A screenshot of a Gmail Inbox. |
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| Developed by | |
|---|---|
| Initial release | March 21, 2004 |
| Latest release | / 4 December, 2007 |
| OS | Cross-platform (web-based application) |
| Type | POP3, IMAP, E-mail, webmail |
| Website | Gmail.com |
Gmail is a free POP3 and IMAP webmail service provided by Google.[1][2] In the United Kingdom and Germany it is officially called Google Mail.
Gmail launched on 1 April 2004 as an invitation-only beta release and became available to the public on 7 February 2007. To this day the service remains in beta status and has tens of millions of users.[3][4][5]
With an initial storage capacity of 1 GB, Gmail drastically increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2-4MB its competitors offered at that time. The service currently offers over 7250 MB of continuously increasing (at a rate of 353.9 KB per day) free storage with additional storage ranging from 10 GB to 400 GB available for $20 to $500 (US) per year.[6][7][8][9]
Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a "conversation view" similar to an Internet forum. Software developers know Gmail for its use of the Ajax programming technique.[10]
Gmail runs on the Google GFE/1.3 server which runs on Linux.[11][12]
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The service currently provides more than 7200 MB of free storage[7]. Additional storage is available from 10 GB (US$20/year) to 400 GB (US$500/year), shared between Picasa Web Albums and Gmail.[13] The increase from 1 GB was announced on 1 April 2005, the first anniversary of Gmail. The announcement was accompanied by a statement that Google would "keep giving people more space forever."[14]
Google presently says it will keep increasing storage by the second as long as it has enough space on its servers. On 12 October 2007, Google ramped up the storage counter to 5.37 MB per hour.[15]
Approximately a week later, the counter went back down to 1.12 MB per hour. On 4 January 2008, the counter went down to about 3.35 MB per day, or 0.14 MB per hour. From October 2008, the counter went down to about 353.9 KB per day.
The Gmail Labs feature, introduced on 5 June 2008, allows users to test new or experimental features of Gmail, such as bookmarking of important e-mail messages, custom keyboard shortcuts and games.
New Labs features can be enabled and disabled selectively and users can provide feedback about each of them. This allows Gmail engineers to get user input about new features to improve them and popular ones might become regular Gmail features. All Labs features are experimental and are subject to termination at any time. Labs features can only be used in the English language interface of Gmail.
The Gmail interface is unique amongst webmail systems for several reasons. Most evident to users are its search-oriented features and means of managing e-mail in a "conversation view" that is similar to an Internet forum.
Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. Initially the software was available only internally as an e-mail client for Google employees. Google finally announced Gmail to the public on 1 April 2004.[16]
Before its acquisition 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, that service has since been discontinued.[17]
As of 22 June 2005, Gmail's canonical URI has been changed to http://mail.google.com/mail/ instead of http://gmail.google.com/gmail/.[18]
The domain gmail.com is unavailable in certain countries, in which cases users are able to use the domain googlemail.com. The Gmail service does not discriminate between these two domains for incoming e-mails, therefore a user with the address "john.doe@googlemail.com" will receive mail sent to "john.doe@gmail.com", and vice-versa. Accordingly, users obliged to use the googlemail.com domain are unable to select addresses already chosen by gmail.com users.
