Google's Sergey Brin Talks on Gmail's Future

de la mettrie writes "Sergey Brin of Google has been discussing the future of GMail in a recent eWeek article. He says that the ongoing beta test will likely take about six months, and that the implementation of mail forwarding, POP access, mail encryption and even RSS feeds is being considered."

google isn't evil

[quelrods]

They also mention various privacy concerns. The only thing they ever meant by not guaranteeing immediate deletion has to do with proper backups. I think the geek/media bridge failed yet again and something was blown out of proportion. I can't wait to see that you're using 99% of your available 1gb for email tho.

Encryption support...

[dmayle]

I really hope they implement support for GnuPG in an easy manner. As it is, having a public key doesn't mean much for email, since people sending you email need to do the work for you to receive encrypted email, and you can't send encrypted email unless the other person has a key. GMail could go a long way towards making GnuPG prolific...

Re:Six months?

[grub]

What are they building a space shuttle?

No, they're building a massive, wide area distributed email system with vast amounts of storage. I doubt they'd want to tarnish their name, especially with an IPO pending, by going live with a buggy system. If you can shave a few months off that, I'm sure you could have a good career at Google.

POP?

[jhoude]

Having a 1GB mailbox is useless if you use POP to get your mail... They should provide IMAP access.

OK, after reading the article, I see that they are also planning to offer imap, but still, pop makes no sense to me for a webmail.

Re:Six months?

[FrYGuY101]

Knowing Google, they're probably doing one or more of the following:

*Getting usibility information from the beta testers.
*Assessing their ad-placement algorithms.
*Trying to see how the email will work on their distributed systems.
*Hashing through privacy concerns, see if there are ways to alleviate them.

And I'm sure there's more that others could think of that they'd be testing...

Re:Six months?

[arvindn]

They're playing for big stakes, and a lot of things have to go right. Since they're offering 1GB, and are doubtless counting on the user not being able to use up all of that immediately, their rate throttling measures had better be really good. If spammers/warez doodz find a way to exploit the system and automate the client interface, then google will probably have to retract their offer, which will be enormous bad publicity. And few people have realized it, but gmail is actually a whole desktop email app written in javascript. Several hundred KB of javascript. Or atleast a cross between webmail and a desktop app. Such attempts have never worked in the past. (I remember some horrors like html editors written in java on web hosting sites, before the dot.bust). But google thinks they're on to something here. Indeed, beta testers have reported that after a few days of using gmail they find it to be a whole new paradigm and don't want to go back to the folder based approach. So there's a lot of testing that google have to do, since they're breaking new ground. Google's known for not releasing stuff until they're really sure they've ironed out the wrinkles.

Free Lunch?

[psychokid]

People want something free (a GB of free mailbox space in this case) at someone else's expense and then criticises about the possible tradeoffs involved? If you want content privacy, you shouldn't be using a free web account to begin with.

I love google but

[jacquesm]

I'm beginning to feel uncomfortable with the amount of clout they have and their new 'commercial' outlook on things.

If - as someone remarked - google goes public that is not the same as google being owned by th e public. It simply means that there will be that much more pressure on them to make cash. Buying stock in an IPO is not to be equated with supporting that company, it simply gives them cash to pursue their business in return for a small piece of the pie.

It would be nice if there was a public - not for profit - alternative to google.

spam?

[circletimessquare]

you realize that if google wrings spam's neck in their implementation successfully (somehow), then they will:

1. have every single user on the internet signing up

2. singlehandedly save email itself from progressively encroaching social irrelevancy

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[brainkiller]

It can be a friend of a friend of a friend of a google employee :) They're really nice about giving frinds beta accounts... I guess they want a lot of feedback to solve the bugs.....

but there is no place where you can "apply" for beta testing...

btw... the usernames for @gmail.com have to be minimum 6 characters ... I was about to cry when I found out I can't get [e-mail] :(

Re:I love google but

[JohnCub]

Dmoz.org [dmoz.org] is about as close to a not for profit alternative to google.

The truth is though, all that bandwidth costs money. Programmers typically want paid. Hardware breaks and electricity is most often not free. I know a non-profit organization still makes money to cover these costs but I don't see the need for anything more than dmoz if that's what you want.

Re:Six months?

[toasted_calamari]

theortically:

1) RAR file
2) Split into 29.9 MB segments
3) Write scripts that interface with Gmail
4) Register 15 accounts
5) Free Storage.

Also, they limit attachement size, but do they limit body size? would it be possible to UUencode the whole thing and stick it as the message text?

Re:Encryption support...

[UnanimousCoward]

So, maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how they can support encryption when their whole email business model is predicated on searching through the contents of a message. How can they do that if it is encrypted?

Re:POP?

[wmspringer]

OK, after reading the article, I see that they are also planning to offer imap, but still, pop makes no sense to me for a webmail.

