Gmail. It is the mail server that is part of the different Google applications.
History Of Gmail
Gmail, called elsewhere in Google Mail (Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom) due to legal problems, is an email service with free POP3 and IMAP possibilities provided by the American company Google as of April 15, 2004, and which it has captured the attention of the media for its technological innovations, its capacity, and for some news that alerted about the violation of the privacy of users.
After more than 5 years, the Gmail service, together with Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Talk and Google Buzz; on July 7, 2009, they stopped being Beta and became finished products.
In the beginning, it was different for having a striking storage capacity for those years, more than a gigabyte, and a peculiar way of displaying messages: instead of viewing each piece separately, communication through this service is organized in ” conversations. “
Technical Characteristics Of Gmail
- This service offers a storage capacity of more than 7 GB and Google affirms that this number will continue to increase. Currently, the growth rate is approximately 4 bytes per second. Since its inception, Gmail had significantly outstripped the storage offerings of its main competitors (Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail). It is now in second place, as Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, and Windows Live Hotmail share first place by offering unlimited space.
- This service stood out among other things for using a simple and advanced message search system, such as changing the language, placing a vacation notice, similar to that of the Google web search engine, which owed its slogan “Search, do not order”. In addition, it provides a mechanism for labeling messages, which expands the possibilities of traditional folders.
- The Gmail interface is now available in forty languages, including Spanish and Catalan. It uses AJAX technology, being pioneers in using it, although it also has an interface based on HTML + CSS useful for old or unsupported browsers.
- Another interesting aspect is the message filter that has many options beyond automatically labeling messages.
- The maximum size of each message (text and attached files) is 25 MB.
- The account is credited with SSL. Except in the case of old browsers in which the connection is without encryption.
- The main page can also be encrypted by SSL.
- Gmail is available for mobile devices, although Gmail mobile does not have all the features of the traditional service. In addition to browser access to a mobile phone, there is a Java application for a large number of compatible phones.
- Supported browsers: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, K-Meleon, Opera, Google Chrome; with partial support for AOL and Konqueror browser.
Background Of The Invitations
Since its inception, registration for an email account was restricted through an invitation system. With the launch of the service, the first invitations were sent to employees and users of Google services.
These, in turn, had a limited number of invitations to distribute among their contacts and so on. In principle, the initial fee for each user was two invitations, which over time increased. This system generated great expectations among a large part of Internet users.
In January 2007, Gmail registrations were fully released, and it is now possible to register without invitations.
Contacts
When a message is sent, the address of the To, Cc or Bcc fields is automatically stored in a list for the user to consult and add information such as associating an image or grouping them. Contacts are imported in several different ways, from Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Orkut or any other contact list capable of being exported as a CSV file. Gmail also allows users to export their contacts to CSV.
Chat
Google Talk can be accessed through a web interface on the site. The web interface is capable of supporting voice and webcam calls if the Google Talk client is running in the background. All messages are archived in the Chats section.
If the recipient is not available, all messages sent will be delivered directly by email. Another feature of Google Talk is voice integration, where the message is sent to the recipient of the Gmail inbox, as well as sending images.
From the 4 of December of 2007, the company announced integration with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and XMPP, allowing in both cases these accounts send instant messages and view the online status of users of AIM and XMPP.
Presentations, for example, PowerPoint, can also be viewed directly in the browser.
Services Provided By Gmail
- Gmail Notifier – available as a program for Windows 2000 or later. Also available as a Mozilla Firefox extension, so it works on any platform where Firefox runs.
- GmailStatus ( Mac OS X )
- Google Talk
- Google Talk Gadget
- Google Page Creator
- Gmail Drive shell extension (unofficial)
- Gmail (unofficial)
- Check email ( Linux )
