Features of Gmail
Discuss about the Executive and Mobile Computing.
Gmail is a free service which is highly designed by Google which is considered to be advertising sustained email service. Operators can easily access the Gmail on their web and by using third party programs which aims at synchronizing the content of email via POP or any IMAP protocols. It is available in 72 languages and it was created and developed by Paul Buchheit and it has successfully created 1.4 billion users till the year 2018. Gmail began as a restricted beta release in the year 2004 and it finished its whole process of testing period in the year 2009. In the very initial stage, Gmail had only one gigabyte capacity that has been offered to the users but however, it increased its amount of storage as the numbers of competitors began to rise. And today, it has been successfully offering the capacity of 15 gigabytes of storage. Operators can easily get emails that will lie approximately 50 megabytes which may include several attachments. Similarly, operators can also send emails with attachments which is approximately 25 megabytes (Rushe, 2013). However, if the users wants to send a longer files, they cane easily insert such files available from the Google Drive into the message box. Gmail has also developed a examine leaning interface along with a chat view which is quite related to an internet forum. The two basic features provided by the Gmail is the storage capacity and the interface which majorly focuses on the conversation threads. Today, it was found that 60% of the US companies and 92% of the startup companies use Gmail for their business operations. Google’s mail server’s scans mails for several reasons such as filter spam or malware practices (Gaikar, 2013).
The main idea behind the development of Gmail was created by Paul Buchheit many years back. It came into the mind of Paul many years before it was actually announced. It was kept secret from many of the Google engineers and it was finally announced in 2004. And today nearly everyone uses it in order to access the information from one to another. Gmail was found in 2004 and was represented as a limited beta release (Popp, 2011). Later in the year 2006, Google started providing Java based application of Gmail basically for mobile phone applications. Similarly, in 2007, Google started to rewrite many parts of the code which Gmail used that will make it more faster and quicker and it also included some additional features as well such as custom keyboard shortcuts and bookmark facility, searching options, IMAP support and many more (Buchheit et al., 2010).
History and Development
Basically it has two major platforms i.e. Web browsers and Mobile phones.
- Web Browsers
Gmail’s basic HTML i.e. Hyper Text Markup Language version will be applied on nearly all the available browsers. The updated and modern AJAX version is formally buttressed in the recent and earlier major releases of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge and Safari web browsers on a regular basis. In the year 2011, Google announced Gmail Offline services. It is an HTML5 powered application which aims at providing access to the services while being offline. It easily runs on the Google Chrome browser and can also be downloaded from Chrome Web Store. Additionally, Gmail can also be easily accessed via web browser on a mobile application as well (Holton and Hakim, 2012).
- Mobile phones
Gmail now can easily be accessed on mobile phones and Android application as well. Gmail has inborn applications for iOS devices that includes iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch and for Android devices as well. In the year 2014, Google announced functionality in the Gmail Android application which aimed at sending and getting mails from non-Gmail addresses such as Yahoo, outlook via POP or IMAP (Van Dijk, 2011).
Later in 2016, Google restructured its application basically for the iOS stage by passing the main complete visual overhaul in “approximately four years”. The new updating included huge number of color combination, more sleek transitions and extremely demanded features like undo send, quicker search with quicker results and auto spelling correction options. The feature also include swipe to Delete or Archive. Similarly in 2017, Google updated its Gmail majorly on the Android application featuring additional protection that will protect from unnecessary attacks. The updated protection was found in Gmail and Google’s Docs document services (Buchheit, Chang, Lim and Singh, Google Inc, 2010). Again, Google developed the addition of “smart reply” as an additional features to Gmail on Android and iOS as well. Smart Reply refers to a feature which was initially announced by Google’s Inbox by Gmail services which helps in scanning a message or any other information by using its machine intelligence and offers majorly three responses which an operator can edit and send. This feature is limited to the English language at the very beginning stage however it was then supported by Spanish and many other languages as well. Inbox options availability by Gmail, and other application from the Gmail team is also easily available for iOS and Android devices. Apart from this, third party programs can also be used to access the account of Gmail by using POP or any other IMAP protocols (Fuchs, 2011).
Platforms of Gmail
In addition to this, in 2008, it changed the elements of Gmail’s use of Java script which lead to in the letdown of a third party script that few users had been using. Google accredited the major issue and provided assistance to the users with workarounds. In 2009, Gmail exited beta status. Subsequent to 2013, operators had to make an approval to view the images that are seen on mails which was presented as a means of security. But it was later changed and no approval was required. Images and attachments will automatically be routed via Google’s secure proxy servers instead of the external host servers (Lane et al., 2010). In 2010, Google started developing out HTTPS as the default for all the operators. In 2012, a security feature was developed that will safeguard users from unnecessary cyber-attacks. Gmail will now automatically scan all the viruses that are attached with the mails. By the end of 2017, Google made an announcement that it started using machine learning technology in order to identify the spam mails by having 99.9% detection security. The company has also started working on improving its algorithms (Rodden and Leggett, 2010).
