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Gmail
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Gmail is a free POP3 and IMAP webmail service provided by Google. In the United Kingdom and Germany it is officially called Google Mail.
Gmail launched on April 1, 2004 as an invitation-only beta release and became available to the general public on February 7, 2007. Although over 100 million users
have taken advantage of stable releases for years, the service remains in beta status.
With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4MB its competitors offered at that time.
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Encyclopedia
Gmail is a free POP3 and IMAP webmail service provided by Google. In the United Kingdom and Germany it is officially called Google Mail.
Gmail launched on April 1, 2004 as an invitation-only beta release and became available to the general public on February 7, 2007. Although over 100 million users
have taken advantage of stable releases for years, the service remains in beta status.
With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4MB its competitors offered at that time. The service currently offers over 7300 MB of free storage with additional storage ranging from 10 GB to 400 GB available for $20 to $500 (US) per year.
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.
Gmail runs on Google Servlet Engine and Google GFE/1.3 which run on Linux.
Features
Storage
The Gmail service currently provides more than 7300 MB of free storage. Users can rent additional storage (shared between Picasa Web Albums and Gmail) from 10 GB (US$20/year) to 400 GB (US$500/year).
On April 1, 2005, the first anniversary of Gmail, Google announced the increase from 1 GB, stating that Google would "keep giving people more space forever."
In April 2005 Gmail engineer Rob Siemborski stated that Google would keep increasing storage by the second as long as it had enough space on its servers. On October 12, 2007, Google ramped up the storage counter to 5.37 MB per hour.
Approximately a week later, the counter went back down to 1.12 MB per hour. On January 4, 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.
Gmail Labs
The Gmail Labs feature, introduced on June 5, 2008, allows users to test new or experimental features of Gmail, such as bookmarking of important e-mail messages, custom keyboard-shortcuts and games.
Users can enable or disable Labs features selectively and provide feedback about each of them. This allows Gmail engineers to obtain user input about new features to improve them and also to assess their popularity and whether they merit developing into 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.
On December 10, 2008, Gmail added support for SMS Messaging through its integrated Chat.
On January 28, 2009, Gmail added support for offline access through its integration with Google gears.
Spam filter
Gmail's spam filtering features a community-driven system: when any user marks an email as spam, this provides information to help the system identify similar future messages for all Gmail users.
Interface
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.
History
Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. Initially only Google employees could use the e-mail client and only internally. Google finally announced Gmail to the public on April 1, 2004.
Domain name
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.
As of June 22, 2005, Gmail's canonical URI changed from http://gmail.google.com/gmail/ to http://mail.google.com/mail/.
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.
Gmail hoaxes
Gmail Paper hoax
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.
Gmail Custom Time hoax
On April Fools' Day 2008, Google introduced a fake service named Gmail Custom Time, which would allegedly 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 actually get routed through the fourth dimension of time itself prior to reaching their intended recipient.
Code changes
Gmail's JavaScript front-end was rewritten in late summer and early fall of 2007 and was released to users starting on October 29, 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".
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.
During the week of January 18, 2008, Google released an update that changed the way Gmail loads JavaScript. This caused the failure of some third-party extensions.
On December 12, 2008, Gmail added support for faster PDF viewing within the browser.
Criticisms
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 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.
Privacy-advocates also regard the lack of disclosed data retention and correlation policies as problematic. Google has the ability 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.
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."
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.
Technical issues
Gmail does not allow users to send or receive executable files or archives containing executable files if it recognises the file extension as one used for executable files or archives.
Tech-savvy users who are not prone to casual errors report loss of random messages in random amounts.
By design, Gmail does not deliver all of a user's e-mails. When downloading mail through POP or IMAP access, Gmail fails to deliver messages that users have sent to themselves.
It also does not deliver to a user's inbox (via any access interface) those messages that users have sent to mailing lists and which they might expect to receive back via the mailing list.
Gmail filters cannot use custom header names. This limitation had a significant impact before Gmail added support for identifying incoming messages sent to a mailing list: some mailing list manager programs, such as the Mailman used by SourceForge, add a custom header to the messages they distribute, but do not change the "Subject". Gmail filters can check for a string in the "Subject", but not in a custom header.
"On behalf of"
With the Gmail implementation, any email sent from the Gmail interface will include the Gmail.com address as the "sender", even if the sending account is a custom email account. For example, an email sent from an external account via the Gmail interface will display to the user as From user@gmail.com on behalf of user@OtherDomainEmailAddress.com. By exposing the gmail account name, Google claims that this will "help prevent mail from being marked as spam". A number of Gmail users have complained that this implementation is both a privacy concern and a professionalism problem.
Awards
Gmail was ranked second in PC Worlds "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 for generous space quotas and unique organization.
Trademark disputes
United Kingdom
On October 19, 2005, Google voluntarily converted the United Kingdom version of Gmail to Google Mail because of a dispute with the UK company, Independent International Investment Research.
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, although a reverse of either in the sent email will still deliver it to the same place.
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 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 January 30, 2007, the EU's Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market ruled in favor of Giersch.
Google spoofed "offering" the same service in the Gmail Paper April Fool's Day joke in 2007.
Since June 19, 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.
Poland
In February 2007, Google filed legal action against the owners of gmail.pl, a fake poet group known in full as Grupa Mlodych Artystów i Literatów abbreviated GMAiL (literally, "Group of Young Artists and Writers").
Lódzka Gielda Komputerowa (Lódz Computer Market), a corporation which sells computer-accessories, had registered the gmail.pl domain for promotional purposes. The Arbitration Tribunal canceled the action for "procedural reasons".
Mainland China
An information-technology company in mainland China named ISM Technologies (Chinese: ???) has owned and operated a web portal from the domain gmail.cn since 2003.
Russian Federation
A Russian free webmail service called gmail.ru owns the "GMail" trademark in the Russian Federation.
The gmail.ru domain name dates from January 27, 2003.
Competition
After Gmail's initial development and launch, many existing web mail services quickly increased their storage capacity.
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.
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 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.
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 four months.
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.
See also
Gmail 3rd party Add-Ins
External links
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