It's only been about a week since Google introduced Anti-Virus capabilities into Gmail, and now the Googlers are now ready to start offering a few more interesting features that may raise a few eyebrows. Their "What's New" page has changed once again and outlines a few extra features that aren't yet available.1. What is Google Web Accelerator?
Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google's global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.
Please note that Google Web Accelerator is currently in beta test mode. If you have any problems using it or have suggestions for how we can improve it, please see the Google Group devoted to it.
Also note that during the first part of our beta testing period, users outside of North America and Europe may not see much improvement in their web page loading speed.
2. How does Google Web Accelerator work?
Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:
3. Can I use Google Web Accelerator with a dial-up connection?
Dial-up users may not see much improvement, as Google Web Accelerator is currently optimized to speed up web page loading for broadband connections.
4. Does Google Web Accelerator speed up all web pages?
No, it doesn't. For security reasons, Google Web Accelerator won't speed up pages encrypted with the HTTPS: protocol (such as bank records pages). Also, Google Web Accelerator only speeds up web pages, not large data downloads such as MP3 and streaming video files.
5. How does using Google Web Accelerator affect my privacy?
Google Web Accelerator receives much of the same kind of information you currently send to your ISP when you surf the Web:
The policies for the Google Web Accelerator, like those for Google.com, uphold the highest level of integrity and respect for our users' information. Google will never rent or sell a user's personal information to third parties without a user's explicit permission. To learn more about our privacy practices, please see the Google Web Accelerator Privacy Policy.
6. What are Google Web Accelerator's system requirements?
To use Google Web Accelerator, your computer must have a Windows XP or Windows 2000 SP 3+ operating system. Google Web Accelerator works for the Internet Explorer 5.5+ or Firefox 1.0+ browsers.
7. Can I run Google Web Accelerator on a browser other than Internet Explorer or Firefox?
For other browsers running on Windows, you'll need to manually configure your proxy settings to 127.0.0.1:9100 for HTTP connections.
8. What should webmasters and content providers know about Google Web Accelerator?
If you're a webmaster or content provider interested in learning how Google Web Accelerator works with your site, please see our webmaster FAQ.
| Using Google Web Accelerator | [back to top] |
1. How do I install Google Web Accelerator?
Visit http://webaccelerator.google.com to download and install the Google Web Accelerator.
2. How do I get the latest version of Google Web Accelerator?
You don't have to do anything to make sure you always have the latest version of Google Web Accelerator; it automatically updates itself whenever a new version is available.
3. What is the Google Web Accelerator toolbar?
When you start Google Web Accelerator, a new toolbar shows up on all of your browser pages. Here are the icons you'll see on this toolbar and what they mean:
This icon means Google Web Accelerator is up and running The speedometer needle moves to indicate your download speed.
This icon means you've turned off acceleration for the site you're currently visiting (learn how to do this).
This icon means you've turned off Google Web Accelerator entirely (learn how to do this).
When Google Web Accelerator is on, you'll see a Time Saved counter that shows you how much time it has saved you since you installed it (or since you reset the counter).
4. How do I uninstall Google Web Accelerator?
If you decide you don't want to use Google Web Accelerator, here's how to uninstall it:
| The Google Web Accelerator Menu | [back to top] |
1. How do I access the Google Web Accelerator menu?
You can bring up the Google Web Accelerator Menu by clicking on the Google Web Accelerator speedometer icon in the toolbar or system tray.
Learn more about each menu item:
| Preferences | [back to top] |
1. What Google Web Accelerator preferences can I set?
The Preferences menu option opens this Web Accelerator Preferences page:
Note: To apply your changes, you must click the Save Preferences button after you make them.
2. How do I ask Google Web Accelerator to not accelerate a website?
You can block Google Web Accelerator from speeding up pages from a particular subdomain (for example, www.somesite.com) or from an entire domain (for example, othersite.com, including any subdomains it might have, such as mail.othersite.com, www.othersite.com, news.othersite.com, etc).
To block a specific domain from being accelerated, enter its name (without a leading http://) in the Don't Accelerate These Sites preference's text area. For example, to block www.firstdomain.com and mail.seconddomain.com, just type those names in the text area, each on a separate line, and click the Save Preferences button. You can also block a domain by selecting the Don't accelerate this website toolbar menu item when you visit the website in question.
