June 22nd, 2004 | 7 Comments

GMail: Google’s Email Servce

After reading plenty about Google’s new(ish) email system, GMail, I’ve finally received an invite to test it thanks to a kind soul at the SitePoint forums.

The major reason for all the inital talk was not just the fact that this was a Google system (anything Google always causes a lot of discussion), but because of a couple of the features it offered; 1GB of storage space, plus context sensitive ads placed next to emails - Google’s way of paying for all that storage space, no doubt.

The storage space was, at the time, way beyond anything else offered by free email services (the announcement on April 1st caused many to think that the storage amount was an April fool), and was more than enough to hold the average users email for years.

The ads caused even more of a stir, as there were concerns that emails were being ‘read’ in order to provide the contextual adverts.

Personally, privacy wasn’t an issue that worried me, the massive storage space far out-weighed any issues in this respect. And if you don’t like the idea of a computer scanning your mail, then why sign-up? In any case, my recent sign-up has not revealed much personal information to Google - no address, age or other personal detail was required. No doubt they can build up a profile of me from scanning my GMails, but to me that is no more scary than any other site building up a profile of my visiting habits. And although I’ve never really noticed it, Yahoo! Mail could have been doing a similar thing for years to target the ad banners that they show when collecting mail.

Since it’s launch, other services have hit back in the storage stakes - most notably Yahoo! has just upped it’s storage amount for free email accounts to 100MB (from 6MB), and for a price you can secure a full 2GB of storage space. Again, for an average email user, 100MB is probably more than enough space, even given the huge amounts of spam that are flying around.

Although I have my own email accounts, and do not particularly need another web-based account, I was interested in getting a GMail address in order to see what all the fuss was about, to see how well their search and conversation threading features work, and also to try to secure a reasonable username before the service goes fully live.

My initial thoughts (after very limited use!) on it are that it appears to be extremely quick (perhaps due to a lower number of users at the current time?) - certainly faster than my Yahoo account, plus no annoying banners, and the contextual ads are hardly noticable.

The code behind it is however horrible (what no DOCTYPE declaration? Where are the html or head tags?? Heavy reliance on javascript and use of frames: ugh!). It would have been nice to see Google embrace the current push towards web standards. It is however still in beta, so hopefully these problems will be pointed out and sorted by the time it goes live to the masses.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Blog, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can make a comment, or trackback from your own site.