The one gigabyte of storage that some on the internet thought might be an April’s fools joke has been confirmed. Hats off to Forbes for the first detailed media review (that I’ve seen anyway) of Google’s new GMail:

Another feature that makes it easy to re-trace the steps in an e-mail exchange: say you need to remember a few action items sent by e-mail from the boss. Once you find the one of the e-mail messages that is part of that exchange, Gmail displays it with related messages in the window. Gmail calls these exchanges “conversations.” And clicking on one expands it so that more than one relevant message is displayed at a time. A link at the right of the screen says “expand all,” and it expands all the messages that are part of a conversation.

Sounds like there are some good features, especially the search, which is a given with Google’s involvement. The privacy angle with the ads are of what’s a real concern and the article addresses that also:

The first night we started using Gmail, late April 9, we saw the text ads, which were nearly identical to the text ads you’re used to seeing in on the right side of the screen after a Web search at Google.com. As of this morning, we noticed no text ads at all.

I have to wonder on the issue of my email contents being scanned by a machine for keywords to display ads. I mean, really, this might still scare people away because if a computer is reading the mail and the mail is being stored offsite, this could be a privacy concern. Would be nice to see them encrypt that email end to end, but then that would screw up their ad targeting service. Perhaps they could only target ads based on the subject field or once the email is created? Hmm …

• Google testing free email service: Gmail
• Google to expand email services?
• Yahoo to expand free email to 1GB, provide virus cleaner and index email
• More Google privacy abounds: paranoia or due dilligence?
• AOL to enter free email space
• Hotel advertising ‘E Mail’