Gmail

From ArticleWorld

Gmail is Google's offer in the field of e-mail. It offers a web-based e-mail service with POP3 support, featuring virtually unlimited storage space. Although having a great userbase and growth, Gmail is still beta at the time of writing, and, thus, invitation-based, meaning that users can only register by receiving an invitation. However, getting an invitation is relatively easy.

Features

Gmail's most highlighted feature is its ever growing storage space, but this is only one of the interesting features of this service. Other notable characteristics include:

• Conversation views. Gmail keeps track of a message and all the replies to it, binding messages together into a structure that resembles a conversation. Although the idea itself is interesting, the implementation sometimes fails to do what it should, breaking conversations into chunks or arranging messages incorrectly.
• Labels, not folders. Instead of sorting their email into folders, users are encouraged to categorize them using labels. A message may have an unlimited number of labels, making them more flexible than folders.
• Keyboard shortcuts. The webmail interface includes several hotkeys to ease navigation.
• Comprehensive searching. Gmail includes a powerful indexing and label-based searching facility, that allows user to find their e-mails easier.
• Chat. The web-based interface can be synchronized with the entire Google Talk network, allowing text-only chats. Although not all of the Google Talk's facilities are supported, the web-based interface does allow users to chat from virtually any computer.

Criticism

Despite being a powerful and popular service, Gmail has received some criticism, in two main directions:

• Privacy. Gmail does store some residual copies of e-mail on their servers, after they have been deleted or even after the account has been terminated. This was, however, just one side of the debate, because Google added context-sensitive advertisements, which obviously meant scanning e-mails. Although Gmail denied they are "reading" e-mails in any way, admitting that a script simply looks for keywords. Nevertheless, this raises some suspicions.
• Absent features. Gmail's web interface is already seriously loaded, and several features are missing. For example, spell-checking is not present, although third-party programs can offer it (Unix-based e-mail clients, which can easily integrate with aspell, for example, offer this facility).

Nevertheless, Gmail remains one of the most popular services.