Happy Birthday, Gmail!

by J. Butler, Content Development Specialist

Wishing Gmail a happy birthday may seem like whispering into the wind tunnel: with all the accomplishments Google had racked up in the past few years, why stop to pay attention to any one anniversary? But looking back and how and why Gmail came about tells us a lot about how far we’ve come in such a short span of time. 

When Gmail was first introduced, a typical webmail account could only store about five megabytes of mail. I can vouch for this firsthand: my old Hotmail account was perpetually full, and I had to resort to saving treasured emails in a file on my hard drive. It was hardly time effective, and made managing mail a chore. Then came Gmail, offering a full gigabyte of space; for some hardcore users, this was barely an upgrade, but for the typical email user, even one gig opened up a whole new world of storage—it’s five happy years later for me, and I’ve barely cracked 4%. And I delete nothing. 

Gmail was designed with one group in mind: the people who racked up a lot of email, and thus, needed a lot of space. Much of common email interface were frustrating to the designers, so they started essentially with nothing, building their new intuitive interface from scratch. Their site architecture was a hybrid of HTML and JavaScript (this later became known as AJAX), which was smoother and faster. This becomes important when you keep in mind that broadband connections and 56k modems were still the norm.

In the years following, Google has developed any number of additions for the basic Gmail structure that ranged from the practical (an ‘Undo Send’ app, ‘To Do’ task lists) to the personal (design themes, custom date formats) to the funny (Google Goggles, anyone?). But by any rate, Goggle’s worked hard to improve an by all accounts stellar service, paving the way for even bigger improvements to personal email in the near future. 

Here’s one stat that can’t escape highlighting: today, thanks in large part to Google, it’s almost commonplace to a 20 megabyte attachment—making that one email four times the size of an entire webmail account in 2004. 

Photo from Official Google Blog entry. 

Using Gmail for Internal Email

by Greg Pike, Applecore Web Developer

A Little Background
At our office we use one email for sending all of our server-generated emails. We have scripts that connect to the server and use that email for sending notifications, contact forms, and other website-related emails. In the past our scripts could send emails and mask who they were coming from by simply changing the value of the "From" field. For instance, if I went to a contact form and entered my email as johnsmith@example.com and click Send, the email received should appear from johnsmith@example.com rather than the generic email used by the server for sending mail.

For years, with our host, this was never a problem. We recently switched our email host to Gmail and, along with a few other technical hiccups from the switch, we had a problem with masking emails as from a specific sender.

Why is there even a problem sending these emails from Gmail?
Gmail blocks server-generated emails from masking who they’re from. Gmail forces the developer to authenticate themselves as whatever email they want to send from. That is, if you wanted your script to send an email as John Smith you would need his username and password to send it from the server. This isn’t usually ideal, but Gmail is trying to prevent servers from sending emails from someone without their consent.

Disclaimer
We managed to come up with an ad-hoc solution to the problem for any small organizations, like ours, that run intranets or scripts that send external emails from employees or members. It isn’t glamorous and it unfortunately doesn’t really work for anyone who isn’t a part of your network, but it’s a solution that met our needs. And since we couldn’t find any references to it online, we’re making our own contribution.

Our solution
Log into the Gmail account you intend to send emails from. This account should be the one your web scripts access. Click Settings and go to Accounts. Here, add the account of each member of your network. You can do this by clicking "Add another email address." As long as John Smith is associated with the server email (the one you logged in to), Gmail can send emails as if they’re from his account. This goes for all members of the network.

It might be wise to explain to your organization ahead of time that you need them to confirm their association with this Gmail account. When you add them as an additional account they’ll receive an email that tells them they need to verify that they wish for their account to be associated with your server account.

Good luck with it!