Sign in Gmail

Sign in Gmail

Gmail is built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful. And maybe even fun. After all, Gmail has:

 

www.gmail.com

Competition Gmail

Competition Gmail

 

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 email storage from 250 MB to the new Windows Live Hotmail which includes 5 GB of storage that grows with you (expands if necessary). In 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 email accounts with 2 GB of storage.

Google may terminate a Gmail account after nine months of inactivity. Other webmail services have different, often shorter, times for marking an account as inactive. Yahoo! Mail deactivates dormant accounts after four months.
As well as increasing storage limits following the launch of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail also enhanced their email 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.

Criticism Gmail

Criticism Gmail

Privacy

Google automatically scans emails to add context-sensitive advertisements to them. Privacy advocates raised concerns that the plan involved scanning their personal, private emails and that this was a security problem. Allowing email content to be read, even by a computer, raises the risk that the expectation of privacy in email will be reduced. Furthermore, email that non-subscribers choose to send to Gmail accounts is scanned by Gmail as well, even though those senders never agreed 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.

In 2004, 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 email 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 used to contain 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". However, this statement does not appear in Gmail's current privacy policy. Less specifically, Google have 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 sophisticated attacks — thought to use phishing and exploit a vulnerability in Internet Explorer — in late 2009. Any (web mail or other) mail system which stores and retains user's email contents is an attractive target for such attacks, but Gmail is popular with security-conscious users because of its early HTTPS secure (encrypted) connection support, and its more-recent HTTPS-only default setting.

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. Buzz was discontinued in December of 2011.

In July 2012 Some California residents filed a lawsuit against Google and Yahoo! claiming that they illegally intercept emails sent by individual non-Gmail and non-subscribers to Gmail and Yahoo subscribers without their knowledge, consent or permission.

Technical limitations

Gmail does not allow users to send or receive executable files or archives containing executable files if it recognizes the file extension as one used for executable files or archives.
By design, Gmail does not deliver all of a user's emails. 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.

Before September 29, 2010, Gmail sorted email 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 emails is possible, most operations, such as archiving and labeling, can be performed only on whole conversations. Conversations cannot be split up or combined.[83] As a result of complaints from some users, Google made conversation view optional starting September 29, 2010.

Outages

Gmail has been unavailable on several occasions. On February 24, 2009, the Gmail service was offline for 2 hours and 30 minutes, preventing millions of users from accessing their accounts. People who rely entirely on Gmail for business purposes complained about these outages.[85][86] Another outage occurred on September 1, 2009. Later that day, a Google vice president, Ben Treynor, explained that the problem, which ultimately resulted in about 100 minutes of outage, was caused by overloaded routers, triggered by a routine configuration change which added more router load than expected. Treynor wrote, "Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we're committed to keeping events like today's notable for their rarity."

In 2009, Google continued to experience outages across its network, leaving users without access to their email, calendars, and virtual files.

Gmail hoaxes

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 purportedly mail an ad-supported paper copy email archive for free.
Gmail Custom Time hoax

On April Fools' Day 2008 Google introduced a fake service, "Gmail Custom Time", which would allegedly allow a user to send up to ten emails per year with forged timestamps. The hoax stated that by bending spacetime on the Google servers, the emails actually get routed through the fourth dimension of time itself before reaching their intended recipient.
Gmail Autopilot hoax

On April Fools' Day 2009 Google introduced a service called Gmail Autopilot by CADIE. According to Google, the service purported to automatically read and respond to emails for the user. It appeared to work by analyzing messages for the emotions expressed in the message and either providing advice to the user or automatically responding to the message.

Gmail Motion hoax

On April Fools' Day 2011 Google introduced a service called Gmail Motion which allowed users to navigate emails, send and even dictate messages through the user's physical actions using webcams. For example, to send an email, the user would perform the action of licking a stamp, and posting it. After the user signed up, they would be directed to an "April Fools'" message.

