Simon Willison’s Weblog

1GB of webmail from Google

1st April 2004

Provided this story about a new 1 GB webmail service from Google isn’t a lame early April fool, I’m really psyched about it. A decent amount of space combined with Google’s search technology could really help me keep up to date with my email. Just off the top of my head, here’s my ideal hosted webmail feature list:

• Costs between two and ten dollars a month. This is a critical service I’m entrusting to a company—I want the reassurance that there’s cold hard cash on the line if they screw anything up. Paying for a no-ads option is fine too.
• Smart filtering. I’m on a bunch of different mailing lists and can’t live without filters.
• “Virtual folders”—things like “all emails from this person”, “emails sent to this person” should be on hand at all times.
• Import and export mail as mbox files. Don’t lock me in!
• Decent spam filtering, obviously.
• Send plain text, receieve plain text. No HTML in either direction.
• Kick-arse search.

I don’t really have very complex needs, which is why I’m so frustrated that so far nothing I’ve tried has done what I need it to. Here’s hoping Google can hit the mark.

Update: The Google press release is dated April 1st. Given their history, it’s almost certainly a hoax. Aah well, we can dream.