Gmail

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Gmail
Gmail Inbox
Developer:	Google
OS:	Cross-platform (web-based application)
Use:	POP3 e-mail, Webmail
Website:	https://mail.google.com, http://www.gmail.com

Gmail, officially 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 the public on February 7, 2007, with a signup link.^[1]

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.

Contents 1 Features 1.1 Storage 1.2 Interface 1.2.1 Programming 1.2.2 Organization 1.2.3 Contacts 1.2.4 Composition 1.3 Security 1.4 Addresses 1.5 Mail fetcher 1.6 Product integration 1.7 Browser support 1.8 Language support 1.9 Applications 2 Development history 2.1 Announcement 2.2 Registration 2.3 Domain name 3 Awards 4 Criticisms 4.1 Privacy 4.2 Service 4.3 Web interface 5 Trademark disputes 5.1 Germany 5.2 Poland 5.3 United Kingdom 6 Competition 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Features

[edit] Storage

The service provides over 2.8 gigabytes (as of March 2007)^[2] 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 first anniversary of Gmail. The announcement was accompanied by a statement that Google would "keep giving people more space forever".^[3] 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).^[4] The growth rate was faster when the announcement was first made.^{[citation needed]} 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.^[5]

[edit] Interface

[edit] 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 mask itself as Internet Explorer to serve the "standard" view with chat.

[edit] 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; 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 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.

[edit] 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.

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.^[6] In Apps, each username variation must be entered as a nickname by the domain administrator.

Underscores and hyphens cannot be included in Gmail addresses.^[7]

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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, similar to Microsoft's Exchange Server.

Further integration is offered with some other Google products. Documents and spreadsheets 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.

[edit] 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+. 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.

[edit] 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, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

[edit] 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.^[8] 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.^[9] Gmail mobile is not officially supported outside the United States (as at December 2006).^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Development history

Main article: History of Gmail

[edit] 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.^{[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."

[edit] 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.^[10] 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,^[11] in Japan since August 23, 2006^{[citation needed]} and in Egypt since December 3, 2006.^[12]

On February 7, 2007, Gmail registration was made public in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Russia, Japan, and Hong Kong.^[13]

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

[edit] 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/.

[edit] Awards

Gmail was ranked second in PC World's "The 100 Best Products of 2005",^[15] behind Mozilla Firefox. Gmail also won 'Honorable Mention' in the Bottom Line Design Awards 2005.^[16] Gmail has drawn many favorable reviews from users because of its available space and unique organization.^[17]

[edit] Criticisms

[edit] 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.^[18] 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, 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 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.^{[citation needed]}

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."^[19]

[edit] Service

Users have found their accounts temporarily unavailable from time to time.^[20]

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 Internet Message Access Protocol services.^[21]

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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Web interface

When using the option to send mail under a different email address, such as a work or school address, recipients may see that the message is from "xxxx@gmail.com on behalf of [xxxx@xxx.xxx]". This option is severely limited by this, and it is preventing gmail from becoming the solution to the multiple email account dilemma, for regular and professional users.

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.

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

There is often difficult 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. Moreover, it is impossible to open the address book (in the same browser window) without losing the current content in the compose window.

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.

[edit] Trademark disputes

[edit] 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.^[22]

[edit] 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").^[23]

[edit] 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.^[24] 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).

[edit] 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.^[25] 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 Gmail 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.

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

[edit] See also

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

Gmail Add-Ins

• PhpGmailDrive
• Gmail Drive
• GmailFS
• RoamDrive

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Find more information on Gmail by searching Wikipedia's sister projects
	Dictionary definitions from Wiktionary
	Textbooks from Wikibooks
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Images and media from Commons
	News stories from Wikinews
	Learning resources from Wikiversity

• Gmail
• GMail Delete Shortcut (Undocumented)
• Jim's Gmail Tips
• Lifehacker's Gmail Tips
• Gmail: The problem with spam mails - shortcomings in the way Gmail handles spam mails