Gmail was announced 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."
Gmail also initially received a lot of criticism for a statement they made in their original terms of use, refusing to guarantee that all e-mails at Gmail would be deleted upon request by the user. Google later clarified that they were referring to backup copies of e-mails, and promised that all deleted mails would eventually be expunged completely from their servers. This, along with the feature that advertisements would be generated by software-based scanning of e-mails in order to better target them, gave rise to a controversy on web privacy (see BBC News Article; for a defense see The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It's Bogus).
Before being acquired by Google, the gmail.com domain name was used by the free e-mail service offered by Garfield.com, online home of the comic strip Garfield. This free e-mail service has moved to e-garfield.com.
As of June 22, 2005, Gmail's canonical URI has been changed to http://mail.google.com/mail/ instead of http://gmail.google.com/gmail/.
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Contents
- 1 Internal development
- 2 Beta testing phase
- 3 Current status
- 4 Gmail for your domain
- 5 Gmail in other languages
- 6 Name change in Germany and in the UK
- 6.1 Gmail in Germany
- 6.2 Gmail in the UK
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Internal development
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 only available internally, as an email client for Google employees. It was hosted under the code name Caribou, a reference to a Dilbert comic strip about Project Caribou.
Beta testing phase
Google initially invited about 1,000 employees, friends, and family members to become beta testers, with trials beginning on March 21, 2004. Active users from the Blogger.com community were offered the chance to participate in the beta-testing on April 25, and later, Gmail members occasionally received "invites" which they could extend to their friends. One round of invites was sent out on May 1, and another three invitations were given to all active members on June 1; by mid-June, the number of invitations had increased, with many users receiving between three and five invites daily. On February 2, 2005, the invitation interface was changed to make it easier to give invites by simply entering an e-mail address and at approximately 3:00 UTC on February 3, 2005, some Gmail users were awarded 50 invites, and more recently, 100 invites, suggesting that Gmail would soon go public. Now, if one attends a Google Mini webinar, one will get a Gmail invitation. One is also able to receive an invitation to Gmail through the use of Google Mobile. More information can be found at http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/product_tours_demos.html.
During the initial months of the Gmail beta, Gmail's well-publicized feature set and the exclusive nature of the accounts caused the aftermarket price of Gmail invitations to skyrocket. According to PC World magazine, Gmail invitations were selling on eBay for as much as US$150, with some specific accounts being sold for several thousand dollars. After a new round of invitations in early June, the price for invitations fell down to between US$2-$5. Several philanthropic Gmail users have utilized services such as the now defunct GmailSwap to donate invitations to people who want them. On June 28, Google amended its policy to forbid the selling of registered accounts. See the Official Gmail Program Policy.
Current status
In March 2004, Google said that Gmail would probably be released publicly after six months of testing, which would have placed their launch in September 2004, but it is still in beta as of June 2006. Speculation also regarding the release date is right after The New York Times said they had "credible sources" saying "Gmail will be released publicly by the end of the year 2005." As of present, however, one needs an invitation from an existing user or to sign up via text message using the gmail homepage (www.gmail.com) and a U.S. cellular phone that has SMS capabilities to get an account, and the site still says it is in the beta development stage. The number of invitations existing account holders can send has been varied, presumably to control the usage and growth of the system. For all intents and purposes, Gmail is open to the public now, since thousands of invites are publicly available from many websites. The use of the invitation/text message system helps prevent spammers from registering numerous accounts for purposes of spamming, and will ensure that any account used illegally will have another valid e-mail address or phone number to trace a user (the one to which the invite was sent).
In January 2005, security experts discovered a critical flaw in the handling of Gmail messages that would allow hackers to easily access private e-mails from any Gmail user's account. This was posted with detailed information to popular technology site Slashdot at 9:23 a.m. PST on January 12, 2005. At roughly 10:15 a.m. PST on January 13, 2005, developers at Gmail announced that they had fixed the problem, and that the security flaw had been patched. Despite Gmail's status as a beta application, this raised concerns among some users who use Gmail as their primary mail account.
On April 1, 2005, exactly one year after the initial release, Gmail increased the mailbox size to 2 GB (advertising it as 2GB plus) and introduced some other new features, including formatted editing (giving users the option of sending messages in HTML or plain text). As of June 6, 2006, the mailbox size is 2.66 GB, and is increasing continuously at a rate of approximately 10 MB per month.
The "New! Get Gmail - Google's free e-mail service with over 2GB of storage." promo that appears for a few days on some computers.
On June 7, 2005, Isnoop.net Gmail Invite Spooler was deactivated by the site moderator, due to intolerance by Google. It was explained that Gmail's Product Manager would no longer tolerate the service, and was shut down midnight PDT. The service was featured in Popular Science magazine, and had given out over 1.2 million Gmail accounts.