To block all subdomains at a particular site, just enter a "." followed by the common part of the domain name. For example, to block all subdomains at domain.com, just enter ".domain.com" on a separate line and click the Save Preferences button.
When your browser shows a blocked site, you'll see:
To unblock a domain, you can delete its entry from the Don't Accelerate These Sites text box and click the Save Preferences button, or uncheck the Don't accelerate this website toolbar menu item.
| Performance Data | [back to top] |
1. How can I tell how much time I have saved with Google Web Accelerator?
On the Google Web Accelerator: Performance Statistics page and the toolbar, you can see how much time Google Web Accelerator has saved you. This includes the number of pages that have been loaded and how long these pages would have taken to load with and without Google Web Accelerator.
2. How can I reset the Time Saved counter value?
Clicking the Reset button on the Performance Statistics page will reset the Time Saved counter.
| Turning Google Web Accelerator Off (and Back On) | [back to top] |
1. How do I turn Google Web Accelerator off without uninstalling it?
Just click on the Stop Google Web Accelerator menu item. Note that when Google Web Accelerator is turned off, the Google Web Accelerator icon in the system tray goes away. To restart Google Web Accelerator, either go to the Google Web Accelerator Toolbar menu and click Start Google Web Accelerator or select Google Web Accelerator in your Windows Start menu.
If you've made the Google Web Accelerator Toolbar invisible in IE, to access its icon menu you'll have to make it visible again by clicking on View > Toolbars > Google Web Accelerator from your main browser menu toolbar.
Google announced recently that the one gigabyte storage limit for Gmail will be increased to two gigabytes.Of course, the big question is "When is Gmail going to be public?"Makes you wonder why they keep improving the service, but make people beg to get invitations to use the service. Wouldn't it make more sense to move out of the "beta" stage before doubling the storage? Google will not discuss when, or even if, Gmail will be public.Asked whether access to Gmail accounts would ever be totally open, Harik declined to answer. "We keep looking for ways to make it more broadly available to people who want to use it," he said. --PCWorld Australia
Google announced recently that the one gigabyte storage limit for Gmail will be increased to two gigabytes.Of course, the big question is "When is Gmail going to be public?"Makes you wonder why they keep improving the service, but make people beg to get invitations to use the service. Wouldn't it make more sense to move out of the "beta" stage before doubling the storage? Google will not discuss when, or even if, Gmail will be public.Asked whether access to Gmail accounts would ever be totally open, Harik declined to answer. "We keep looking for ways to make it more broadly available to people who want to use it," he said. --PCWorld Australia
Gmail includes a number of original features as well as improvements upon those standard to web mail services.
the main innovations of Gmail is its method of categorizing e-mails, which Google calls Conversation View. In contrast to other e-mail services, Gmail keeps track of individual "conversations" (an original message, along with all the replies to that message), and allows users to view easily all the e-mails related to a specific message. Gmail's algorithm for determining how conversations fit together is not perfect, however: Single conversations sometimes become fragmented (especially when a replier changes the e-mail's subject line) and unrelated conversations occasionally become attached together. Conversations split into two separate storage sections if there are more than 150 messages, sometimes resulting in 5 or 6 chunks making up a whole conversation. Another drawback was that the entire conversation gets deleted if the user deleted one single email which was a part of that conversation, but this was fixed when a "Trash This Message" button was added.
Filters can be run only on incoming mail by using an interface similar to the Search Options dialog (see searching below). Gmail allows users to filter messages by their text; their From, To, and Subject fields; and by whether or not the message has an attachment. Gmail can perform any combination of the following actions upon a message that meets a label's criteria: Archiving (i.e. removing the message from the Inbox), marking as "starred", applying a label, moving to the trash, and forwarding to another email address.
Beginning on April 1, 2005 (Gmail's first birthday), Gmail started to offer 2 gigabytes of email storage space, which is increasing steadily ever after. This figure and the original offering of 1000 megabytes are hundreds of times more than what other webmail services offered at the time of Gmail's original announcement in 2004. Google suggests that users "archive", rather than delete their messages; Gmail's more than 2 gigabyte of storage is sufficient to hold many years' worth of an average user's e-mails, and Gmail's search technology allows users to search their archives easily. Additionally, users can store files (up to 10 megabytes in size) as e-mail attachments.
