New technology highlight of the day... GMail!

I heard about GMail some time ago and, initially, I thought the idea was pretty hokey. GMail is an e-mail service that is currently being Beta tested by Google (the popular Internet Search Engine). As this service is coming from Google, it has some very "Googlish" things.

First of all, Google is supplying up to 1 gigabyte of storage. With so much storage space, there's little need to delete e-mails, you can simply archive them. To go right along with the notion of archiving everything, Google is providing the ability to use their search engine to scour your old e-mails looking for the long-lost e-mail with Aunt Susie's address in it from two years ago. ;-)

Hmmm...sounds great, right? So what's the catch? Well, Google needs a way to pay for this - after all they're a business and they want to make money. How do they make money? Advertising. Here's the kicker - when you sign up for an account on GMail, you authorize them to scour through all of your e-mail messages (a computer does this, of course, not a person) and look for keywords. Then, when you view your messages, you'll see ads alongside the message that relate to the keywords found in your message. So, for example, if someone sent you an e-mail about an upcoming camping trip, you might see some links alongside the e-mail that have to do with camping supplies or sporting good shops.

So, that's the catch and, at first, I thought this sounded like a bunch of garbage. However, I've recently heard a lot of folks talking about GMail and a lot of them sound quite excited about it. Well, because I'm a curious little rodent, I figured I'd better check it out and I signed up for an account. Here's my take on it...

First of all, the GUI is clean, crisp, and incredibly responsive. I've never used a web-mail service that's been so fast. Of course, that's taken out of context to some degree - I have very few messages in my mailbox and the system isn't currently open to the public yet so I imagine the current workload is pretty light.

Secondly, the search tools are great. They're fast and they're accurate. Nothing quite like being able to sift through gobs of messages in no time to get what you're after.

Third, the advertisements are very minimal, although I think this has more to do with the Beta release than anything. I sent myself some test e-mails with some "choice commercial words" that I thought would draw some ads, but I've seen little to nothing.

Finally, the coolest feature I've seen is "threaded conversations." Rather than having separate e-mails for "e-mail conversations" (a series of replies from one person to another and back again), GMail groups all of those e-mails together into a single "thread." When you receive a new reply, the entire conversation is bumped to the top of your inbox so that you can easily look back on the entire conversation (or minimize the rest of the conversation so that you only see what's new). That feature, by itself, it pretty cool.

I'm not sure what sort of tools are available to help filter SPAM - the tools like sadly rudimentary at first glance but, if the SPAM filtering tools are useful, GMail might just be a hit.

Anyway, if you're interested in learning more about GMail, check out gmail.google.com. It's probably not for everyone, but it's worth a look.