Gmail

Gmail is the email service of the US corporation Google. An email is a letter that isn’t sent on paper, but over the internet. With Gmail, these letters don’t sit on your own phone or laptop, but on Google’s computers, which run constantly and are reachable via the internet. You open the inbox either in the browser, meaning the program you use to view websites, or via an app on your phone. The service launched in 2004 and is free for private individuals. Today, according to Google, more than one billion people use it.

The ID for half the internet

A Gmail address is rarely just an address. Anyone who sets up a Google account also gets access to YouTube, the map service Google Maps, the online storage Google Drive, and the app store for Android phones. The email address is the name you use to sign in everywhere. Even other, unrelated websites often offer a button to sign in with your Google account.

This creates a tangible risk. Anyone who loses the password to this one account may lose access to many services at once. Attackers know this and deliberately target email inboxes. That’s because many websites send password resets exactly there. Experts therefore recommend a second security factor when signing in, such as a numeric code sent to your phone.

For companies, Gmail is also a business field. Firms pay for Google Workspace, a package with email under their own company address, word processing, and online storage. At Google, this segment counts among the pillars of revenue alongside advertising. In business news, Gmail and Workspace therefore regularly appear as competitors to Microsoft and its services Outlook and Office.

What’s behind the spam filter

Technically, Gmail consists of two parts. One part receives messages, sends them, and stores them in large data centers, meaning halls full of computers. The other part is the interface you see: inbox, search field, folders. Between the two parts sit filters that check every incoming message.

The best-known of these filters sorts out spam, meaning unwanted mass advertising and scam attempts. It works with machine learning: a program has seen, across many millions of examples, which messages users have marked as junk, and recognizes patterns from that. These include suspicious sender addresses, typical wording, and links to fake sites. Google states that this catches over 99 percent of spam. Errors remain possible nonetheless, which is why an occasional glance into the spam folder is worthwhile.

The search is also characteristic. Gmail doesn’t primarily sort messages into folders, but expects you to find them again via keywords. This fits Google’s core business, which began with a search engine. In addition, labels are attached to messages, meaning tags, of which an email can carry several at once.

Suggested texts and privacy debates

In everyday life, Gmail is encountered by most people as the default inbox on an Android phone. There, the app comes preinstalled. You also notice the service through small details: reply suggestions under an email, automatically completed sentences while writing, a hint about an appointment mentioned in the message. These features come from the field of artificial intelligence and, to work, read along with the text of the message.

This is exactly the core of the criticism. Until 2017, Google analyzed the content of private emails in order to show matching ads, and ended this practice after public pressure. Automatic checks for spam, malware, and convenience features, however, continue to run. In news about data protection and about AI assistants like Gemini, which are meant to access one’s own inbox, Gmail therefore comes up frequently.

There’s a common mix-up worth knowing about. Email is an open standard supported by many providers; Gmail is just one of them. A Gmail address can write to an address at GMX, Posteo, or a company without any problem. So anyone who doesn’t trust Google can switch without giving up the principle of email.