Current storage limit — As of December 18th, 2005, the maximum storage capacity has already exceeded 2675.661056 MB. [4]
Originally, the rate of increase was one megabyte every 7.44 hours (or 7 hours, 26 minutes and 24 seconds). This means that the storage space increases approximately 134.4 kilobytes each hour. Recently, however, the rate of increase has slowed down considerably - it seems that the rate of increase is now only between 13 and 14 kB per hour.
Gmail has added a system of Auto Save, a system for avoiding loss of data in case of a browser crash or other error. This feature automatically saves a "draft" copy of the current message once per minute.
Gmail automatically saves one's contacts as one sends e-mail. If one changes, adds, or removes information near an e-mail such as the name while sending any e-mail, it also updates that in one's contact list.
When one starts typing in the To (or CC or BCC) field it brings up a list with one's relevant contacts. Experience has shown that this "little Google search" on one's contacts is not too smart and it is made only to work with the two main fields of each contact and it is still restricted to Name and Primary Email. But it does provide a good and easy interface.
Even because of the auto-completion feature, the auto saving creates a contact for each e-mail instead of trying to guess which e-mail should be together and which should be a different contact. That can raise one's contact list and make it chunky if one keeps more than one e-mail per person. One can also go to one's Contacts and add more information as one wishes. They are all basically just for one's note only.
It is possible to import contacts in several different ways, from Outlook, Eudora, Hotmail, Yahoo!, orkut, and any other contact list capable of being exported as a CSV file. It does allow one to export one's contacts to CSV as well.
It is also possible to group contacts in a similar way as e-mails are labeled.
Gmail's interface relies heavily upon JavaScript, a client-side scripting programming language, which requests data from the Gmail servers via XMLHttpRequest, an example of the web-development technique which some referred to as Ajax. Since much processing takes place on the user's computer, relatively little information must be transferred between Gmail's web servers and the client, so the interface should run quickly, even over a dial-up connection.
In late February 2005, Google rolled out a "basic HTML view" Gmail interface, accessible from any HTTP 1.1-compliant web browser (previously, Gmail was only accessible via a few modern browsers in "standard view"). The HTML interface does not use JavaScript, and is much slower than the standard interface.
Gmail allows users to navigate its interface by using the keyboard as an alternative to the mouse, which is the norm for site navigation. This feature is not enabled by default, although instructions on how to enable it are provided.
Gmail allows users to categorize their e-mails with "labels." Labels give users a flexible method of categorizing e-mails, since an e-mail may have any number of labels (in contrast to a system in which an e-mail may belong to only one folder). Users can display all e-mails having a particular label and can use labels as a search criterion. Gmail also allows users to set up filters which label incoming e-mail automatically.
Users can simulate the functionality of folder-based filtering by applying labels and archiving mail as it arrives.
Gmail allows users to search by a number of criteria:
Gmail also allows users to construct advanced search strings. For example, the following search strings would search for all e-mails from Bob to anyone with the subject field containing "work" or "school" but not "close friend", labeled as "to do" or "pending" among all that are not in "Inbox" (which means it is archived), with a PDF attachment, and with a carbon copy to self, limited to the date range between May 1, 2004 and June 1, 2004, that are not starred:
See also: How do I use Gmail's advanced search?
Gmail offers a spam filtering system. Independent tests conducted in May 2004 showed this spam filter to be about 60% accurate for a wide variety of spam, significantly lower than the spam filtering accuracy of Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail. In December 2004, however, unscientific tests suggested that Gmail's accuracy was much higher than it was in May. Messages marked as spam are automatically deleted after 30 days.
Gmail is the first major provider to sign outgoing mails with Yahoo!'s DomainKeys signatures.
Although not offered with the original release, Gmail allows all users to send and receive their e-mail via POP3 (over SSL) and SMTP. Some users have experienced authentication difficulties when trying to gain access to their accounts and have blamed Google for the problem, however the authentication problem is likely due to the user needing to activate a setting within Gmail before it will allow POP access, not because Gmail has a technical problem. However, some users continue to experience authentication problems in spite of the activation of this setting.
A feature added to Gmail on its first birthday, Rich Text Formatting, allows users to set the size, font, color, and alignment of text, create bullet points and numbered lists, in addition to several other features. With Rich Text Formatting enabled, messages to which one replies and forwards retain all embedded formatting, whereas Plain Text editing strips out all formatting including embedded graphics.
Rich Text Formatting is currently only able to work on browsers that support WYSIWYG, such as Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. Browsers that do not support WYSIWYG editing cannot take advantage of this feature.