On April Fools' Day 2007, Google made fun of Gmail by introducing "Gmail Paper", where a user could click a button and Gmail would purportedly mail an ad-supported hard copy for free.[19]
On April Fools' Day 2008, Google introduced a fake service named Gmail Custom Time, which would allow a user to send up to ten e-mails per year with forged timestamps. The hoax stated that by bending spacetime on the Google servers, the e-mails are actually routed through the 4th dimension of time itself prior to reaching their intended recipient.[20][21][22]
Gmail's JavaScript front-end was rewritten in late summer and early fall of 2007 and was released to users starting on 29 October 2007. The new version had a redesigned contacts section, quick contacts box and chat popups, which were added to names in the message list as well as the contact list. The contacts application is integrated into other Google services, such as Google Docs. Users granted access to the new version were given a link at the top-right corner which read "Newer Version". As of December 2007, most new registrations in English (US) along with most pre-existing accounts are given the new interface by default when supported. There remains the option to downgrade via a link labelled "Older Version".[23][24][25][26]
These coding changes mean that only users of Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, Google Chrome and Safari 3.0 (or more recent versions) can fully use the new code. Internet Explorer 5.5+, Netscape 7.1+, Mozilla 1.4+, Firefox 0.8, Safari 1.3 and some other browsers will give limited functionality. Other browsers may be redirected to the basic-HTML-only version of Gmail.[25][27][28][29][30]
In the week of 18 January 2008, Google released an update that changed the way Gmail loads JavaScript. This caused the failure of some third-party extensions, including Remember The Milk's Firefox extension for Gmail.[31][32]
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 and these senders 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, most e-mail systems make use of server-side content scanning in order to check for spam.[33][34]
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 e-mails 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.[35]
Some commentators have criticised 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."[36][37]
As part of Gmail's privacy policies, Google states that Gmail will refrain from displaying ads next to potentially sensitive messages. Content that suppresses ads includes news about a tragedy, an e-mail about catastrophic events and death announcements. Critics argue that the fact remains that these e-mails are being scanned in order for Gmail's systems to identify the fact that the e-mail is of this type.[38]
Gmail does not allow users to send or receive executable files or archives containing executable files. Tech-savvy users who are not prone to casual errors report loss of random messages in random amounts.[39][40]
By design, Gmail does not deliver all of a user's e-mails. When downloading mail through POP access, Gmail fails to deliver messages that users have sent to themselves.[41] It also does not deliver to a user's inbox (via POP or webmail) those messages that users have sent to mailing lists that should be distributed back to themselves via the mailing list. [42]
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.[43][44]
Gmail has drawn many favorable reviews from users for generous space quotas and unique organization.[45]
On 19 October 2005, Google voluntarily converted the United Kingdom version of Gmail to Google Mail, because of a dispute with another company, Independent International Investment Research, in the UK.[46][47]
Users who registered before the switch to Google Mail were able to keep their Gmail address, although the Gmail logo was replaced with a Google Mail logo. Users who signed up after the name change receive a googlemail.com address.
On 4 July 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 e-mail 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 e-mail 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.[48]
It seems Google isn't without a sense of humor as this is the same service Google "offered" in the Gmail Paper April Fool's Day joke in 2007.[49]
Since 19 June 2008, the domain gmail.com no longer redirects to the Google Mail service when being accessed from a German IP address. Instead, a short text message is shown.
In February 2007, Google filed legal action against the owners of gmail.pl, a fake poet group known in full as Grupa Młodych Artystów i Literatów abbreviated GMAiL (literally, "Group of Young Artists and Writers"). In reality, Gmail.pl was registered to use for promoting Łódzka Giełda Komputerowa (Lodz Computer Market) - a corporation which belongs to the domain-owner and which sells computer-accessories. The Arbitration Tribunal cancelled the action for "procedural reasons".[50]
An IT company in mainland China named ISM Technologies (Chinese: 爱思美) has owned and operated a web portal from the domain gmail.cn since 2003.[51][52]
A Russian free webmail service called gmail.ru owns the "GMail" trademark in the Russian Federation.[53]
The gmail.ru domain name was created 27 January 2003.[54]
After Gmail's initial development and launch, many existing web mail services quickly increased their storage capacity.[55]
For example, Hotmail increased space for some users 2 MB to 25 MB, with 250 MB after 30 days, and 2 GB for Hotmail Plus accounts. Yahoo! Mail went from 4 MB to 100 MB and 2 GB for Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts. Yahoo! Mail storage then increased to 250 MB and in late April 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.[56]
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 noted in the case of 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 1 GB of storage.[57]
In August 2005 AOL started providing all AIM screen names with their own e-mail accounts with 2 GB of storage.
Another source of competition for Gmail came from 30Gigs who, as their name implied, offered 30 gigabytes of storage, initially through invitation only, starting in late 2006. However in November 2007, 30Gigs' service was discontinued.
The Gmail system flags as dormant every Gmail account which remains inactive for six months. After a further three months, for a total of nine months dormancy, the system may delete such accounts. Other webmail services have different, often shorter, times for marking an account as inactive. Yahoo! Mail deactivates dormant accounts after four months and Windows Live Hotmail currently deactivates free accounts after two months.[58]
As well as increasing storage limits following the launch of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail also enhanced their e-mail interfaces. During 2005 Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail matched Gmail's attachment size of 10 MB. Following the footsteps of Gmail, Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! Mail Beta service and Microsoft launched Windows Live Hotmail, both incorporating Ajax interfaces. Google increased the maximum attachment size to 20 MB in May 2007.[59]
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