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| Coordinates | 50°35′″N22°16′″N |
|---|---|
| Name | Gmail |
| Logo | |
| Screenshot | |
| Caption | A screenshot of a Gmail inbox |
| Developer | |
| Released | |
| Latest release date | December 4, 2008 |
| Platform | Google Closure Tools (JavaScript) |
| Genre | POP3, IMAP, E-mail, Webmail |
| Website |
Gmail is a free, advertising-supported webmail, POP3, and IMAP service provided by Google. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though still in beta status at that time. The service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009, along with the rest of the Google Apps suite. , it had 193.3 million users monthly.
With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4 MB its competitors such as Hotmail offered at that time. Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a "conversation view" similar to an Internet forum. Software developers know Gmail for its pioneering use of the Ajax programming technique. Gmail runs on Google GFE/2.0 on Linux.
On April 1, 2005 the first anniversary of Gmail, Google announced the increase from 1 GB. Georges Harik, the product management director for Gmail, stated that Google would "keep giving people more space forever." In April 2005 Gmail engineer Rob Siemborski stated that Google would keep "keep giving Gmail users more space as we were able".
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.
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 Gears.
On July 14, 2009 Gmail brought Tasks out of Labs testing and made it an official feature.
On September 22, 2009 Google brought Push Mail support to its Gmail service using Google Sync for iPhone and iPod Touch platforms.
In order to use the service a user will need a Gmail account and a mobile device that meets the following requirements:
Gmail Mobile was released on December 16, 2005 and is available in many different languages.
The service logged over 1 million calls in 24 hours on 26 August 2010.
Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. Initially the e-mail client was available for use only by Google employees internally within the company. Google announced Gmail to the public on April 1, 2004. IMAP support was added on October 24, 2007.
, Gmail's canonical URI changed from
Google explains this:
{{cquote|If you'd like to sign up for a Gmail address, you need to have a mobile phone that has text-messaging capabilities. If you don't have a phone, you may want to ask a friend if you can use his or her number to receive a code.
One of the reasons we're offering this new way to sign up for Gmail is to help protect our users and combat abuse. Spam and abuse protection are two things we take very seriously, and our users have been very happy with the small amount of spam they've received in Gmail. We take many measures to ensure that spammers have a difficult time sending their spam messages, getting these messages delivered, or even obtaining a Gmail address (spammers will often use many different addresses to send spam). Sending invitation codes to mobile phones is one way to address this, as the number of addresses created per phone number can be limited.
These coding changes mean that only users of Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, Google Chrome and Safari 3.0 (or more recent versions) are officially supported by Gmail and can fully use the new code. Opera 9.5 and more recent versions are not officially tested but are expected to "work with all of Gmail's features". 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.
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-mail messages with information from Internet searches. Google has not confirmed how long such information is kept or how it can 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.
Gmail's privacy policy 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 points out that Gmail adheres to most industry-wide practices. Google has stated that they will "make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical."
Google defends its position by citing their use of email-scanning to the user's benefit. Google states that Gmail refrains from displaying ads next to potentially sensitive messages such as those that mention tragedy, catastrophe, or death.
Gmail accounts of human rights activists in China were hacked in a sophisticated attack in late 2009. The fact that Gmail stores, analyzes and retains user's email contents makes Gmail an attractive target for such attacks.
The launch of Google Buzz as an opt-out social network immediately drew criticism for violating user privacy because it automatically allowed Gmail users' contacts to view their other contacts.
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 if the client has a copy of it already. 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 sorts e-mail only by conversations (threads), which can be a problem for large conversations. For example, if a user sends a query to a large group of people, all of the responses are stored in a single conversation that is impossible to break apart. There is no way to search for responses from one user without getting the entire conversation. While deletion of individual e-mails is possible, most operations, such as archiving and labeling, can be performed only on whole conversations. Conversations cannot be split up or combined. As a result of complaints from some users, Google made conversation view optional starting 29 September 2010.
In 2009, Google continued to experience outages across its network, leaving users without access to their email, calendars, and virtual files.
Key outage dates include:
"Receiving, deleting, or downloading large amounts of mail via POP or IMAP in a short period of time. If you're getting the error message, 'Lockdown in Sector 4,' you should be able to access Gmail again after waiting 24 hours." A number of Gmail users complained that this implementation was both a privacy concern and a professionalism problem.
On July 30, 2009, Gmail announced an update to resolve this issue. The updated custom 'From:' feature allows users to send messages from Gmail using a custom SMTP server, instead of Gmail's. However, the issue is still present for users whose custom email address is a second Gmail account, rather than an account on a separate domain.
Gmail has drawn many favorable reviews from users for generous space quotas and unique organization.
The domains are interchangeable so users obliged to use the googlemail.com domain are unable to select addresses already chosen by gmail.com users. Inbound e-mails sent to either googlemail.com or gmail.com addresses will reach the user. When registering for an online service, Google Mail users must use the googlemail.com form of their email address to ensure that any administrative emails they send to the service, such as confirmation messages, are recognized.
The UK was also covered by this restriction, but Google announced on May 3, 2010 that the restriction would be lifted.
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.
The gmail.ru domain name dates from January 27, 2003.
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.
In September 2009 Google began to change the branding of UK accounts back to Gmail following the resolution of the trademark dispute.
On May 3, 2010, Google announced that they would start to phase out the googlemail.com domain in the UK. Existing users will get the option to switch to gmail.com, while new users will be given a gmail.com address by default.
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 from 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 June 2005 AOL started providing all AIM screen names with their own e-mail accounts with 2 GB of storage.
If an account remains inactive for six months, the Gmail system flags it as 'dormant'. After three more 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, while Hotmail matches Gmail's nine 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 and to 25 MB in June 2009.
Category:Internet properties established in 2004 Category:Gmail Category:Google services Category:Email websites Category:Web 2.0 Category:Cross-platform software Category:Internet privacy
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