpand any message (quickly, using only client-side JavaScript functionality) to view the content of any number of emails simultaneously

Conversation views

Among the main innovations of Gmail is its method of categorizing e-mails, which Google calls Conversation View. In contrast to other e-mail clients, Gmail keeps track of individual "conversations" (an original message, along with all the replies to that message), and allows users to easily view all the e-mails related to a specific message. Gmail's algorithm for determining how conversations fit together is not perfect, however: Single conversations sometimes become fragmented (especially when a replier changes the e-mail's subject line) and unrelated conversations occasionally become attached together.

Filtering

Filters can be run on incoming mail 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 email address.

Two gigabytes of storage

Beginning on April 1st, 2005 (Gmail's first birthday), Gmail offers more than 2 gigabytes of email storage space. This figure and the original offering of 1000 megabytes are hundreds of times more than what other webmail services offered at the time of Gmail's original announcement in 2004. Google suggests that users "archive", rather than delete their messages; Gmail's 2 gigabyte of storage is sufficient to hold many years' worth of an average user's e-mails, and Gmail's search technology allows users to search their archives easily. Additionally, users can store files (up to 10 megabytes in size) as e-mail attachments.

Template:Gmail

The current rate of increase is one megabyte every 7.44 hours.

Fast interface

Gmail's interface relies heavily upon JavaScript, a client-side scripting language, which requests data from the Gmail servers via XMLHttpRequest, an example of the web-development technique referred to as AJAX. Since much processing takes place on the user's computer, relatively little information must be transferred between Gmail's web servers and the client, and the interface runs very quickly, even over a dial-up connection.

In late February 2005, Google rolled out a "Plain HTML" Gmail interface, accessible from any HTTP 1.1-compliant web browser (previously, Gmail was only accessible via a few modern browsers). The HTML interface does not use JavaScript, and is much slower than the standard interface.

Spell checker

File:Gmail compose spellcheck.png
Compose view, with spell checker
The user is composing a new email, and has invoked the client-side spell checker feature. Like the spell checker in a word processor, the user is shown words which aren't recognized, and can either pick a replacement from a list or manually enter an alteration

Gmail provides an interactive spell checker. In the Gmail spell checker, one can select the spell check mode while composing a message. In the spell check mode misspelled words appear in place and can be replaced in any order. In this regard, the spell checker is different from a web-based iterative spell checker, which usually go through each spelling error one at a time, and different from a batch spell checker, which lists all misspelled words at once.

HTML email compositon

As of early April 2005, Gmail users may compose e-mails with "rich formatting." This feature is only available to users using the JavaScript-enhanced version of Gmail (via Internet Explorer 5.5+, Mozilla/Mozilla Firefox, or Safari). Previously, all e-mails were sent in plain text.

Keyboard shortcuts

Gmail allows users to use their keyboard, rather than their mouse, to navigate its interface. This feature is not enabled by default.

Labels instead of folders

Gmail allows users to categorize their e-mails with "labels." 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. Gmail also allows users to set up filters which label incoming e-mail automatically.

Searching

Gmail allows users to search by a number of criteria:

  • whether the message "has" or "doesn't have" a certain phrase
  • the message's From, To and Subject fields
  • the message's location (All Mail, Inbox, Starred, Sent Mail, Spam, Trash, All & Spam & Trash, Read Mail, Unread Mail, or a label)
  • whether the message has an attachment
  • the message's date within a given range (e.g. all messages received within one week of January 1, 2004)

Gmail also allows users to construct advanced search strings. For example, the following search string would search for all e-mails from bob to alex with the subject field containing "work" or "school" but not "friend," labeled as archive, with a PDF attachment, and with a carbon copy to self, limited to the date range between May 1, 2004 and June 1, 2004, that are not starred:

from:bob to:alex subject:(work OR school -friend) label:archive has:attachment filename:pdf in:unstarred cc:self after:2004/05/01 before:2004/06/01
(Note that logical operators (e.g. OR, AND) must be in upper-case)

See also: How do I use Gmail's advanced search?

