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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. With an initial
storage capacity of 1 GB, it drastically increased the standard for free
storage.
Gmail currently offers over 4000 megabytes
(increasing by nearly a megabyte every ten minutes) of free storage, with an
additional 10 GB available for US$20 per year. It has a search-oriented interface and a
unique 'conversation view'. Gmail is well-known for
its use of the Ajax
programming technique in its design. Gmail has
about 58 million users.
Features
Storage
Gmail
login page
The service currently provides
over four gigabytes of free storage and paid storage of 10 GB up to 500 GB,
shared over Picasa and Gmail.
The increase from 1 GB 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 storage by the second as long as they have enough space on their
servers. Gmail's storage increased by about 145 MB
a year (equating to almost 0.4 MB per day) through 12 October 2007, when Google
ramped up the storage counter to 5.37 MB per hour.
Gmail can also be used as an alternative hard
drive. On August 9, 2007, some users of Gmail
reported that their storage capacity had been increased to 9030 MB (8.8 GB).
The 9030 MB of space is an over-all total of all the users' storage space(s)
within a Google Account, including Picasa. This
development seemed to occur about the same time that Google began allowing
purchasable Picasa storage. In other words, Google
has shared storage space, supporting both pictures and email.
Sorting
and deleting email
- Gmail provides the ability to search your
mail, using the search email button. The query string "has:attachment" will
list messages that have an attachment. Queries like "filename:pdf" or
"filename:xls" will show messages
that have attachments of a specific type. Combine them with a label,
like "sent:" and you will display all the PDF files that you
have sent. An example search mail query may look as follows "to:bill has:attachment
before:2007/01/15"
- There are also undocumented search
operators like "language:russian"
that can be helpful.
- See the Google Help
Center for full
list of Search operators
- Some users are at their email storage
limit and wish to delete email.
- Gmail currently doesn't allow users to
see their email message size or to sort email by size.
- Only a few of the blogs
or web postings regarding sorting Gmail by
size list the ability to buy more storage space. As mentioned above,
additional storage can currently be purchased in increments of 10, 40,
150, or 400 GB.
- Some other users suggest adding additional
Gmail accounts in order to store email when
their original accounts become too large.
Interface
Programming
Gmail makes use of Ajax (specifically, the AjaXSLT
framework), employing modern browser features such as JavaScript, keyboard
access keys and Web feed integration.
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 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,
unless the user is using basic HTML view, designed for people with slower
internet connections or browsers that do not support AJAX. 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.
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.
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 is not used when the email is sent from the Gmail servers to the destination domain's mail
exchangers, unless supported, so at some stage your email message may still
be transmitted in unencrypted 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. However,
Gmail has now fixed this problem.[citation
needed] The drawback of their spam filtering system is that one cannot
disable it. It is particularly inconvenient when using POP3 access, because
it is needed to regularly visit the spam folder through the web interface to
check, if legitimate emails were marked as spam.
IP addresses of Gmail users are disguised in order to protect security.
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. However, some viruses have
been known to hide from the scanner and have infiltrated many e-mails.[citation needed] Gmail also
does not allow users to send or receive executable files or archives
containing executable files.
Gmail is also one of the first major e-mail
providers to sign outgoing mails with Yahoo!'s DomainKeys signatures.
In the past, Gmail
has had severe trouble with security which allowed a full account compromise
via Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities affecting the Google.com
homepage or information disclosure through a file which was stored on
Google's server and included all the Email contacts of the currently logged
in user. The vulnerability was quickly patched after the initial disclosures
on the Internet.
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.[citation
needed]
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.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.
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 support retrieving mail from IMAP
servers, nor does it support sending messages through an external SMTP
server.
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.
If the fellow chatter suddenly has to get offline, any and all further
messages sent will be delivered to that person via e-mail, including in it
the entire conversation had previously. 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, similar to Microsoft's
Exchange Server.
Further integration is offered
with some other Google products. Documents, spreadsheets and presentations
can be opened using Google Docs, 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 PSP and
PS3, Nintendo Wii's Internet Channel and Nintendo
DS Browser web browsers but is not fully supported.
Language
support
Gmail
supports multiple languages; shown here is the 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, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian,
Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog,
Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Gaelic.
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, several unofficial notifiers are
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 has 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.
Google Apps Provider Branding
Google Apps provides companies to
provide Gmail-like interfaces for other systems.
For example, users of Sky Broadband access their @sky.com emails from a
customized Gmail interface with 10GB of storage
space.
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.[citation needed]
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 had an
invitation from an existing account holder, from Blogger,
and later through their mobile phone. Additionally, a limited number of
invitations were given out directly from Google to end users via a link on
Google's home page. 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 were
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.[citation
needed]
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 "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.
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 this type of scanning
is needed for server-side spam checking in any system.
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, which contains 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."
Trademark
Disputes
Germany
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 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
An IT company named gmail.cn supplies yourname@gmail.cn addresses in
mainland China.
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's Hotmail, which upgraded its e-mail storage erratically from 250 MB
to the new Windows Live Hotmail which includes 5 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 six months is labeled dormant and three months
later (a total of nine months), may get deactivated by Gmail.
All stored messages would be 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.
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