Gmail Totally Explained

Everything about Gmail totally explained

Gmail, officially Google Mail in Germany and the United Kingdom, is a free Web-based email (webmail), POP3 and IMAP e-mail service provided by Google. On April 1, 2004 the product began as an invitation-only beta release. On February 7, 2007 the beta version was opened to the general public. With an initial storage capacity of 1 GB, it drastically increased the standard for free storage.
Gmail currently offers over 6700 MB of free storage (increasing approximately 3.348 MB daily), with additional storage ranging from 10 GB to 400 GB available for US$20 to $500 per year. It has a search-oriented interface and a 'conversation view' similar to an internet forum. Gmail is well-known for its use of the Ajax programming technique in its design, and has tens of millions of users.

Features

Storage

The service currently provides more than 6700 MB of free storage and paid additional storage from 10 GB (US$20/year) up to 400 GB (US$500/year), shared over Picasa Web Albums and Gmail. The increase from 1 GB 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." All Google says about this now is that it'll keep increasing storage by the second as long as they've enough space on their 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. From January 4, 2008, the counter went down to about 3.35 MB per day, or .14 MB per hour.
On August 9, 2007, some users of Gmail reported that their storage capacity had been increased to 9030 MB (8.8 GB). The 9030 MB of space is an over-all total of all the users' storage space(s) within a Google Account, including Picasa Web Albums. This development seemed to occur about the same time that Google began allowing purchasable Picasa storage. In other words, Google has shared storage space, supporting both pictures and email.

Interface

Programming

Gmail makes use of Ajax (specifically, the AjaXSLT framework), employing modern browser features such as JavaScript, keyboard access keys and Web feed integration.

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. There are also undocumented search operators like "language:russian" that can be helpful.
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; by 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 (for example 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 into separate sections. There have been reports of emails not from the same conversation being mistakenly joined into one conversation, and conversations splitting up.
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. In addition, important e-mails can be flagged with a star (as mentioned earlier) so that a user may find an important e-mail more quickly than searching through the entire inbox.
Unlike other email Web clients, Gmail doesn't permit users to see the size of an email message or to sort email (for example, alphabetically by subject).

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, unless the user is using basic HTML view, designed for people with slower internet connections or browsers that don't support AJAX. 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.

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. Autosave is another feature in Gmail — a system for avoiding loss of data in case of a browser crash or other error. While an e-mail is being composed, 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.
Gmail places the cursor above quoted text when replying, which encourages top-posting. Regardless of how a received message is formatted, Gmail's conversation view defaults to showing only unique content, in chronological order, making posting style irrelevant to the Gmail user.

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 and IMAP access uses Transport Layer Security, or TLS.
   Although TLS is used when one sends email via an email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird, it isn't used when the email is sent from the Gmail servers to the destination domain's mail exchangers, unless supported, so at some stage the user's email message may still be transmitted in unencrypted plain text.
   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. However, Gmail has now fixed this problem. The spam filtering system can't be disabled. POP3 users need to check their Spam folder manually via the web interface as only emails sent to the Inbox can be retrieved via POP3.
   IP addresses of Gmail users are disguised in order to protect security . This is only the case for webmail users.
   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 cleaned attachment. Gmail also scans all outgoing attachments and will prevent the message from being sent if a virus is found. Executable files are automatically blocked by the Anti-Virus system. However, some viruses have been known to hide from the scanner and have infiltrated many e-mails. Gmail also doesn't allow users to send or receive executable files or archives containing executable files.
   Gmail is also one of the first major e-mail providers to sign outgoing mails with Yahoo!'s DomainKeys signatures.
   In the past, Gmail has had severe trouble with security which allowed a full account compromise via Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities affecting the Google.com homepage or information disclosure through a file which was stored on Google's server and included all the Email contacts of the currently logged in user. The vulnerability was quickly patched after the initial disclosures on the Internet.

Server

Gmail runs on the Google GFE/1.3 server, which is hosted on a Linux Operating System.

Addresses

Gmail 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, and will arrive in the inbox of username@gmail.com. This allows users to sign up for different services with different aliases and then easily filter all e-mails from those services. In addition, should users start to receive spam messages that are directed to their e-mail address with the extra text, that'll know what services have leaked out their e-mail address to others. However, some websites don't accept email addresses containing plus signs, despite the '+' symbol being part of the mail address specification.
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's added. "Plus-addresses" can also be added as sender addresses in a similar 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 "From:" field of the email. However, the Gmail account used to actually send the message is easily seen, as it either appears on a "Sender:" field in the email header, or in the message's subject field. Some mail clients will write "From: Sender@gmail.com (External Link

) On Behalf Of..." upon reply, making it very obvious.
Optionally, a different "Reply-to:" address can be set for each "send as" address.
Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within a username. Instead, it'll ignore all dots in a username. 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's necessary to include any dots used in the creation of the account. Also note that this doesn't work in Google Apps for Your Domain. In Apps, each username variation must be entered as a nickname by the domain administrator.

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. Once accounts are added, the user is asked if they want to create a custom sender address (see above) automatically if they've not yet done so manually. This feature doesn't support retrieving mail from IMAP servers, nor does it support sending messages through an external SMTP server.

