Product Reviews

When Google launched a webmail service on April Fool's day, most people thought it was a joke. A full gigabyte of online storage? Free? It's no fairytale, though. Google recently allowed active users of its weblog service, Blogger, to test the beta of its Gmail service, and we've put it through its paces; no date is yet set for full release.

Let's get the contentious stuff out of the way first. The reason Google can justify such an extravagant mailbox allowance free of charge, when other webmail services such as Hotmail and Yahoo offer 2MB and 6MB respectively, is partly due to economies of scale (1GB storage reportedly only costs $2) and partly due to its use of contextual advertising.

Google uses its AdSense technology to comb though emails looking for keywords, presenting a list of text-based links related to these keywords to the right of the body of the email. It's important to stress that it's not 'reading' your email in any real sense of the word, and certainly no human looks at any email content; it's a purely automated process, and no personal data is passed on to the advertisers.

The ads are, in truth, unobtrusive, and are intelligent enough not to be tricked into tactlessly displaying links to funeral directors when we underhandedly sent an email of condolence to a Gmail account.

We're not going to let these issues affect our rating, however, as whether or not you feel uncomfortable with this approach is more a personal judgement than the actual abilities of Gmail as a webmail package. It certainly is a very capable option, offering many features you'd expect from a desktop email client.

Webmail systems are

ADVERTISEMENT

inherently flexible, allowing you to send and receive email from any Internet-enabled computer anywhere in the world. Currently, Safari isn't officially supported (it can be forced, but the behaviour is unpredictable; this should be fixed before final release), so we tested it with Firefox.

In addition to the generous mailbox, Gmail has a few other tricks for managing mail. Emails get grouped as 'conversations'; they don't get moved anywhere, but you can view an entire thread of replies back and forth at once. Rather than offering you the chance to file your messages into folders, Gmail uses labels. This is actually very practical, and allows you to mark up messages as belonging to more than one category.

Reasonably complex filters can also be set up, and you can set incoming emails to be tagged automatically with a label, so that, for example, all messages coming from addresses containing @dennis.co.uk could be tagged as 'Work'.

Because messages don't get filtered into folders, your inbox could get tricky to navigate. Two features prevent this. The first is an Archive button, which moves checked messages into storage (you can still view your messages by clicking 'All mail'). The other option is searching, and since Gmail is a Google product, you'd expect impressive results, and we weren't disappointed.

Gmail also features a spam filter, which we couldn't give a long-term test to. In the short term it performed reasonably well, generating no false positives; the addition of an option to manually load external images from an HTML email should help keep spam at bay.

It really is almost like having a desktop email client, an illusion further enhanced by keyboard shortcuts allowing you to, for example, tap 'c' to compose new messages.

It's missing a few features - we'd like to see email signatures, better Safari support, POP3 or IMAP access, and the ability to import addresses from a desktop PIM. But this is a powerful email tool, wrapped in a very slick, minimal interface - and it's still in beta.

Time will tell whether Gmail's approach will work, but we like what we see now. Do you Yahoo? Not any more.

Needs: Netscape 7.1 or later, Mozilla 1.4 or later, Mozilla Firefox 0.8 or later