Why not?

I use Mozilla for my email, but when I download it I leave it on the server until it's deleted. That way I have it on my home computer, but I can still get to it through the web interface if I'm not at home.

Of course, I tend to have to go and clear out old emails every so often..

Re:I love google but

[mpk]

Commercial doesn't necessarily equal evil. If commercial means "having the money to implement things we think are cool in interesting ways without having to scrape around", that's a good thing. If, for instance, Google were having to go to venture capitalists to raise the funding to develop Gmail, development would be primarily driven by commercial concerns and interfered with by investors wanting to maximise return rather than the way it's being done, which seems to be to be more or less a drive to Do The Right Thing. If investors were clamouring for a return on their investment, you can bet Gmail would be being rushed into full service right now rather than going through a good long testing and shakedown period for making sure everything works the way it should.

However, in the long term Google ain't a charity and all of the staff and system resources needed to provide the search engine, Google News and Gmail have to be paid for somehow. If the least obnoxious way of doing that is via Google's fairly unobnoxious and much-less-evil-than-many-others approach to inline advertising, that's fine with me.

If Google do go public then they'll have to be very careful to make sure they keep the freedom they have at the moment - but it seems to work so well right now that any shareholder demanding changes for the sake of changes would be a fool.

The privacy concerns are overrated.

[endersdouble]

In my opinion, the privacy concerns people have about GMail are vastly overrated. Don't get me wrong, I'm just as privacy/rights obsessed as the next Slashdotter...but there isn't very much wrong with GMail. Go to Google, will you? Type something into the search box, let's say "books." No reason why, just a random word. On the right side of the screen, what do you see? Under the heading "sponsored links", you see adds for Amazon and the like. Things which paid to get in on the "books" search. Do people complain about this? No! But, I hear you cry, GMail is looking into my personal words! They can context-ad my searches, but not my email! And why not? From everything I've seen, it's been said that no person will EVER read what you've written/been sent. If that's true, then how is your privacy invaded? It's not! Pure code scanning your email and showing ads is not an invasion of privacy. But, I hear you cry, if they start with that, they may end up reading our email by hand/searching it for use other than anonymous advertising/whatever? So? So could Hotmail. So could Yahoo. We trust them not to actually read our mail. We have to trust Google too; we all know the lesson of Ken Thompson's "Reflection on Trusting Trust"...we have to trust any mail service at some point. My point? I'll trust them not to actually read them. Anonymous ad fetching? That's OK.

Re:Six months?

[danila]

So there's a lot of testing that google have to do, since they're breaking new ground.
I though Google fanboyism was already passe...

Could you tell me, what new ground exactly are they breaking here, besides writing a complex IE-only webmail application in Javascript? That's cool, but not as cool as a 5 kilobytes JS-based [the5k.org] chess program or a first person shooter...

1Gb mailboxes - everybody offers huge (or even unlimited - my webmail provider [www.mail.ru] does it now) mailboxes now. Kudos to Google for the idea, but it's not really something very difficult to do. Dynamic folders, filters and searches? Opera M2 [opera.com] was here first. Check out their latest 7.5 beta [opera.com], it rocks! I have 250Mb of e-mail and it has instant searches and autofill for search terms. "Conversations"? I don't have a GMail account, but is it better than Active contacts and Active threads in Opera?

Not to mention the fact that many other webmail providers already have POP3/IMAP access, forwarding in both direction, encryption, WAP access and what not.

So what is so new about GMail? Except the fact that it's a webmail in javascript...

Re:Encryption support...

[gad_zuki!]

I dunno, its seems to me that only x amount of traffic is encrypted. I don't encrypt everything mainly because of the technophobes who don't even have keys or certs. Google is just assuming (and wisely so) that most mail will be unencrypted. The worst-case scenario is that they ask for your private key and just decrypt things on fly, but something tells me this would be fatal to the Gmail project.

Secondly, its good to see an industry leader take on encryption. MS, hotmail, yahoo, etc have all largely ignored encryption. Google could make encryption or at least encryption awareness a goal and a selling point. Hopefully it wont be a proprietary gmail to gmail system, but something based on open standards so everyone can use it. Gmail could issue free personal certificates and perhaps implement a simple "get someones public cert here" webpage.

Re:Encryption support...

[qbwiz]

Do you trust Google that much?

Re:Six months?

[billcopc]

The common inbred mortals that use Hotmail aren't going to bother switching over to Gmail. It's called laziness.

Heck, how long did it take for those inbreds to just start USING Google search ? WE THE NERDS had to change their start page to Google.com because they were still using the default MSN page. And then we had to teach them how to use a fricking SEARCH ENGINE.

Gmail is cool, but they won't steal many Hotmail users. They earn a whole bunch of new users though, as well as us geeks who typically run our own mail servers and/or pay a nominal fee for a true POP/IMAP account.