Spam filtering

Gmail offers a spam filtering system. Independent tests conducted in May 2004 showed this spam filter to be about 60% accurate for a wide variety of spam, significantly lower than the spam filtering accuracy of Yahoo! and Hotmail. In December 2004, however, unscientific tests suggested that Gmail's accuracy was much higher than it was in May. Messages marked as spam are automatically deleted after 30 days.

Email signing

Gmail is the first major provider to sign outgoing mails with Yahoo!'s DomainKeys signatures.

POP3 access

Although not offered with the original release, Gmail allows all users to send and receive their e-mail via POP3 (over SSL) and SMTP. Some users have experienced authentication difficulties when trying to gain access to their accounts and have blamed Google for the problem, but this is likely because the user must activate a setting within Gmail before it will allow POP access, not because Gmail has a technical problem.

Rich Text Formatting

A feature added to Gmail on its 1st birthday, Rich Text Formatting allows users to change the size and font of text, change the color and highlited color of text, and do allignment, bullet points, and numbered lists, in addition to several other features. Rich Text Formatting is currently only able to work on browsers that support WYSIWYG, such as Mozilla Firefox. Unfortunately, browsers that don't support WYSIWYG such as Apple's Safari cannot take advantage of this feature.

Username handling

Gmail usernames must be between 6 and 30 characters (inclusive) and made up of only letters, numbers, and periods (.). Experimentation has shown that Gmail ignores periods when resolving addresses. That is, 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 from google@gmail.com.. However, when signing in it is necessary to include periods.

Gmail recently blocked users from creating addresses that vary by periods only. The assumed reason behind this is that the idea was, in effect, an invasion of privacy. Consider that two different people with the addresses john.doe@gmail.com and johndoe@gmail.com who will each receive all emails intended for any one of the accounts. The ability to create new such addresses is now blocked. However, it remains to be seen how Google will resolve the collisions of such addresses.

Plus-addressing

Gmail also supports "plus-addressing" of emails. Messages can be sent to addresses in the form: gmail.user+extratext@gmail.com where extratext can be any string. Plus-addressing allows users to sign up for different services with different aliases and then easily filter all e-mails from those services. Plus-addressing even works when sending email from a Gmail account to itself. Additionally (in some cases) the string appended to the e-mail address may not be longer than six characters; if it is longer, Gmail shortens it.

Gmail Notifier

The Gmail Notifier, an official tool offered by Gmail, displays a small icon in the bottom right corner of the screen in Microsoft Windows (system tray area), 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, and the program only works with Windows 2000, XP, or more current Microsoft operating systems.

Available to those who surf with Mozilla Firefox is the identically named Gmail Notifier extension, which fulfills the same purpose as Google's official tool.

Multi language support

The Gmail interface currently supports 12 languages in addition to US English: Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, simplified and traditional Chinese, and UK English.

File:Gmail inbox in Japanese.jpg
Gmail supports 12 languages. Here, its interface is shown in Japanese.

Privacy

There has been a great deal of criticism regarding Gmail's privacy policy.[1] Much of the controversy involved the clause "residual copies of email may remain on our systems for some time, even after you have deleted messages from your mailbox or after the termination of your account." Many believed that this meant that Google would intentionally archive copies of deleted mail forever. 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. However, opponents of this view state that when your 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.

Perhaps the most severe privacy issue plaguing gmail so far is a result of their not-so-famous address error correction and the way they handle usernames. Surprisingly, this problem draws little or no criticism at all. For more information about this problem see the topic Username Handling above.

Limitations

The conversation view groups related messages in a linear stack, which can be expanded and collapsed. While this does provide an innovative view of an email thread, it does not provide any way to differentiate messages that branch off from the original thread. This can occur when mail is sent to multiple recipients who respond individually.

The following features are absent from Gmail, but are offered by Gmail's main competitors, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, some for a price:

  • The ability to search within text message attachments.
  • The ability to import mail from external POP3 servers into the webmail account.
  • WAP access.

Google is hesitant to release any upcoming plans for the implementation of any of these features. The Gmail Team has said in e-mails to questions that future features will include the option to export contacts.

