Gmail
Gmail (at gmail.com) is a free web mail service, still in beta testing, run by Google, announced on March 31, 2004.
Features
Gmail offers 1000 megabytes (one gigabyte) of email storage space (more than 166 times more than others, including Yahoo! and Hotmail), searchable emails and contexual text ads (located at the side of the page) based on the content of the message. The large capacity is intended to allow users to keep thousands of emails permanently. The service also allows the searching of a user's emails with Google's searching technologies. Attachments of up to 10 MB each are allowed (Guardian Website, MSNBC).
The main innovation in Gmail is a new mode of categorising e-mails, which Google calls Conversation view. In this view, Gmail will keep track of "conversations" (back and forth e-mail sending), displaying summaries of all previous mail correspondence when displaying a mail. This makes it easier to look back to check what was being discussed in earlier e-mails. However, as Gmail must guess how conversations fit together, conversations may be fragmented or unrelated conversations become attached together, although Gmail in general appears to be good at this.
Another innovation is a highly simply categorising system, in which e-mails are given tags. An e-mail might have any number of tags, and all e-mails having a particular tag can be displayed easily. Thus, you could tag all e-mails relating to a particular project or from a particular relative, and quickly look at all the e-mails sent on that subject. Filters allow you to tag mail automatically.
History
Gmail was announced amid a flurry of rumour. Owing to April Fool's Day, however, the company's press release (Press Release) was greeted with resounding skepticism in the technology world, especially since Google already has been known to make April Fool's Jokes (the most famous being PigeonRank). However, they claimed that the real joke had been a press release put out by them, saying that they would take offshoring to the extreme by putting employees in a "Google Copernicus Center" on the Moon (Link). But Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of products, was quoted by BBC News (Link) as saying, "We are very serious about Gmail." It was later confirmed that Gmail was completely authentic.
Gmail also initially recieved a lot of criticism for a statement they made in their original terms of use, refusing to guarantee that all e-mails at Gmail would be deleted if asked to be deleted by the user. They later clarified that they had referred to backup copies of all mails on Gmail, and promised that all deleted mails would eventually be expunged completely from their servers. This, along with the fact that the advertisements would have to read your personal mail in order to target advertisements gave rise to a controversy on web privacy, which is being heavily debated on. (BBC Article, Article by Tim O'Reilly)
Current Status
Google initially invited about 1,000 employees, friends and family members to test it. The trials began on March 21, 2004. Since then, others have been randomly selected to test the service. On April 25, active users from the Blogger.com community were offered the chance to participate in the beta-testing. Some beta-testers have put up an account of their experiences on the web (Report from a beta tester). Google says that Gmail will likely be publicly released in six months, i.e. around September.