Starting on July 11, 2005, or more likely earlier, Google gave away free Gmail accounts to random people who searched for the word "gmail" using the Google search engine. A promotion link would appear at the top of the page displaying "New! Get Gmail - Google's free e-mail service with over 2GB of storage." This has since expired. ↑
On August 24, 2005, Google offered a new method of signing up for a Gmail account via mobile phone text messaging. The public would be able to obtain an account by submitting a U.S. mobile phone number to Google, which would then send a text message with an invitation code that would be used to create a Gmail account. Numbers are stored in order to keep track of the number of accounts created which is limited to ten per phone number. This method of creating accounts makes it difficult for spammers to send out spam messages, getting spam delivered, or obtaining an account thus keeping Gmail as spam-free as possible. This method is currently only available to people with a U.S. mobile phone number. See https://www.google.com/accounts/SmsMailSignup1.
This shows the option to choose which address a message appears to be sent from.
On August 30, 2005, Gmail started to add the facility to customize the address that messages are sent from on outgoing mail to some accounts. This adds option for outgoing messages to appear as if they had been sent from an alternative e-mail address, rather than from the Gmail account. Right now, this option is only available for accounts that have set English (US) as Gmail display language. Gmail Help Center., but users can switch to another language and keep using this feature after adding another address.
In August 2005, Gmail started offering 100 invites to some users.
In October 2005, Gmail withdrew use of username@gmail.com within the UK, due to a dispute with the UK company Independent International Investment Research (IIIR), who own the gmail.co.uk domain. From October 19, any new UK users wanting a gmail account were forced to have username@googlemail.com. There is still a concern that old UK users will also have to change to the new domain sometime in the future.
In December 2005, Gmail added a "Vacation responder" (to provide automatic response to e-mails), and Contact Groups (allowing e-mail to be sent to a number of contacts, in a user defined group).
On December 16, 2005, Google quietly released a version of Gmail for the mobile device, which they named "Gmail Mobile" [1], [2] This product competes with, and has features similar to an open source version of Gmail Mobile 1.0 which was launched just 3 weeks earlier by the SourceForge community.
On January 17, 2006, Gmail added a delete button to the menu bar. This now allows users to easily delete their messages.
On February 7, 2006, Gmail added the ability for users to chat with others on their contact list when logged into their account. A Quick Contacts box displays names of people that are emailed most often and when a name is clicked, a chat session or email will start. Chat sessions will then show up on the bottom right corner or it can be popped-out into a new window. Users have the option to save their chats in a Chat History.
On April 4, 2006, Gmail was integrated into the newly released "Google Calendar" service. [3].
Gmail for your domain
On February 10, 2006, Google introduced Gmail for your domain. This service, currently in beta testing, allows organizations to offer e-mail services through Gmail using their own domain. San Jose City College is one of the organizations currently using this service. Google may eventually open the service to all domain owners, as Microsoft has with its Windows Live Custom Domains service.
Gmail in other languages
- On April 13, 2005, Gmail became available in several languages: British English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and simplified and traditional Chinese.
- On June 30, 2005, Gmail became available in 4 new languages: Danish, Finnish, Polish, and Swedish.
- On August 9, 2005, Gmail became available in 12 new languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
- In the beginning of September 2005, Gmail became available in 9 new languages: Catalan, Czech, Estonian, Hindi, Lithuanian, Romanian, Tagalog, Thai, and Turkish.
- From the end of May 2006, Gmail started to support Arabic and Hebrew, which requires support for bi-directional text.
Name change in Germany and in the UK
Gmail in Germany
The German version of Gmail was first named Gmail Deutschland. Unfortunately for Google, the German company Giersch Ventures had already trademarked G-mail in 2001. The company later filed a lawsuit against Google for trademark infringement.
On 4 July 2005, Google announced that Gmail Deutschland would be rebranded Google Mail. From that point forward, visitors originating from a German IP would be forwarded to googlemail.com where they could obtain an email address containing the new domain. Any German user who wants a gmail.com address must sign up for an account through a proxy. German users who were already registered were allowed to keep their old addresses.
Despite this limitation, German users can still be emailed at their corresponding address containing the gmail.com domain. In many respects, the googlemail.com address is simply an alias. A German user interested in having their mail sent to gmail.com can simply change their reply-to address.
The Giersch Ventures lawsuit also forced Google to change the site's URL from gmail.google.com to mail.google.com, which briefly broke some applications and plugins that relied on this address to access the mail service.
Gmail in the UK
On 19 October 2005, the UK version of Gmail was converted to Google Mail for similar reasons to those described above for Germany [4].
To register a @gmail.com email address in the UK, a proxy server such as VTunnel can be used to avoid the @googlemail.com address UK residents are given. On the 9th of February 2006, users in the UK appeared to be seeing the main logo "Gmail+Chat" as opposed to the expected Google Mail logo. However, on the following day, it was changed back to Google Mail, suggesting a mistake in the process.
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