Gmail Tap hoax

On April Fools' Day 2012, Google introduced a service called Gmail Tap, an application for Android and iOS which claimed to double typing speed with a revolutionary new keyboard. The system involves a keyboard with three keys: Morse code "dash" and "dot", and a spacebar (along with backspace). Shortly before midnight, on March 31, 2012 Gmail Tap was added, an Android Application utilizing Morse Code instead of the onscreen keyboard. Selecting Download App for Your Phone produced the message: "Oops! Gmail Tap is a bit too popular right now. We suggest you try downloading it again on April 2nd

History Gmail

History Gmail

 

The idea for Gmail was pitched by Rajen Sheth during an interview with Google,] and went on to be developed by Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. Initially the email client was available for use only by Google employees internally. Google announced Gmail to the public on April 1, 2004. IMAP support was added on October 24, 2007

Interface Gmail

Interface

 

The Gmail user interface differs from other Webmail systems with its focus on search and its "conversation view" of email, grouping several replies onto a single page. Gmail's user-experience designer, Kevin Fox, intended users to feel as if they were always on one page and just changing things on that page, rather than having to navigate to other places

Features Gmail

Storage

The Gmail service currently provides more than 10 GB of free storage per account.Users can rent additional storage (shared between Picasa Web Albums, Google Docs and Gmail) from 25 GB (US$2.49/month) to 16 TB (US$799.99/month).[18] On April 1, 2005, the first anniversary of Gmail, Google announced an increase from 1 GB. Georges Harik, the product management director for Gmail, stated that Google would "keep giving people more space forever."

On April 24, 2012, Gmail announced the increase of free storage in Gmail from 7.5 GB to 10 GB (and counting) as part of the launch of Google Drive.

Gmail Labs

The Gmail Labs feature, introduced on June 5, 2008,allows users to test new or experimental features of Gmail, such as bookmarking of important email messages, custom keyboard shortcuts. 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.

Spam filter

Gmail's spam filtering features a community-driven system: when any user marks an email as spam, this provides information to help the system identify similar future messages for all Gmail users. Users may tune the system to allow mail marked as spam to be handled in particular ways.

Gmail Mobile

Gmail Mobile is a version of Google's Gmail email service. It is a free service, developed to provide access to Gmail from mobile devices such as cell phones, or smartphones. Gmail Mobile offers many of the features as Gmail delivered effectively to smaller, mobile screens. Users have the ability to compose, read, archive, reply, forward, mark unread, add a star, add custom labels or trash email messages.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:

    It must have Internet access and a WAP enabled web browser
    It must be XHTML compliant
    It must have cookies enabled and the mobile network must also allow cookies to be set
    It must allow SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) traffic.

Gmail Mobile was released on December 16, 2005, and is available in more than 40 languages.]

Google Buzz

Main article: Google Buzz

On February 9, 2010, Google commenced their new service, Google Buzz, which integrates with Gmail allowing users to share links and media, as well as status updates. Buzz was launched with an automatic opt-in, causing an uproar in the Gmail community which led Google to quickly undo its initial moves. Buzz was discontinued in December of 2011.

Google Voice in Gmail chat

Main article: Google Voice

In August 2010, Google released a plugin that provides integrated telephone service within Gmail's Google Chat interface. This service initially lacked an official name, with Google referring to it as "Google Voice in Gmail chat" and also "Call Phones in Gmail", but is now called Google Video and Voice Chat. The service allows people to make free calls from their Gmail account to U.S. and Canada, at least through the end of 2012. Gmail account users can also call other countries on a fee basis.]

The service logged over 1 million calls in 24 hours on 26 August 2010.

Offline Google Mail

On August 31, 2011, it was announced on the Official Gmail Blog that Offline Google Mail was launched as a Chrome web app at the Google Chrome Web Store. This HTML5-powered app is based on the Gmail web app on tablets.

On April 11, 2011, Google engineer Sundar Pichai revealed that Google employees had been testing the app together with offline versions of Google Docs and Google Calendar for months and that the apps would be launched in the summer of 2011.

Gmail Search

Gmail has the integrated search function that resembles Google Search but only searches a user's Gmail account. On May 21, 2012, Gmail improved their search functionality to include autocomplete predictions from the user's email content.

Security Warnings

On June 5, 2012, a new security feature was introduced to protect users from state-sponsored attacks. Whenever Google analyses indicate that a government has attempted to compromise an account, Gmail will display a notice that reads "Warning: We believe state-sponsored attackers may be trying to compromise your account or computer".