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."

Comments

Deleting messages?

[erick99]

I don't quite understand how they are going to do that - it seems like a massive undertaking. Are they going to go through a tape library and only delete messages that the user deleted or are they going to delete archived messages periodically anyway. It seems like a massive task to selectively delete messages (from possibly billions?) from a massive tape library. Anyway, I think their intent is to make sure that messages are not saved forever:

Is it possible to delete messages, or does everything continue to reside in AllMail?

Oh, no, no, that was just poor wording on our part. It's just that we make a variety of backups, and we can't guarantee instantaneous deletion. Stuff that's on tapes, and those are offline--we eventually delete it, but we can't guarantee an instantaneous deletion.

The question would be whether or not somebody could feel confident that if they wanted to delete something that it would eventually be deleted.

Yes, eventually it will be deleted.

Happy Trails!

Erick

Re:Six months?

[gooru]

I have to wait six months to get an account :(

Nyah nyah! I have one! :-p It's actually not too tough to get an account. You just have to be acquainted with someone at Google. If you're on Orkut, it shouldn't be a problem to find someone who's less than a few degrees of separation from you who works at Google.

Also, six months is hardly a long time for a beta test. This is an absolutely enormous task they're undertaking. It's not like they're just installing IMP on a server or something. Gmail is also still very far from being ready for public consumption. I send bug reports and feature requests in constantly for things that are IMHO absolutely necessary for a full email experience.

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[dokebi]

I have a friend with a Gmail account. He got one through an acquantance working at Google. It seems like Google employees get accounts, and they could give out "passes" to a number of people. (not sure how many, though--definately more than 2)

Why always Hotmail?

[koi88]

Just because they were first?
I mean,

• no pop3
• ridiculously little space
• no imap
• reminds you to use Internet Explorer each time you use it with Mozilla
• belongs to MS ;-)

My email provider offers pop3, imap, 12 mb storage (well, that's not much, if you pay, you get more), email forwarding etc. (some stuff I don't use, like sms when you get email). Of course, all for free and quite reliable for 3 years now.
So why always Hotmail?

Yet more testing notes

[mpk]

I've written a few thoughts on my initial impressions of Gmail. Not much that hasn't been said before, but hey, it's another data point.

In summary - WHOA, keyboard shortcuts!

I switched over to using Gmail exclusively

[MarkWatson]

Yes, I know that it is a beta system, but for really crucial business email, I keep a flat file where I copy and paste emails for local backup (but, I almost never bother to do this).

Setting up Gmail was trivial - just forwarded email from my domain name. It is a little strange using a web based email system but because it uses a Mozilla plugin it is really more like a fat client. I find that the convenience of getting my email from any computer I am using outweighs any hassles of a web interface.

Oddly enough, I don't use the search capability very often, but it does work well. I like the way threads are organized in "conversations" and a new email to a "conversation" moves the entire conversation to the top of the Inbox.

-Mark