GMail

The quickest way to get people to want your product is to tell most of them they can’t have it. Give it to just a handful of “special” folks, then stand back and watch the riot begin. Google have created a stampede of desire among the cyber users for Gmail, a free email service not yet available to mere mortals. It’s not an all-marketing magic, however. Gmail really is different and already better than its competition in many ways. I suspect that it will be a big hit once it’s open to everyone.

One of Google’s many smart moves in testing Gmail was to give accounts to those chosen ones. I’m one of the chosen few, and I’ll also sing its praises. But for those of you suddenly experiencing the ugly flush of envy—one of the seven deadly sins, mind you—let me give you some relief:

It really is just an email account. Honest. There are three features that make Gmail unique:

First: Users have a two-gigabyte of email storage space, far more than any other free service offers. For example, Yahoo offers only a few megabyte-spaces and still only a fraction of Gmail’s storage.

Second: Rather than sorting email into folders, Gmail encourages its users to rely on Google’s renowned search capabilities to find specific items.

Third: Gmail is free because advertising covers its costs. Ads appear on the right side of Gmail’s viewing window and change based on the content of the email being read at the time.

No humans—except for the sender and recipient, of course—read users’ email. Google uses the same technique for generating the ads that it employs on Web sites that sign up for its context-sensitive advertising program. The text is scanned by a computer, which finds key words and displays advertisements associated with them. For example, if you get mail from Mom raving about a new restaurant, you might see ads for that kind of eatery.

In fact, Google’s ads are less intrusive than those found at other email sites. No ads are embedded in emails you send from Gmail to others. The Gmail site has no banner or pop-up ads.

Gmail’s layout is simple and clean, and it is almost completely text-based. That means it loads quickly, even on the slowest computers and Internet connections. The inbox is dynamic, so mail appears immediately upon arrival—no need to refresh the page to see new items, which is required with many Web-based email services.

However, email sometimes can take a while to show up. Email sent to a Hotmail account and Gmail invariably shows up in Hotmail much sooner. This could be a function of the beta test, if Google is using a limited number of servers to process mail.

As mail comes in, it is automatically sorted into what Gmail calls “conversations.” Both outgoing and incoming items are grouped together under common subject lines, so you can quickly see a complete thread. Because most email services and software place outgoing mail in a “Sent Items” folder, this may take some getting used to, but it’s very convenient.

Once you’re done reading a conversation, you clear it out of the inbox by clicking the Archive button. This hides older mail but leaves it open to Google’s search feature, Gmail’s strongest feature. I was able to find every piece of mail I was looking for on the first try, which sure beats combing through folders. The process was as fast as Google’s Web searches, with results popping up instantly.

For those who can’t shake loose of the folder metaphor, Gmail offers an alternative. You can label email items, then sort by that label. The difference here is that you can apply multiple labels to each email. For example, you could label Mom’s email about the restaurant as being about food and being from a family member.

With two gigabytes of storage, Gmail’s operators encourage users not to delete anything. In fact, if you move something to Gmail’s trash and then delete that item from the trash, you’ll get this message: “No conversations in the trash. Who needs to delete when you have 2,000 MB of storage?”

Gmail has other features you’d expect to find in a Web-based email service—including behind-the-scenes spam filtering as well as filters you can set up yourself—though it lacks others. You can’t add an automated signature to the bottom of each email, for example, nor can you access standards-based email accounts, such as POP3, from Gmail.

However, Gmail is far from finished. What I’m testing now may be quite different from what the masses will see when Google finally throws open the gates to the public.

(Franco Mendoza is the systems administrator of Verizon Pacifica.)