Gmail usernames must be between 6 and 30 characters (inclusive) and made up of only letters, numbers, and periods (.). Experimentation has shown that Gmail ignores periods when resolving addresses. That is, the account google@gmail.com receives mail sent to goo.gle@gmail.com, g.o.o.g.l.e@gmail.com, etc. Likewise, the account goo.gle@gmail.com receives mail from google@gmail.com. However, when signing in it is necessary to include periods.
Gmail blocks users from creating addresses that vary by periods only. Consider two different people with the addresses john.doe@gmail.com and johndoe@gmail.com, who will each receive all emails intended for either one of the accounts.
( main article: Email address#plus addressing)
Gmail also supports "plus-addressing" of emails. Messages can be sent to addresses in the form: gmail.user+extratext@gmail.com where extratext can be any string. Plus-addressing allows users to sign up for different services with different aliases and then easily filter all e-mails from those services. It does not appear, however, that the +string feature works when sending email from a Gmail account to itself. Additionally (in some cases) the string appended to the e-mail address may not be longer than six characters.
The Gmail Notifier, an official tool offered by Google, displays a small icon in the notification area (see Taskbar) in Microsoft Windows and on the right-hand side of the menu bar in Mac OS X, indicating the presence of new mail in one's inbox. It also has a feature that makes Gmail the default mail client for mailto links. It does not, however, download new messages.
On Windows, the Gmail Notifier is uninstalled (after a prompt to the user) if one installs Google Talk, which provides the same features and a new, updated interface.
Available to those who surf with Mozilla Firefox is the identically named Gmail Notifier extension, first appeared around July 8, 2004 [5], which is more than one month before the official one (August 21, 2004).
The Gmail interface currently supports 38 languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK), English (US), Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
After its one-year anniversary, Gmail started placing customizable RSS feeds in some interfaces. The RSS feeds are limited to a single line at the top of the page, which can be scrolled through by the user. The option now appears all accounts as "Web Clips".
Every account which is inactive for 9 months gets deactivated by Gmail. All stored messages get deleted and the account gets "recycled", which means the account name can be used by any other users afterwards. Other webmailYahoo! and Hotmail, have different, sometimes shorter, times for marking an account as inactive. services, like
Gmail recently introduced a feature which automatically scans all incoming and outgoing email attachments for viruses. If a virus is found on an attachment the reader is trying to open Gmail will try to remove the virus and open the newly cleaned attachment. Gmail also scans all outgoing attachments, and if a virus is found on an outgoing attachment Gmail will prevent the message from being sent until the attachment is removed; this is an innovation that has not been previously seen in other webmail services such as Hotmail or Yahoo.
The conversation view groups related messages in a linear stack, which can be expanded and collapsed. While this does provide an innovative view of an email thread, it does not provide any way to differentiate messages that branch off from the original thread. This can occur when mail is sent to multiple recipients who respond individually.
Google seems hesitant to release any upcoming plans for the implementation of these features.
The following features are absent from Gmail.
Some are provided by another kind of computer program, such as Eudora, Outlook Express or Apple Mail.
Some are provided by same kind of computer program, webmail applications (sometimes for a price), such as Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail.
Features present in Linux mail programs (such as Kmail) are: automatic spell-checking (by red underline), "attachment warning," and automatic bounce-back of unwanted mail (imitating a mail-daemon message). Gmail may or may not add these in the future.
Those are absent features that includes, at least, Organizing and Searching:
It has been noted that changing the interface language between English(UK) and English(US) will affect the overall interface. For example, the UK has different standards for date and time, as well as naming (ie: Trash versus Deleted Items).
While these are simple cosmetic differences, there are several limitations encountered within various language interfaces:
Because Google is located primarily in the United States, non-US interfaces tend to lag behind in upgrades and features:
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 emails, 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 and google-watch.org; 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 email service offered by Garfield.com, online home of the comic stripGarfield. This free email service has moved to e-garfield.com.
As of June 22, 2005, the Gmail IRI has been changed to http://mail.google.com/mail/ instead of http://gmail.google.com/gmail/.
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 email address and at approximately 3:00 UTC on February 3, 2005, some Gmail users were awarded 50 invites, suggesting that Gmail would soon go public. Now, if one attends a Google Mini webinar, one will get a Gmail invitation. Go to http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/product_tours_demos.html for more information.
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.
