Gmail, officially Google Mail in Germany and the United Kingdom, is a free POP3 and IMAP webmail service provided by Google. On April 1, 2004 the product began as an invitation-only beta release. On February 7, 2007 the beta version was opened to the general public. To this day, the service has remained in beta status. With an initial storage capacity of 1 GB, it drastically increased the standard for free storage.

Gmail currently offers over 7200

Storage

The service currently provides more than 7200

.

On August 9, 2007, some users of Gmail reported that their storage capacity had been increased to 9030 MB (8.8 GB). The 9030 MB of space is an overall total of all the users' storage space(s) within a Google Account, including Picasa Web Albums. This development seemed to occur about the same time that Google began allowing purchasable Picasa storage. In other words, Google has shared storage space, supporting both pictures and email.

Gmail Labs

Gmail Labs, introduced on June 5, 2008, is a feature that allows users to test new or experimental features of Gmail, such as bookmarking of important email messages, custom keyboard shortcuts, and games. New Labs features can be enabled and disabled selectively, and users can provide feedback about each of them. They allow Gmail engineers to get user input about new features to improve them, and popular ones might become a regular Gmail feature. All are experimental, and might stop working at any time. Labs features can only be toggled when using the English language interface of Gmail.

Programming

Gmail makes use of Ajax (specifically, the AJAXSLT frameworkFact: date=September 2008), employing modern browser features such as JavaScript, keyboard access keys and Web feed integration.

Organization

Advanced search strings can be constructed, using either the Advanced Search interface, or search operators in the search box. Search options include search for phrases, message sender, message location and message date. There are also undocumented search operators like "language:russian" that can be helpful.

Filters can also be run by using an interface similar to the Search Options dialog (see searching]] below). Gmail allows users to filter messages by their text; by their From, To, and Subject fields; and by whether or not the message has an attachment. Gmail can perform any combination of the following actions upon a message that meets a label's criteria: Archiving (i.e. removing the message from the Inbox), marking as "starred", marking as read, applying a label, moving to the trash, and forwarding to another e-mail address.

Gmail recognizes related messages and groups them into "conversations" where associated messages are listed one after another, with the newest messages at the bottom. If a conversation has more than approximately 100 messages, it splits into separate sections. Reply or forwarded messages from local [[Yahoo! Mail accounts split up conversations because their subjects contain parameters in the local language, instead of "Re" or "Fwd:".Fact: date=July 2008