I just got invited to GMail (Google’s new free email service which offers 1 Gigabyte of storage space) by a family member, and am trying the service out. When you choose a user name, you are restricted to six letters or more–a bummer for me, I was hoping to get blogd@gmail.com, but no such luck–and I don’t like names followed by numbers, like blogd1. But I can understand their reasons: dictionary spam.

Sometimes spammers just flood services like Yahoo or Hotmail with spam addressed to every conceivable email address, starting with aaaa@yahoo.com and ending with zzzz@yahoo.com. Limiting the addresses to names and numbers, that’s 1,679,616 combinations with four-character email addresses, and 60,466,176 with five characters. That’s maybe doable for some spammers, especially if they limit five-character addresses to ones that follow certain spelling rules. But six-character email addresses present more than two billion possible combinations, far too many for dictionary spam to handle without severe restrictions. Which is likely why Google made the limitation.

The sign-up process was pretty easy (though there are several terms and policy pages to scan), and then you get your account. It’s highly functional, but also very spartan–makes Yahoo and Hotmail seem hopelessly cluttered. You get an address book which activates by typing the first letter(s) of a name in your contacts list–for example, just type in the letters “bl” and if “blogd@gmail.com” exists in my contacts list, it appears below the “To:” box; just hit “Enter” and the address types itself out. Nicely done. GMail also has a spell-checker.

Attaching files is no problem, either–a few simple clicks and you can browse your hard drive for files to attach. Photos attached in this way show up inline in the recipient’s email (at least it did when I emailed myself in an account I check with Eudora). And web site URLs automatically become links, though they do not appear that way when you compose the email. Each email is limited to 10 MB in size–more than enough even for sending a small batch of unedited digital camera photos. GMail also will refuse to send “executable” files (programs, ending with .exe) for understandable reasons (viruses).

GMail also gives you nine months of dormancy before they delete your account and recycle your address. Yahoo gives you four months before your account becomes dormant, and although their wording is not clear, it appears that you have another four months to ask for your account back before they delete it. Hotmail is far more strict–no access in 30 days and they wipe your account, deleting everything in it; you are given another 90 days to reclaim the address.

Right now, since GMail is in its beta period, you can’t just sign up for an account–you have to be invited by someone else who is already a member. You don’t get to invite someone right away, though. From what my sister told me, a link appears after a few days which allows you to invite three other people to join GMail. According to GMail’s help page on the topic, you are “periodically” allowed to invite people, but “once you have used all of those invitations, we will not be able to immediately issue more invitations.” The wording seems to indicate that you are not always given three invites.

Like Yahoo, GMail will eventually offer POP3 access (so you can check your GMail account using a program like Eudora or Outlook), but it will be fee-based. Reasonable, since the ads they show are what generate the revenue, and POP3 email would at least minimalize the impact of the ads.

Finally, there are the contextual ads–the real revenue driver for GMail. When you sign up for an account, you have to agree to GMail’s scanning your email–though it is software-only, real people won’t be rifling your email–in order to find out what you’re saying, so they can target you with ads specific to your writing. Apparently, they don’t let more obnoxious spam through–my sister said that for fun, she and her husband tried emailing each other about porn sites, sexual aids and mortgage payments, and none of that got reflected in the ads they saw.

There are some who fear the possible abuses of the contextual ads, like this story which supposes an anti-gay group buying GMail ads targeted at gay people; when people follow the links, their IP address is revealed and the group can perhaps find out who they are and add them to ‘hit lists.’ Frankly, I don’t see this as a problem–for one thing, I don’t think it would be quite that easy to identify many people just from IP addresses, but more to the point, the same result could be gained much more cheaply by simply creating faux-gay web sites and getting their search-engine listings high up. And as for GMail scanning my email content, I’m not too worried about that either in terms of privacy as all email is far less than private. You use any email service, you should treat it like a postcard, and expect that strangers will read it.