Gmail is a free email service provided by Google that was released to the public in February 2007. Though there are over 100 million users, Google still maintains the service in beta, or testing, status. Gmail offers 7300 MB of free storage with additional storage available for a fee.

Gmail is unique in several ways from other webmail systems. By offering a community-driven spam filtering feature, allowing users to mark emails as spam, it provides the system with information to help protect all Gmail users. It offers search-oriented features and a “conversation view” manner of managing email, much like Internet forums. This makes it appear to users that they are staying on a single page rather than navigating a number of locations.

Gmail is also different from other webmail services in that it automatically saves email being composed or edited every minute and saving it to the “draft” folder. This protects work from being lost without the user having to take action.

In June 2008, Google introduced the Gmail Labs feature, allowing users to test experimental test features such as custom keyboard shortcuts, email bookmarking and games. The Labs features can be enabled or disabled and users can provide Gmail engineers with feedback to improve them, determine their popularity, and assess whether or not they should be incorporated into the regular Gmail features. Being experimental, features can be terminated at any time.

In December 2008, Gmail incorporated SMS Messaging, or Short Message Service, through its chat feature to support mobile telephone text messaging. Integrating Gmail with Gears in January 2009, allowed for offline access.

Gmail is supported by Google’s AdWords advertising program. Google utilizes “content extraction”, scanning incoming and outgoing email, to target advertising content to the content of the email. For example, if an email talks about buying a new car, ads for auto dealerships or services may be presented.

Privacy advocates are critical of Google’s privacy policies and lack of data retention disclosure. Gmail emails are automatically scanned in order to provide context-relevant advertisements, seen at the right of the screen next to the email. It raises concerns that emails, assumed to be private, are at risk, even if only read by a computer. It also raises the question of privacy of non-subscribers to Gmail, those who did  not agree to Google’s terms of service or privacy policy, whose emails are also being scanned once they flow into the system. Over 30 civil liberties and privacy organizations have advocated for the suspension of Gmail service until privacy issues are resolved.

Categories: Glossary
Tags: adwords, Gmail, gmail chat