Google.com is the brain child of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The Internet search engine took off in 1999 and has now become one of the most successful search sites indexing more than four billion pages. Now Google have turned their eyes to e-mail in the form of G-Mail.
There's been a lot of buzz about this new Google service a lot focusing around the fact that it breaks limitations imposed by rivals such as Hotmail and Yahoo! by giving users One Gigabyte of email storage space, effectively meaning you'll never need to delete an email ever again, and yet at the same time still be able to find the emails you want ,when you want.

G-Mail is currently still in beta stage, so users can only join by invitation, but there not that hard to come by and once you sign up you get invitations of your own to send out. A sneak preview for those who cannot get an invite is available HERE Thanks goes to Driver7 who provided me with my invitation so that I could bring this article to you.

Google provide these two pictures as a basic outline for the G-Mail layout:

Registration is as easy as it comes, Your name, your handle, your pass, your done. See below

When you first log in to your G-Mail account you get the usual Welcome e-mail:

The whole design of G-Mail looks polished even at Beta stage, they're making a big thing about the storage space (and why shouldn't they) so your used/available space is displayed at the bottom of each page. " You are currently using 0 MB (0%) of your 1000 MB. "


Organising your Mail

G-Mail claims to be 'Different' and well the features it boasts for organising and access your mail is impressive. Replies to mail are linked directly in as seen here:

The latest reply is shown and previous emails are displayed above with their snippet line shown next to the subject, click on them expands the page instantly to show the reply you chose, it's a very fast and very neat interface.

As well as this labels can be easily defined, this group mail as a folder would do, except an email can belong to many different labels and when a label is chosen will be displayed in both categories such as work, and holiday subjects if the email contains both. This breaks the limitation of folders and allows for better organisation a key component in G-Mails marketing. Emails of importance can be easily starred which means they can then be easily recalled using the starred view from the left panel.

The search facility is also extensive, as you'd expect from google, the ability to filter emails as you would in an actual program is nice to see in a web based implementation.


Spam

Not the versatile meat product sold in abundance to Vikings but Unsolicited email. It's become the bain of most business and personal users over the last few years, I alone receive between 100-200 Spam messages a day on my main email account. G-Mail is taking a swift approach to spam as do most email provides, intensive message filters and the ability to report email as spam built into the interface means the G-Mail team can go further in developing it's filters and attempting to stem the flow of spam.

Advertising

The advertising design for G-Mail does what google does best after Searching, Targeting Ads. All the ads are Text Based, but what has caused concerns is the fact they are targeted to the content of the email, your private, personnel emails scanned and analysed and then ad's generated to match the content. I personally have no issue with this, it's simply the way the worlds going, Minority Report anyone? I prefer this method to pointless flashing GIF images and screen grabber flash dancers. An example of the advertising you can see below, in a small conversation between myself and a friend. - A joke conversation of course. Don't contact me for details of the money or gold :-)

POP3

G-Mail doesn't currently allow POP3 access to your mail, However there is a 3rd Party Tool now available that will do exactly this.

Pop Goes The Gmail 0.9 is availble on MajorGeeks.com - HERE

The program sits between the G-Mail server and your e-mail client and allows your program to access your mail. Official Support for POP3 may come at a later date.


Conclusion

G-Mail is an impressive new contender to the web-mail market. It has features that far outweigh its rivals. The resources allocated to each user are well above anything out there in terms of storage space. The search and grouping facilities makes G-Mail a breeze to use and a sure success. There were early reports of slow server acidity but this all appears to have been sorted out now, I can see no trouble accessing any of the site from my computer. When G-Mail is finally launched I'm sure they will see a surge in registrations so how long they can justify 1GB each is still to be seen, ok the majority won't come close to that kind of usage but I'm sure they're servers will take a beating in the process.

I thought one method of stinging the user would be similar to Hotmail's 30 Days inactivity rule, but G-Mail is currently being billed as a Six-Month dormant stage, and then a further 3-Months before the account is completely removed. Again another bonus point for G-Mail.

Again I'd like to express my thanks to Driver7 of the DriverHeaven forums for allowing me an invitation into the G-Mail program. Thank you.