Gmail

Developed by : Google
Initial release : March 21, 2004
Latest release : / December 4, 2007
OS : Cross-platform (web-based
application)
Type : POP3, IMAP, E-mail, webmail
Website : mail.google.com, or Gmail.com
Gmail, officially Google Mail in Germany and the United Kingdom, is a
free webmail 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.To this day, the service has remained in beta
status. With an initial storage capacity of 1 GB, it drastically increased the
standard for free storage.
Gmail currently offers over 7200 MB of continuously increasing free
storage (more space is continually being added - about 3.348 MB a day), 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.
Development history:
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 PigeonRank).However, they
explained that their real joke had been a press release 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 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, fromBlogger,
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 was
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.

Features

The service currently provides more than 7200 MBs 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 will keep increasing storage by the second as long as they have
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 0.14 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 overall
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.

Gmail Labs

Gmail Labs, introduced on June 5, 2008, is a feature that allows users to test
new or experimental features of Gmail, such as bookmarking of important
email messages, custom keyboard shortcuts, and games. New Labs features
can be enabled and disabled selectively, and users can provide feedback
about each of them. They allow Gmail engineers to get user input about new
features to improve them, and popular ones might become a regular Gmail
feature. All are experimental, and might stop working at any time. Labs
features can only be toggled when using the English language interface of
Gmail.

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.

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 do not 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, Mozilla Thunderbird, 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.

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.
As of July 2008, it is possible to configure Gmail for HTTPS access only
through the Settings option - this prevents any insecure access via HTTP.
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
is not 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 have claimed this problem has been fixed.
The spam filtering system cannot 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. Currently about 75% of email sent to Gmail
accounts is filtered as spam.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.
Gmail also does not 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 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.

Language support

The Gmail interface currently supports 52 languages, which include most of

the US English features, including: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese
(simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish,
Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK), English (US), Estonian, Finnish, French,
German,Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian,
Italian, Japanese,
Kannada,Korean,Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Polish,Punjabi, Portuguese(Brazil)
, Portuguese(Portugal), Romanian,Russian, Serbian, Sinhala,Slovak, Slovenian
,Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog (Filipino), Tamil, Telugu,
Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian,Urdu, and Vietnamese, .

Applications

Google has developed several smaller applications, with attempts to increase

user productivity, expand into business sectors and making Gmail available
on mobile devices.

Gmail Notifier, an official tool offered by Google, displays a small icon in the
notification area (see Taskbar) in Microsoft Windows and on the right-hand
side of the menu bar in Mac OS X, indicating the presence of new mail in
one's inbox. It also has a feature that makes Gmail the default mail client
for mailto links. It does not, however, download new messages. For Linux,
several unofficial notifiers are available. It should be noted that currently the
Gmail Notifier (v1.0.25.0) does not work with Google Apps For Your
Domain.On February 10, 2006, Google introduced Gmail For Your Domain. All
companies who participated in the beta testing were allowed to use Gmail
through their own domain. Since then, Google has developed Google Apps,
which includes customizable versions of Google Calendar,Google Page
Creator and more.

With various editions available, it targets enterprises as well as small

businesses.On November 2, 2006, Google began offering a mobile-application
based version of its Gmail product for mobile phones capable of
running Javaapplications. Those interested in using the application can
download it from gmail.com/app directly from their mobile phone. In
addition,Sprint Nextel announced separately that it would make the
application available from its Vision and Power Vision homepages and which
will be preloaded onto some new Sprint phones. The application gives Gmail
its own custom menu system, which is much easier to navigate than a Web-
based application would be on a cell phone. Gmail's message threading also
shows up clearly, and the site displays attachments (like photos, Word
documents) in the application.

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 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 and was made publicly
available late 2006. However in November 2007, 30Gigs was discontinued.
Every Gmail account which remains 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 andWindows 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, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail also
enhanced their e-mail interfaces after the launch of Gmail. During 2005
Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail matched Gmail's ability to have an attachment-size
of 10 MB. 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.
Google Apps, a hosted package that includes Gmail, puts Google into
competition with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express and
Microsoft Exchange Server.
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.