Google Mail: Virtue Lies in the In-Box

As Google's white-hot initial stock offering hogs the headlines, its rivals can only gnash their teeth and wonder: How did a couple of Stanford Ph.D. dropouts build an outrageously profitable billion-dollar-a-year company in only five years?

Part of the answer is great Web-search technology. But another part is the company's motto: "Don't Be Evil."

That credo explains why Google's home page is practically empty, because ads and graphics would slow dial-up modems. It also explains why Google's ads are clearly labeled and separate from search results. Slipping paid-placement links into your search results, as MSN and Yahoo do, would be evil.

So six weeks ago, when Google described Gmail, the free e-mail service it is testing, the prevailing public reaction was shock. The company said that its software would place ads in your incoming messages, relevant to their contents.

It appeared to many people that Google had gone way beyond evil into Big Brother land. What could be more sinister than snooping through private correspondence looking for advertising opportunities?

Privacy advocates went ballistic. The Electronic Privacy Information Center called for Gmail to be shut down, describing it as "an unprecedented invasion into the sanctity of private communications." And a California state senator, Liz Figueroa, offered a bill that would make it illegal to scan the contents of incoming e-mail. (Never mind that such a bill would make it illegal for children's e-mail services to filter out pornographic material.)

Those reactions, as it turns out, are a tad overblown. In fact, no human ever looks at the Gmail e-mail. Computers do the scanning - dumbly, robotically and with no understanding the words - just the way your current e-mail provider scans your messages for spam and viruses. The same kind of software also reads every word you type into Google or any other search page, tracks your shopping on Amazon, and so on.

Besides, if you're that kind of private, Gmail is the least of your worries. You'd better make sure that the people at credit-card companies, mail-order outfits and phone companies aren't sitting in back rooms giggling at your monthly statements. Heck, how do you know that your current e-mail providers - or the administrators of the Internet computers that pass mail along - aren't taking an occasional peek?

Still, you feel what you feel. If Gmail creeps you out, just don't sign up.

That would be a shame, though, because you'd be missing a wonderful thing. Even in its current, early state, available only to a few thousand testers, Gmail appears destined to become one of the most useful Internet services since Google itself.

Like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, Gmail is a free, Web-based e-mail program, which means that you will be able to check or send e-mail from any computer on the Internet, wherever you go. Even if you already have a traditional e-mail account, a Web mail account makes a great backup.

But otherwise, you wouldn't even peg Gmail as being from the same planet as Yahoo and Hotmail. The most important difference is the amount of storage: one gigabyte. That's 250 times the amount you get on a free Yahoo account, 500 times the amount on Hotmail.

One gigabyte changes everything. You no longer live in terror that somebody will send you a photo, thereby exceeding your two-megabyte limit and making all subsequent messages bounce back to their senders. You're no longer neurotic about checking your mail twice a day just to keep the in-box cleaned out. You can let years' worth of e-mail pile up, complete with file attachments (maximum size: 10 megabytes each).

One gigabyte means that Gmail can be a handy personal transfer disk. Send files to yourself and then retrieve them when you get to the office. Keep important pictures or documents in your Gmail account all the time, ready to forward when friends request them.

In fact, Google argues that with so much storage, you should get out of the habit of deleting messages. Why risk throwing away something that you might need again someday? An Archive button moves a message out of the in-box, but it remains searchable. Actually deleting a message involves fussing with a pop-up menu.

Of course, if you're going to keep all your e-mail around forever, you'd better have some pretty good tools for managing it. Fortunately, if anyone can tame a vast pile of data, it's Google. Its famous search command works brilliantly on your own e-mail, plucking one message out of 5,000 in a fraction of a second.

Each message offers a hollow star icon that turns yellow when you click on it, to signify anything you like: "Deal with this," "Those darned in-laws," or whatever. Each row also displays the first line of the message in light-gray type, which is a time-saving bit of X-ray vision.

Gmail doesn't have the usual mail folders. Instead, you can flag messages with labels of your own choosing. The advantage here is that you can apply different labels to a single message, in effect filing it under several categories at once. An extremely easy-to-use filter feature lets you flag incoming messages with certain labels automatically according to who sends them, what's in their subject line and so on.

Yet another clever organizational feature is "conversations," known to computer geeks as threading. Back-and-forth messages on a single topic, even among several participants, appear as one entry in your in-box. When opened, the exchanges appear like file-folder tabs, which you can expand or collapse individually or all at once.

And now, about those ads.

They turn out to be a maximum of three text-only four-line affairs, clearly labeled and way off the to the right, just as on Google itself. In my e-mail, a message about Earth Day contained an ad for a computer-recycling company. A question about music players had two ads for stores selling the Apple iPod. In a press release for a computer show, a Linuxworld link appeared.

You sometimes get Releated Links beneath the ads, too. Google doesn't get money for these; it offers them just to be friendly, and they can sometimes be useful indeed. For example, in a message about a coming family vacation, sent from my wife downstairs (yes, we're that sort of family), Google offered a link to a Web site of restaurant reviews in the resort town we were considering.

Ads appear in fewer than half of my messages; in fact, they seem to appear primarily when a capitalized brand name appears in the message. If your correspondence is mostly personal stuff ("Miss you guys. How did Casey's toe surgery go? Went out to the new vegetarian steakhouse yesterday - great."), you may not see many at all.

The ads are so subtle, so easily ignored, that it's hard to imagine anyone preferring the big, blinking, slow-loading graphic ads that appear every time you check for messages at the Hotmail and Yahoo Mail sites. Even more refreshing, Gmail doesn't turn you into an unpaid billboard for Yahoo or Microsoft (Hotmail's owner) by stamping ads on at the bottom of every outgoing message, no matter how sensitive the topic.

Other Gmail features include an excellent spelling checker, a built-in address book, auto-complete for addresses, the ability to specify a Reply To address (a different e-mail address for replies to your messages), indicators (>>) that denote messages sent only to you, in-message photo display, online help and one-key shortcuts (C for Compose, R for reply, and so on) that let power users cruise through entire e-mail sessions without ever touching the mouse. The automatic spam-removal feature is adequate for the moment, but once thousands of people begin to use the Report Spam button, Google plans to harness the cumulative intelligence of its customers to refine its spam filters in innovative ways.

Finally, Google promises that it won't shut down your account until you go nine months without using it. (Hotmail and Yahoo delete all your mail and recycle your address after only 30 days). Now that's not being evil.

Google hasn't said when, exactly, Gmail's testing period will end and the service will go live.

That's just as well, because there are a few items that should still be on its To Do list: compatibility with Apple's Safari browser (at the moment, it works on on the Mac, Windows and Linux versions of Mozilla, Firefox and Netscape 7.1, plus Internet Explorer for Windows ), for example, and a signature feature that stamps your name on each outgoing message. It would be nice if you could use regular e-mail readers like Outlook Express to check your Gmail, as you can withHotmail. A certain audience will miss the ability to format outgoing messages with fonts, styles and colors, too.

Otherwise, Gmail is infinitely cleaner, faster, more useful, more efficient, less commercial and less limiting than other Web-based e-mail services. Once Gmail goes live, Hotmail and Yahoo won't know what hit them.

The only population likely not to be delighted by Gmail are those still uncomfortable with those computer-generated ads. Those people are free to ignore or even bad-mouth Gmail, but they shouldn't try to stop Google from offering Gmail to the rest of us. We know a good thing when we see it.