Development

Gmail was announced 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 ([2]). Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of products, was quoted by BBC News as saying, "We are very serious about Gmail."

Gmail also initially received a lot of criticism for a statement they made in their original terms of use, refusing to guarantee that all e-mails at Gmail would be deleted upon request by the user. Google later clarified that they were referring to backup copies of emails, and promised that all deleted mails would eventually be expunged completely from their servers. This, along with the feature that advertisements would be generated by software-based scanning of e-mails in order to better target them, gave rise to a controversy on web privacy (see [3] and [4]).

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

Beta testing phase

Google initially invited about 1,000 employees, friends, and family members to become beta testers. The trials began on March 21, 2004. Since then, others have been randomly selected to test the service. On April 25, active users from the Blogger.com community were offered the chance to participate in the beta-testing. Since then, active members have periodically received "invites" which they can extend to their friends. One round was sent out on May 1, and another three invitations were given to all active members on June 1; in mid-June, the number of invitations has been increasing, with many users receiving between three and five invites daily. On February 2, 2005, the invitation interface was changed to make it easier to give invites by simply entering an email address and many users got an unprecedented 50 invites. On February 16, many opened up their Gmail accounts to find themselves with 50 invites, regardless of previous amount.

During the initial months of the Gmail beta, Gmail's well-publicized feature set and the exclusive nature of the accounts caused the aftermarket price of Gmail invitations to skyrocket. According to PC World magazine, Gmail invitations were selling on eBay for as much as $150 USD, with some specific accounts being sold for several thousand dollars. After a new round of invitations in early June, the price for invitations fell down to between $2-$5 USD. Several philanthropic Gmail users have utilized services such as the now defunct GmailSwap to donate invitations to people who want them. On June 28, Google amended its policy to forbid the selling of registered accounts [5].

Some beta-testers have put up an account of their experiences on the web; see [6] and [7].

Current status

In March 2004, Google said that Gmail would probably be publicly released after six months of testing, which would have placed their launch in September 2004, but it was still in beta at that time. Speculation also regarding the release date is rife after The New York Times said they had "credible sources" saying "Gmail will be released publicly by the end of the year." As of today, however, an invitation from an existing user is still required in order to make a new account, and the site still says it is in the beta development stage. But the number of invitations existing account holders can send has been varied, presumably to control the usage and growth of the system. At approximately 3:00 UTC on February 3, 2005, Gmail users were rewarded with 50 invites, suggesting the possibility that Gmail is soon to go public. For all intents and purposes, Gmail is essentially open to the public now, since thousands of invites are publically available at the Isnoop.net Gmail Invite Spooler, the Gmail Queue , the Automatic Gmail Invite Giver-Awayer, and FreeGmailInvites.com. There is speculation that Google will continue to provide Gmail accounts only on an invite basis. This will help prevent spammers from registering numerous accounts for purposes of spamming, and will ensure that any account used illegally will have another valid email address to trace a user (the one to which the invite was sent).

In January 2005, security experts discovered a critical flaw in the handling of Gmail messages that would allow hackers to easily access private e-mails from any Gmail user's account. This was posted with detailed information to popular technology site Slashdot at 9:23 a.m. PST on January 12, 2005. At roughly 10:15 a.m. PST on January 13, 2005, developers at Gmail announced that they had fixed the problem, and that the security flaw had been patched. Despite Gmail's status as a beta application, this still raised several concerns among many users who use Gmail as their primary mail account.

On April 1, 2005, exactly one year after the initial release, Gmail increased the mailbox size to 2 GB along with some other new features, including formatted editing (sending Html/Plain text alternative multipart)

On April 13, 2005, Gmail became available in several international languages: UK English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and simplified and traditional Chinese. Invites are still required for registering.

Competition

Due to the heavy media coverage of Gmail's initial announcement and development, many existing web mail services quickly increased their storage capacity. This was seen as a move to stop existing users from switching to Gmail, and to capitalize on the newly rekindled public interest in web mail services. See Webmail for a list of these services.

See also

Gmail tools

FAQs

Blogs

Forums and discussion groups

Invitations

Privacy concerns and legislation

Spam filter

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