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I'd bet my beloved Transformers toy, Bluestreak, that 99% of all you lovely people reading this have some kind of free web-based email account, whether it be Hotmail, Yahoo or Lycos, etc.

These accounts are perfect for keeping in touch with friends and family while on the move, overseas or just on a short weekend break, as you don't need any email client to send or receive your messages; as long as you have access to a web browser and the internet, you're all set.

While these types of free accounts are great, they are also slightly limiting in the fact that they offer very little storage space in which to hold those scanned images of your recent Christmas party or the latest uplifting Powerpoint presentation currently doing the rounds. Hotmail provides a mere 2mb in which to store your email life and Yahoo ups the ante slightly to 4mb, but as great as they are, it's often nowhere near enough.


So what do you do?

Well, the only way to increase your storage space at present is to pay for it: Hotmail charge $37.95 a year for 10mb, $57.95 for 25mb, $77.95 for 50mb and $117.95 for 100mb, while Yahoo asks $29.99 for 25mb, $39.99 for 50mb and $59.99 for 100mb.

Not too unreasonable considering that storage obviously costs money and these companies can't just go around handing out gigabytes of space completely free of charge now can they?

Well, to the amazement of the entire IT community, it seems that Google can and will be doing just that in the up-coming months when they launch their free web-based email service, GMail, which will offer a staggering 1GB of storage space per account!

Google put out a news release on April 1, announcing the proposed service, and at first it was dismissed as an April Fool's joke given the date of the release and their past affection for April Fool pranks (anyone remember the claim that they were looking to start a new research center on the moon?), however, a few days later - once every message board in the world had exploded with discussion, rumours and debates about the sheer feasibility of service - Google finally came out and confirmed its legitimacy.

Despite many IT professionals' claims that it simply cannot be done due to the sheer cost and scalability issues alone, it seems Google are pressing ahead anyway and are currently in Beta stage at the moment, refining and tweaking the service after handing out a small number of trail accounts to some lucky individuals.

GMAIL FEATURES:

From the previews I've read, the service itself is typically 'Google-like' in its clean design, easy-to-use navigation and powerful search functionality (which is what Google is best known for), allowing you to search all emails you've sent or received either by simple keywords or via advanced filtering. There is also a new feature included called 'Labels', which replaces the 'Email Folders' approach by allowing users to assign a label to a particular email without having to group them all together in one view: now you can apply a label to a particular email (such as 'family', 'friends', etc), but still retain them in your main InBox view.

Another interesting feature of GMail is 'conversations', which basically takes any consecutive emails based around a topic and orders them in a newsgroup styled display. So, for instance, if I were to email my girlfriend asking her what she'd like me to pick up for dinner on the way home tonight (with a subject line of 'Dinner?'), she might reply, telling me she didn't mind as long as it wasn't fattening (Re: Dinner?). I'd then write back, telling her that those kinds of foods don't exist, but I'll do my best to get a low fat Thai meal or something (Re: re: Dinner?), and so on. Ignoring the fact that our conversation could have ended up with me sleeping on the couch, you get the idea: all related emails from a particular 'conversation' are ordered together, making the whole ordeal of getting takeaway - amongst other things - a lot easier to keep track of. Click here for an example.

It all sounds too good to be true really doesn't it?

Well, all free products or services have to be funded in some way, and whilst most freebies are paid for by advertising, Google's GMail goes one step further, and some people are questioning whether that step is just a little too far across the line.

EMAIL SCANNING:

Google propose to assign robots to scan each and every email sent to a GMail user, and then based on the content of that email, they then plan to display targeted adverts along the right hand side of the screen. So for instance, say a friend of mine sends an email to my GMail account asking if I know the name of a good web host in Australia, I will then most likely be presented with adverts on the right hand side of my screen for companies offering exactly these services. For a better understanding, take a look at the example on the GMail website to illustrate this.

Google assure us that humans will not be assigned to read emails and target adverts accordingly, and have since issued a statement in an attempt to clarify the way the systems operates, as there is growing concern surrounding this and many other areas of the proposed service, including the way they handle deleted email and cookies.

DELETED EMAILS:

When you read through Google's privacy policy, a couple of things stand out as potentially alarming, and one of them is Google's policy on deleted emails, which reads: "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". This is the cause for concern for many, and as Bits of Freedom founder, Maurice Westerling says, "If a person deletes an email, he should be confident that email is actually deleted."

GOOGLE COOKIES:

Surprisingly however, the most worrying part of Google's service does not stem from the scanning of email content or the backing up of deleted emails, but it is the single cookie (which isn't set to expire until 2038) that Google assigns to you for web searching and GMail usage which is angering many privacy activists around the world. Currently, when you use Google to perform a web search, a cookie with a unique ID is assigned to your computer. This cookie is useful in that it retains your language and other such preferences so you don't have to continually set it up every time you use it, however, this cookie also records your IP address, search criteria and even some of the sites you visit from those searches as well, and it is feared that Google will use this information, along with the details you provide when you sign up to GMail (most notably your name) to tie in these two sources, giving them the most complete and accurate insight into our online habits to date, all of which could be used (or abused) by Google, law enforcement agencies and possibly even marketeers around the world.

Google representatives haven't done much so far to allay fears either, as when Co-founder, Larry Page, was asked if Google planned to link GMail users to their web search queries, he said, "It might be really useful for us to know that information to make search results better. I'd hate to rule anything like that out."

In addition, VP of Engineer, Wayne Rosing, also commented by saying, "We have no immediate plans to do so in the future."

FINAL NOTE:

Regardless of people's concerns and reservations, there is little doubt that Google's GMail service will be hugely popular, so if you do plan to take advantage of their service, then just remember: one of the other 'benefits' of having a completely fresh email service is that there will obviously be a wealth of highly desirable email addresses up for grabs still, so I'd advise those of you are considering signing up to start thinking about those addresses now, because if your name is John Doe, you'll probably want to register 'john_doe @ gmail.com' as quickly as possible!

- Story by: Stephen Jesson