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 was still in beta as of December 2005. 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." 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) an 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 essentially open to the public now, since thousands of invites are publicly available from many public 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 email 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 December 2005, the mailbox size is 2.60 GB, and is increasing continuously at a rate of approximately 10 MB per month.
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.
Since July 11, 2005, or more likely earlier, Google has been giving away free Gmail accounts to random people who search for the word "gmail" using the Google search engine. Follow this link and look at the top of the page for the promo that says "New! Get Gmail - Google's free email service with over 2GB of storage." However, this promo may only last a few days for a particular IP address, before it does not show up any more. ^
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.
On August 30, 2005, Gmail started to add the facility to customise 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 email 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 19th, 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 2005, some Gmail users began reporting that their accounts were being locked for 24 hours or more. Account home pages were reportedly replaced with the flippant title: "Lockdown in sector 4!" along with a short explanation of the lockdown. Google's explanation was that the accounts in question had conducted "unusual usage," although the users maintain their innocence. Most account lockdowns are lifted after 24-72 hours, although some users report being locked out again not long after [6], though most of the time the user could clear their cache and reload the page, and the account would become unlocked again. It also may be worth noting that virtually all webmail providers will suspend an account if it is suspected of violating the provider's terms of service.
It is worth noting that many scripts for the Mozilla Firefox extensionGreasemonkey have caused this problem as well.
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 2MB to 25MB (250MB after 30 days), while Yahoo! went from 4MB to 100MB. Yahoo storage upgraded again in late April 2005, to 1GB. 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 Microsoft's Hotmail, which upgraded its email storage erratically from 250 MB to the new Windows Live Mail (beta) which includes 2 GB of storage over a number of months. In August 2005, AOL started providing all AIM screen names with their own email accounts with 2 GB of storage.
The German version of Gmail was first known as Gmail Deutschland. However, the company Giersch Ventures already had the words G-mail trademarked since 2001, and filed a lawsuit against Google for trademark infringement. Gmail is an postal mail service around Hamburg.
On 4 July 2005, Google announced that Gmail Deutschland would be renamed Google Mail and that every German IP would be forwarded to a different server where every new user would be able to obtain an address in the googlemail.com domain. Any German user who now 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 gmail.com addresses.
However, also new users in Germany are reachable at gmail.com, the emails are forwarded. If using some Google services like Google analytics or Google alerts the German users still see their gmail address, even if they registered recently at googlemail. As it seems Google does not pay much attention to the German trademark so far, maybe because the Giersch business homepage looks very strange somehow. For example it is difficult to find out what exactly the services of Gmail Germany are, but there are many words about innovative services and there is some Google Adsense advertising on the website. Also, a new service about transforming postal mail into email and being payed for receiving letters, one eurocent for each one, is described, but only offered for a very small area so far. There is talk about Europe-wide expanding anyway. This leads to the question: Will the German trademark Gmail be expanded to an EU trademark ? This still would be possible, for some bigger money sum to be payed to the trademark office. Another question is why Google didn´t check that out in the past. It had been possible for less than 100 Euros.
In practice, there is little difference between the two, as googlemail.com addresses act as aliases for their gmail.com counterparts. A user interested in having all of his or her mail sent to a gmail.com address only needs to change the reply-to address in the account settings page.
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 it to access Gmail.]
On 19 October 2005, the UK version of Gmail was converted to Google Mail due to similar reasons as described in Germany [7].
There has been a great deal of criticism regarding Gmail's privacy policy. Some of the controversy surrounded the clause "residual copies of email may remain on our systems for some time, even after you have deleted messages from your mailbox or after the termination of your account." Many believed that this meant that Google would intentionally archive copies of deleted mail forever. Google continues to refute some of this criticism by pointing out that Gmail is using mostly industry wide practices. [8] Google later stated that they will "make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical."
Most of the criticism, however, was against Google's plans to add context-sensitive advertisements to e-mails by automatically scanning 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, for advertising purposes, raises the risk that the constitutional expectation of privacy in e-mail will be reduced. Furthermore, non-subscribers' e-mail is scanned by Gmail as well, and these senders of e-mail did not agree to Gmail's terms of service or privacy policy. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that Google can change its privacy policy unilaterally, and that Google is technically able to cross-reference cookies across its information-rich product line to make dossiers on individuals.
Opponents of these views state that when one's e-mail is checked to see if it is spam, it is being scanned by the same process. Because a human is not reading the message, they say, it is not a problem.