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 is able to support voice calling and voice messages if the Google Talk client is running in the background. All messages are archived to the Chats mailbox in Gmail unless 'Off the Record' is enabled in Google Talk. If the fellow chatter suddenly has to go offline, any and all further messages sent will be delivered to that person via e-mail, including in it the entire conversation had previously. Another Google Talk integration feature is voicemail, where the message is sent to the recipient's Gmail inbox; as well as synchronizing contact pictures. On December 4, 2007, the company announced integration with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), allowing Gmail users to login to their AIM accounts and send instant messages to and see the online status of AIM users. 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, spreadsheets and presentations can be opened using Google Docs, without downloading the file to a hard disk first. Also, pictures can be sent directly from Picasa using a Gmail account.

Browser support

Gmail's old code will run 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+. It works well in the AOL 9.0 browser, but may have problems with earlier AOL browser versions. Although officially unsupported, it also works in Konqueror when the browser identifies itself as Firefox 1.5+.
However, the new code has more stringent requirements; users must upgrade their browsers to Firefox 2.0 or Internet Explorer 7. This can be a minor issue for some users, as several new features are available only in Gmail's newer version. Google has included a note at the top of several help pages, reiterating this differentiation between the two versions of the code:
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 available only internally, as an email client for Google employees.
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 ). However, they explained that their real joke had been a press release saying that they'd 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."

Registration

When Gmail was first announced, access to the service was limited to those who had an invitation from an existing account holder, from Blogger, and later through their mobile phone. Additionally, a limited number of invitations were given out directly from Google to end users via a link on Google's home page. 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 were unable to make a large number of accounts. 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, in Japan since August 23 2006 and in Egypt since December 3 2006. On February 7 2007, Gmail registration was made public in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Russia, Japan, and Hong Kong. On February 14 2007, Gmail registration was made public globally, so anyone could register for a Gmail account.
Sign up link: https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount

Domain name

Before being acquired 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, the service has since been discontinued. 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/.

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 actually mail a hard copy.

Gmail Custom Time hoax

On April Fools' Day 2008, Google introduced a fake service named Gmail Custom Time, which would allow a user to send up to ten emails per year with forged timestamps. By bending spacetime on the Google servers, the emails are actually routed through the 4th 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 started to be rolled out to users on October 29, 2007. The new version had a revamped contacts section, a redesigned quick contacts box, and made-over chat popups, which were added to names in the message list as well as the contact list on the left. 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". which broke a few third-party extensions — including Remember The Milk's Firefox extension for Gmail.

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. These senders of e-mail didn't 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 email systems make use of server-side content scanning in order to check for spam.
   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 emails with information about their Internet searches. It isn't 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.
   There has also been criticism regarding 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 that'll "make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical."
   Further, URLs in emails are converted to a clickable hyperlink with a Google redirect prepended, so Google can track whether the link is clicked.
   As part of Gmail's privacy policies, Google states that Gmail will refrain from displaying ads next to potentially sensitive messages. Content that will trigger the ad kill switch includes news about a tragedy, an email about catastrophic events, and death announcements.

Service issues

Users have occasionally found their accounts temporarily unavailable. Gmail doesn't 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.

Web interface

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. Labelling (tagging) is limited to message threads, while it would be also useful for contacts and individual messages too.
   Support for entering bi-directional text is currently available only in the Arabic and Hebrew interfaces.
   It can be 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 doesn't 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. However, it's possible to open the composed message in a new window so the address book can be opened, or another instance of gmail can be opened in another window to access the address book. Gmail's current documented help on this issue states: "While Gmail doesn't currently support the functionality to open your Contacts list while composing a message, we're testing many new features to improve our service."
   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. However, when a Gmail message is sent to another email address of a different provider, there will be no advertisements in the message unlike most other webmail providers.
   Unlike most other webmail services, Gmail's default mode doesn't allow for emails to be opened in a new tab or window. But this can be done if one switches to the "Basic HTML" mode or by opening the email and clicking the "new window" icon.
   When a Gmail mailbox is full, it's not possible to search for emails by size in order to delete the largest ones first. The best the web interface can do is to search for emails with attachments, but it doesn't indicate what the sizes of those attachments are.

Awards

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. Gmail has drawn many favorable reviews from users for generous space quotas and unique organization.

Trademark disputes

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. 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.

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").

United Kingdom

On October 19 2005, the United Kingdom version of Gmail was voluntarily converted to Google Mail, because of a dispute with another company, Independent International Investment Research, in the UK. 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. However, mail sent to a user with a Google Mail account will still be received if it's addressed to the corresponding gmail.com address.

Mainland China

An IT company named gmail.cn supplies yourname@gmail.cn (Chinese: 爱思美） addresses in mainland China.

Russian Federation

A Russian free webmail service called gmail.ru owns the "GMail" trademark in the Russian Federation. The gmail.ru domain name was created January 27, 2003.

Competition

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, in late April of 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 visible for 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 have 1 GB of storage. In August of 2005, AOL started providing all AIM screen names with their own e-mail accounts with 2 GB of storage. Another source of competition came from 30Gigs who were offering 30 gigabytes of storage, initially through invite only but now available publicly.
   Every Gmail account which is inactive for six months is labeled dormant and three months later (a total of nine months), may get deactivated by Gmail. All stored messages would be deleted if that were to happen. Other webmail services, like Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Hotmail, have different, often shorter, times for marking an account as inactive; Yahoo! Mail deactivates dormant accounts after four months, and Windows Live 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. Google increased the maximum attachment size to 20 MB in May 2007.
   With Google Apps, a hosted package that includes Gmail, Google is competing with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Exchange Server.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Gmail'.

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