Google Gets E-mail

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Pamela Parker of ClickZ News reports that Google is testing its new e-mail service, Gmail. Not yet available to the general public, Gmail is a free, ad-supported Web-based e-mail service. The company says a handful of users are now testing the service, "which is built upon the idea that e-mail should be easy to search and store." The service organizes e-mails by conversation topics, and boasts robust spam-fighting capabilities and 1 gig of storage space capacity.

Google will include targeted advertising to help support the service. While users read e-mails, ads will be served that are related to the content of the e-mail displayed. Sounds a bit "big brother-ish," but Google stresses that the ads are computer, not human, generated, so the content of e-mails is not being read or analyzed by a person. Its privacy statement says it's a completely automated process, and no personal information like the ads a single user clicks on or Web pages a user views are recorded. The only information recorded is aggregated data about how the ads are displayed and clicked on in Gmail.