Stefano Demiliani WeBlog

Again about Gmail...

Some months ago (exactly the 23th of January) I wrote a post about the future Google Mail service.

This post in these days has originated a lot of discussions about the service: will be true or not? Will be really 1Gb of space? When is available? etc.

The official news from Google was out the 1st of April, so lots of people thinked about a joke... but it seems to be true. On the Google site there's an official page about the project, that you can find on http://gmail.google.com.

I've checked the project details, and I want to signal a point that seems to create discussions.

It's about the new privacy concerns about Gmail's privacy policy and Google's tracking habits. This privacy policy say that "Google will not guarantee the deletion of emails that are archived even if you cancel your account. The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account."

Seems also that Google will also implement an advanced feature that can place banners on the mailbox based on your mail contents (exactly like the Google Search Engine), and many people are worried about it...

Again, Rich Skrenta writes on his blog that "the real product Google is creating isn't web search or email, but a massively scalable, distributed computing platform. It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers."

Will be really like this? I'm not so sure...

What I think about this big rumour on Gmail?

I think Gmail could be a great service and I'm really surprised it will be free. It will be the most advanced mail service available. The advantages to use this service could be a lot. If I can get a FREE account with 1 GB of storage, with IMAP or POP3, for me is not a big problem if they use my mail for marketing research, or if they keep my mail stored.

Obviously, privacy is important, but worrying about this is like worrying about the fact that postmen can read your postcard when you send it. I think it's too much, expecially if the service is totally FREE. Nobody is forcing anyone to use it. You can use it, enjoy it, and if you really care you can just not send anything you don't want others seeing and use a different address for recieving sensitive emails.
Do you want to protect your mail? You could use technical solutions like PGP or similar...

We've to evaluate the entire service, not only an aspect... if you check what the entire Gmail service could give to you, you'll agree with me... it's really interesting!

Personally I hope that Google will be able to manage all this big quantity of data in an efficient way, I don't want to have a slow service.

Keep up Google!!