Friday, May 16, 2008
Privacy advocates are frothing about Google's plan to scan e-mail for advertising purposes. A report from an early tester of the service says their concerns are overblown.
Apr 26, 2004 | I'm not scared of Gmail. I'm not at all worried that my privacy is about to be invaded by the world's most popular search engine company. Call me brave, call me crazy, but I'm not. Nor should you be.
Gmail is the new Web-based e-mail service from Google that offers a gigabyte of storage space to users. Google announced Gmail on April 1 and has been handing out a limited number of beta accounts since then. The company still doesn't have a firm release date, but says it will most likely be within the next three to six months. More beta users are being added every day. On April 20, Google began divvying out Gmail accounts to "active" users of its weblogging service, Blogger.com. A representative of Google says that there are currently not quite "tens of thousands" of Gmail users, and that it wants to try to incrementally roll out more accounts. If it's as good as Google search -- and it is -- it won't be long before that number hits the tens of millions.
I was fortunate enough to be one of the early beta testers. Here's my report on how it works, and why you shouldn't let it frighten you.
Gmail grew from an internal program to help Google employees better manage their e-mail. Among the program's most useful features is its incorporation of Google's search technology right in the inbox. Finding a particular message based on its content has never been easier in a Web-mail application.
"I think the principal issue that we had to contend with early on was the fact that I had a lot of e-mail," says Google co-founder Sergey Brin. "In Unix, all of your mail is stored in a mail spool file. Oftentimes, people I know would just open up a raw spool file. You can't do anything but it's very, very fast, and you can use other Unix tools such as grep. That was the inspiration as much as anything.
"Fairly early on, we decided we wanted an internal search for e-mail. I wanted it for myself. I found I was eventually using it for all my e-mail. And as a consequence of that, I decided everyone should have a version of it and that's been the more recent effort."
But Gmail is much more than storage and search. It makes extensive use of JavaScript to give users such niceties as keyboard shortcuts, spell-checking, and seamless composition, replying and forwarding. The result feels like a cross between a Web-based application and a standalone program.
"We wanted to have the benefits of both," says Brin. "We wanted to have the efficiency of a stand-alone application. I think we aimed for that, but I don't think we went as far as those kinds of things that really try to duplicate apps. We did not want to go that far. If you push it too far, then it really interferes with what people are used to in a Web application and it causes the browsers to be really confused."
It has a fairly effective spam filter that uses both rules-based and Bayesian filtering. I redirected much of the spam from my old mail account to Gmail, and it caught every piece of spam I threw at it. Brin says that coming down the pike will be even better filtering tools.
Gmail also sports several interesting organizational features. Messages are grouped together in "conversations," similar to the way some stand-alone e-mail applications thread replies. But Google does it differently, making it easy for users to view the new text in each reply in a thread without reading the full body of the message that's being quoted back and forth. Furthermore, each response is expandable and collapsible, with previous replies being collapsed by default. When you need to go back and look at previously quoted text, clicking on an individual message within the conversation causes it to expand instantly.
"While there are mail programs that support threading, it's often not on by default, and it usually has some funny trade-offs," says Brin. "Ultimately when they do thread them you don't see all the messages at once. And then you end up reading the same content twice. We've dealt with all those issues, and it makes it easier for me."
Gmail's labeling is also interesting. Normally, when you want to organize your e-mail, you have to sort it into different folders. Gmail uses "labels" instead, that allow users to apply multiple labels to the same message.
Want to keep your work mail separate from your personal mail? Set up a filter that applies a "work" label to incoming mail from your office's domain. Have friends at work who send you personal messages? Set up another filter that labels those messages as "friends." Thus when a co-worker sends you a message about catching an A's game after work, you don't have to make a decision about where to file it. It can appear in both places.
Get Salon in your mailbox!