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Gmail is a free webmail service, still in beta testing, run by Google. It was announced on March 31, 2004, but many became aware of it on April 1. There was speculation that this announcement was an April Fool's joke, because of the 1 gigabyte limit of storage space, which was unusually high at the time for a free web mail service.
Gmail offers several features, some of which were previously not utilized by competing web mail systems before proposed by Gmail.
The main innovation in Gmail is a new mode of categorizing e-mails, which Google calls Conversation view. In this view, Gmail will keep track of "conversations" (back and forth e-mail sending), displaying summaries of all previous mail correspondence when displaying a mail. Google argues that this makes it easier to look back to check what was being discussed in earlier e-mails. However, as Gmail must resolve how conversations fit together, conversations may be fragmented or unrelated conversations become attached together.
Filters can be set up on incoming mail. The interface to set up the criteria for a specific filter is similar to the Search Options (see #Searching below). It allows for specifying the From, To, or Subject fields, as well as looking at the body text through the options Has the words, Doesn't have, or specifying whether the mail has an attachment or not. After setting up the criteria for the filter, one can test to see which emails match it, and then go on to the next step to set up actions to be performed on incoming mails matching the criteria. The actions include archiving the mail (i.e. removing it from the Inbox), marking the mail as starred, applying a label to the mail, moving the mail to the trash, or a combination of the aforementioned options.
Gmail offers 1 gigabyte (1024 megabytes) of email storage space, which was hundreds of times more than what the competition offered at the time of the announcement. The large capacity is intended to allow users to keep thousands of emails permanently, through their Archive system. The service also allows the searching of a user's emails with Google's searching technologies. Attachments of up to 10 MB each are allowed.
Though the advertised amount of storage is 1000MB, it is in fact 1024MB according to Google, both the number and percentage displayed in advertising and in the Gmail interface itself are rounded figures.
In the initial beta phase, Gmail makes heavy use of JavaScript for its user interface and tools.
Gmail provides an interactive spell checker. In the Gmail spellchecker, 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.
An interactive address completion tool allows users to quickly fill in email addresses of friends while composing email. This feature allows you to click on the name of the contact after you've partially typed in his or her name or email. Gmail will then fill in the rest of the name and email address.
An option to use keys like "c" to compose a message or "!" to mark something as spam, in addition to using the mouse to access these common functions. The shortcuts are not enabled by default.
Another innovation is a categorizing system, in which e-mails are given labels. An e-mail might have any number of labels, and all e-mails having a particular label can be displayed together. This allows for grouping of e-mails relating to a particular subject. Labels are a generalization of the "folder" concept typically used by mail programs; unlike folders, the email can be in multiple categories without duplication. Gmail also allows for the option of setting up filters to label incoming e-mail automatically.
Previous e-mail systems to use labels include Opera Software's OperaMail and Lotus Notes Mail, the latter of which uses both folders and labels.
Gmail has extended searching capabilities. The Search Options interface is a form that allows for searching by:
Gmail also allows for advanced searching through the search box. For example a more complex search string could look like:
The above search string would search for all mails from bob to alex with the subject field containing "work" or "school" but not "friend," labeled as archive, with a PDF attachment, in the Unstarred location, with a carbon copy to self, and limited to the date range between May 1, 2004 and June 1, 2004.
Gmail offers a spam filtering system, which independent tests have shown to be about 60% accurate for a wide variety of spam, significantly less than spam filtering accuracy of Yahoo! and Hotmail. Messages marked as spam which are more than 30 days old are automatically deleted by the system.
Gmail allows usernames of between 6 and 30 characters. The only characters that can be used are letters, numbers, and periods (.). An unofficial feature of username handling seems to be that periods do not actually matter when resolving addresses. What this means is that signing up for the account foobar@gmail.com allows one to receive mail sent to the accounts: foo.bar@gmail.com, f.o.o.b.a.r@gmail.com, etc. Additionally, one is also allowed to receive mail sent to accounts of the form: foo.bar+bas@gmail.com where bas could be any string. This would allow for different aliases to be used when signing up for different services and then being able to easily filter them. It does not appear, however, that the +string feature works when sending email to an account from that account. This does not allow for using the feature for notetaking and other tasks.
In lieu of POP3 or IMAP access, displays a small icon in the bottom right corner of the screen on a Windows system, indicating the presence of new mail in one's inbox. It does not download new messages, though.
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.
Options that are offered by competing services, but that are not yet offered by Gmail include:
All of these features are offered in some way or another by Gmail's main competitors, Yahoo! and Hotmail, some for a price. 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:
Gmail is incompatible with Opera Browser and generates this message:
Gmail was announced amid a flurry of rumor. Owing to April Fool's Day, however, the company's was greeted with resounding skepticism in the technology world, especially since Google already has been known to make April Fool's Jokes (such as ). However, they claimed that the real joke had been a press release put out by them, 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 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 if asked to be deleted by the user. They later clarified that they had referred to backup copies of all mails on Gmail, 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 and ).
Before being acquired by Google, gmail.com was a free email service offered by Garfield.com, online home of the comic strip Garfield. This free email service has moved to .
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 some users receiving between three and five invites daily.
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 $1 and $5 USD. Several philanthropic Gmail users have utilized services such as to donate invitations to people who want them. On June 28, Google amended its policy to forbid the selling of invites and accounts .
Some beta-testers have put up an account of their experiences on the web; see and .
Google says that Gmail will likely be publicly released after six months of testing, which would mean around September 2004.
Due 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.
On April 5, 2004, Spymac became the first free email service to offer a gigabyte of storage.
On May 29, 2004, the European edition of Lycos raised its paid storage allowance to 1 GB.
On June 15, 2004, popular web mail competitor Yahoo! increased its free storage space to 100 MB and its pay storage space to 2 GB.
On June 18, 2004, Rediff.com headquartered in Mumbai, India, increased the storage capacity of its free public Rediffmail service to one gigabyte.
On June 24, 2004, Microsoft's Hotmail announced an increase of storage space to 250 MB and 2 GB for its free and paid email services, respectively.
Throughout June, the Israeli search site Walla has been slowly upgrading their service to 1 GB of space and also offering their service in English.
In July 2004, Yahoo! acquired Oddpost which was the first service to perfect the instant response functionality of a desktop email client in the browser through javascript.
On July 29, 2004, Yahoo! announced an increase of storage space to 1 GB but only in China in hopes of getting a foot hold in their booming internet market.
Further followers of the big mailbox hype;
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