Utente:Ppalli/Sandbox:2

Development history

Announcement

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 available only internally, as an email client for Google employees.

Gmail was finally announced to the public in 2004 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."

Registration

When Gmail was first announced, access to the service was limited to those who had an invitation from an existing account holder, from Blogger, and later through their mobile phone. Additionally, a limited number of invitations were given out directly from Google to end users via a link on Google's home page. Creating a Gmail account without an invitation required a text messaging-enabled mobile phone. Initially however, account holders received their invitations after being on a waiting list previous to the launch. Google stated that the invitation system intended to initially reduce the amount of abuse, as spammers were unable to make a large number of accounts. When the invitation system was in use, account holders were given up to 100 account invitations to send out to other e-mail addresses.

On August 9, 2006, Gmail registration was made available to anyone in Australia and New Zealand, in Japan since August 23 2006 and in Egypt since December 3 2006.

On February 7 2007, Gmail registration was made public in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Russia, Japan, and Hong Kong.

On February 14 2007, Gmail registration was made public globally, so anyone could register for a Gmail account.

Domain name

Before being acquired by Google, the gmail.com domain name was used by a free e-mail service offered by Garfield.com, online home of the comic strip Garfield. After moving to a different domain, the service has since been discontinued.

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/.

Privacy

Google automatically scans e-mails to add context-sensitive advertisements to them. Privacy advocates raised concerns that the plan involved scanning their personal, assumed private, e-mails, and that this was a security problem. Allowing e-mail content to be read, even by a computer, raises the risk that the expectation of privacy in e-mail will be reduced. Furthermore, e-mail that non-subscribers choose to send to Gmail accounts is scanned by Gmail as well. These senders of e-mail did not agree 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 this type of scanning is needed for server-side spam checking in any system.

What privacy advocates also consider problematic is the lack of disclosed data retention and correlation policies. It is possible for Google to combine information contained in a person's emails with information about their Internet searches. It is not known how long such information would be kept, and how it could 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.

There has also been criticism regarding Gmail's privacy policy, which contains 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." Google continues to reply to this criticism by pointing out that Gmail is using mostly industry-wide practices. Google later stated that they will "make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical."

Competition

After Gmail's initial announcement and development, many existing web mail services quickly increased their storage capacity. For example, Hotmail went from giving some users 2 MB to 25 MB (250 MB after 30 days, and 2 GB for Hotmail Plus accounts), while Yahoo! Mail went from 4 MB to 100 MB (and 2 GB for Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts). Yahoo! Mail storage then proceeded to 250 MB, in late April of 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 visible for MSN's Hotmail, which upgraded its e-mail storage erratically from 250 MB to the new Windows Live Hotmail which includes 5 GB of storage. As of November 2006, MSN Hotmail upgraded all free accounts to have 1 GB of storage. In August of 2005, AOL started providing all AIM screen names with their own e-mail accounts with 2 GB of storage. Another source of competition came from 30Gigs who were offering 30 gigabytes of storage, initially through invite only but now available publicly.

Every Gmail account which is inactive for six months is labeled dormant and three months later (a total of nine months), may get deactivated by Gmail. All stored messages would be deleted if that were to happen. Other webmail services, like Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Hotmail, have different, often shorter, times for marking an account as inactive; Yahoo! Mail deactivates dormant accounts after four months, and Windows Live Hotmail deactivates free accounts after two months (previously one).

Other than the general increase of storage limit, there has also been an improvement of the e-mail interfaces of Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail after the launch of Gmail. Gmail's ability to have an attachment size of 10 MB was also matched by Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail during 2005. Following the footsteps of Gmail, Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! Mail Beta service and Microsoft launched Windows Live Hotmail, both now incorporating Ajax interfaces. Google increased the maximum attachment size to 20 MB in May 2007.

With Google Apps, a hosted package that includes Gmail, Google is competing with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Exchange Server.