In the year 2014, Google announced inbox by Gmail on an invitation-only basis. It was initially settled by the team of Gmail but it served as an entirely dissimilar type of inbox. This feature has aimed at providing assistance to the operators by dealing and facing the obstacles and challenges related to active emails. Finding out the problems that are buried under the messages, getting huge number of emails than before, distractions, sorting mails automatically, setting reminders, providing assistance and snooze options, highlighting the surface information are all well managed by Gmail. Inbox available by Gmail was officially announced in the year 2015 (Buchheit and Singh, Google Inc, 2010).
In the year 2010, Google introduced a plugin which aimed at providing integrated telephone services that exists within Gmail’s Google Chat interface. This feature was earlier lacking a formal name with Google referring to it as combined “Google Voice in Gmail chat” and “Call Phones in Gmail”. This service was logged and used by more than one million calls in only 24hours (Grevet et al., 2014). Later in 2014, Google voice was discontinued due to some issues and it was replaced with Google Hangouts which created other communication areas from Google. In 2010, Google started an innovative networking tool named Google Buzz which is connected with Gmail. This tool helps in providing users to share Medias and links along with the status updates. However, this tool was again discontinued in 2011 and it was again replaced with new updated technology named Google+. Gmail was combined with Google+ in 2011 so that all the necessary information can easily be accessed by single account i.e. Google account with a central Google+ user profile. Later in 2015, it was again stepped back to remove due to some privacy concerns. In 2013, Google introduced the combination of Google wallet and Gmail (Buchheit and Singh, Google Inc, 2011). It aims at providing the facility to operators to send money via attachment made in Gmail account. This created a restriction that the sender must have a Gmail account in order to perform such transactions. In addition to this, there was no transaction fee costed but the amount of money transferred has limitations. This feature was extended to application in Android in the year 2017 for only those who are living in United States. In 2016, it announced Google trips which will automatically create travel cards for the users which will be based on the information in the Gmail messages (Anderson et al., 2011).
Security Features
In the year 2012, Google declared that there are approximately 425 million of dynamic users of Gmail across the entire globe. In 2015, Google it increased to 900 active users of Gmail out of which 75% of the females category used to operate Gmail account on mobile phones. Later in the year 2016, Google had successfully created 1billion active users of Gmail account. Similarly in 2017, Google declared that it has reached 1.2 billion of active users of Gmail account. In the business areas, Quartz stated that in the year 2014, nearly 150 companies have checked into three majorly segments in the country United States. The companies include Fortune 50 largest companies, mid-size tech and media companies and startup companies. 60% of the midsized companies as well as 92% of the startup companies used Gmail for any business activities. Later in 2014, Gmail was announced as the first and foremost application which was available on the Google play store which successfully hit nearly one billion connections majorly on Android devices (Bik and Goldstein, 2013).
Google has only one privacy policy which has covered all of its necessary services. Google privileges that Gmail abstains from presenting ads which are next to theoretically complex messages. It includes messages related to race, religion, caste, sex, health or any other financial statements.
References
Anderson, D., Buchheit, P., Dean, J.A., Harik, G.R., Gonsalves, C.L., Shazeer, N. and Shivakumar, N., Google Inc, 2011. Serving content-relevant advertisements with client-side device support. U.S. Patent 8,086,559.
Bik, H.M. and Goldstein, M.C., 2013. An introduction to social media for scientists. PLoS biology, 11(4), p.e1001535.
Buchheit, P. and Singh, S., Google Inc, 2010. Email conversation management system. U.S. Patent 7,814,155.
Buchheit, P. and Singh, S., Google Inc, 2011. Email system with conversation-centric user interface. U.S. Patent 7,912,904.
Buchheit, P.T., Chang, B.W.W., Lim, J.Y. and Singh, S., Google Inc, 2010. Displaying conversation views in a conversation-based email system. U.S. Patent 7,818,378.
Buchheit, P.T., Chang, B.W.W., Lim, J.Y., Rakowski, B.D. and Winograd, T.A., Google Inc, 2010. Conversation-based email messaging. U.S. Patent 7,788,326.
Fuchs, C., 2011. A contribution to the critique of the political economy of Google. Fast Capitalism, 8(1), pp.1-24.
Gaikar, V., 2013. Google updates Gmail Inbox with Tabbed Interface.
Grevet, C., Choi, D., Kumar, D. and Gilbert, E., 2014, April. Overload is overloaded: email in the age of Gmail. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 793-802). ACM.
Holton, J.R. and Hakim, G.J., 2012. An introduction to dynamic meteorology (Vol. 88). Academic press.
Lane, N.D., Miluzzo, E., Lu, H., Peebles, D., Choudhury, T. and Campbell, A.T., 2010. A survey of mobile phone sensing. IEEE Communications magazine, 48(9).
Popp, K., 2011. Software industry business models. IEEE software, 28(4), p.26.
Rodden, K. and Leggett, M., 2010, April. Best of both worlds: improving Gmail labels with the affordances of folders. In CHI’10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 4587-4596). ACM.
Rushe, D., 2013. Google: don’t expect privacy when sending to Gmail. The Guardian. Retrieved Dec, 19, p.2014.
Van Dijk, T.A. ed., 2011. Discourse studies: A multidisciplinary introduction. Sage.
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