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Google’s Gmail has gained much acclaim but to really be the best it should attack spam head on!

In April of 2004 the new internet presence, Google, made a move to place itself as an e-mail provider in a web-world dominated by Hotmail, Yahoo and MSN free email services (Ref.1). The innovative new email system had a revolutionary business plan, which was to generate revenues from its’ web-based email service by providing targeted ads related to the main text in the users email (Ref.2). To attract these new users, Google decided, against the norm, to give away an enormous amount of free storage space. This was a stark contrast to MSN, Yahoo and Hotmail which drew their clients in using the free email service then surprise them with a membership fee once they required more storage space. The initial launch of Gmail gave its users 1 GBs of storage which shadowed the messily 40 to 60 MBs offered by Hotmail & MSN. It seems that this was done as if to say “you have put up with space pinching email services for long enough, come to a far better alterative.” Google’s great new email system is a start but there is still work that can done to improve it and make it more attractive. This author believes Google’s Gmail should implement an anti-spam technologies as it largest possible means of future improvement.

Amazingly, targeted ads on Google’s search engine and on ad served websites produced $1,031 Mill the last quarter of 2004 and $1,256 Mill in first quarter of 2005. With number jumps as big those, it is hard to believe that the R&D money put into Gmail was not offset by the revenues and profits from its operations. However, there is more to be gained then generating money from one’s services. If used in mass Gmail would strengthen Google’s Brand name as quoted from their SEC filings, “Our business depends upon a strong brand, and if we are not able to maintain and enhance our brand, our ability to expand our base of users, advertisers and Google Network members will be impaired and our business and operating results will be harmed.” 

Today, any moves made by Google are followed by much fan fare from the internet community and now the financial community. In the case of Gmail, several unaffiliated webmasters cashed in on the publicity by creating a number of Gmail related help sites (Ref.3) even thought Google maintains its own help forums (Ref.4.1). Other marketing tricks like only being able to register with Gmail via and invitation from a current user made the initial launch of their email services targeted toward the inquisitive web-savvy users. If the new users approved of Gmail’s quality and service, which mostly all of them do, then they would serve as reputable marketing agents pushing the email service to their friends through the invitations they send. This made the marketing launch of the service almost cost free. Attracting new inquisitive users also served a secondary developmental purpose which was to obtain customer feedback free of charge. The initial beta release received many recommended improvements from helpful Gmail’s users about new features and service that could be added. Many of which have been implemented since Gmail’s conception (a few were POP forwarding, the Gmail Notifier, along with several editing options). Going against the established business model for web-based emails proved to strengthen Google’s brand name amongst it customers. However there is always room to improve through continued development of ones products and services.

Google’s Gmail has proven itself worthy of hosting part of the world’s emails; however, is there anything they can do to improve their Gmail email service, making it the idol for all other email services? Well, since its conception users have suggested many features in the google forums (Ref.4.2) of which Google has acted on by releasing new features for their email service, but most of these have been small additions and had a relatively small impact on the overall quality and attractiveness of Gmail. Never mind the small improvements, are there any major improvements that can be made that could benefit Google significantly? There are several, but the biggest one in this author’s mind would be to greatly reduce the amount of incoming spam!

When a word as horrendous sounding as “Spam” is featured in periodical articles in News Week,  New York Times & Wall Street Journal, debated over by state seniors and forces giants like Microsoft to take action you know you have a dire problem (Ref.4.3). Going into the irritating annoyances of spam and the economic and computation burdens it places on the internet are not necessary in this article, (Ref.5); Besides, what is better publicity campaign could a billion dollar company like Google do than attack one of the internet’s largest invader in their own front yard being Gmail’s cyberspace? 

            Stating that Google could best improve its Gmail service by reducing spam is a simple remark, the difficult part is providing a developmental solution which would minimize the impact on Google’s resources and maximizing its spam filters effectiveness. The detailed of spam filters operations is much too intricate to be describe in this article. Besides it has been mention in much greater detail in other periodicals (Ref.6).

First the goals must be listed, which are to greatly reduce spam in all Gmail accounts. The initial launch of Gmail was praised for the low amount of spam, but as time progressed spammer slowly diverted around the spam filters and in the case of some users the spam reached levels so high that they deemed their accounts unusable. For Gmail to seriously reduce spam it must maintain a constant guard against spammers and their innovative new attacks and moreover must be dedicated to this purpose! 

With this goal in mind, the developmental strategy must be created. Spam filtering is not a simple technology; many different and innovative techniques have been implemented to thwart spammers such as artificial intelligences algorithms and topic sensitive personalized spam filters (Ref.5). The best anti-spam technologies may still be in development, with such a multitude of choices Google should implement a benchmark test of several anti-spamming technologies to determine the best ones. Amazingly, searching Gmail’s own forums uncovered a number of conversations about commercially available anti-spam filter software and their respective pro & cons.

 The act of filtering spam in some cases may be computationally intensive especially when large amounts of spam are present. Implementing a CPU intensive filtering algorithm may be very costly or impractical to apply to all of Gmail’s current clients. Some alternatives were suggested such as integrating the algorithm into Gmail’s PC based Notifier software to alleviate server CPU loads, but in such a case only the users operating the software would be covered by the advanced spam protection.

Thus the author believes the following actions should be taken 

1.      Try to purchase an advanced spam filtering algorithm or the company and the employees which produce it. They may even have a contest among software companies to determine the best algorithm, with the award being a license contract from Google. Google should only try to develop their own algorithm if they firmly believe they can do better.

2.      They should offer the algorithm in conjunction with the Gmail Notifier software as a beta test of its effectiveness.

3.      If effective they should consider implementing it on a small scale for part of their current email member base. They would then utilize the spam reporting feature as a quantitative measure of how well the filter is working.

4.      Once Gmail becomes more profitable they should buy more servers and integrate their advanced spam algorithm fully into their online service.

5.      Finally they can use the improved spam filtering in marketing campaigns to attract new users to their email service.

The author believes a funny result will occur if Google is successful in greatly reducing spam, being spammer downgrading the value of spam lists with a lot of google e-mails addresses in it. In a best case scenario, Gmail’s spam protection would be so superb that spammers would ignore spamming Gmail accounts because of the lack of click returns. Regardless of the road taken, reducing spam in Gmail will be a difficult task which will be fruitfully rewarded by extending Google target audience and by increasing customer satisfaction. If Google finds it in their interests they can make a serious impact on spam, and make some of us who really care extremely happy. They surely have the cash and resources to do so.

In the authors efforts to collect as much information on the subject as possible a preliminary version of this article was sent to a colleague who is a website business stagiest. He came up with an interesting value extraction strategy for a super spam proof version of Gmail. Consequently the author would like to close with Rafael Sosa’s statements:

Currently, Google’s Gmail is ideally positioned to benefit from a largely ignored market of e-mail outsourcing. To that effect, the implementation of effective spamming tools, together with Gmail’s clean and organized web-format would benefit many individuals. More importantly it would benefit businesses, both large and small, for which Gmail could handle all of their e-mail traffic, hosting and storage needs.

The question then becomes how to extract the maximum value out of move to significantly reduce spam? To maintain Gmail’s current business model and improve their companies image Google should still maintain their free individual email accounts. However, to address the business communities’ needs for an efficient anti-spamming email service, Google could offer a subscription email solution.

Technically this would involve Google setting up private label paid accounts where companies and individuals could set Google as their mail server and view their e-mails in a Gmail’s online interface or through the clients PC based email programs; such as, Eudora and Outlook.

Switching users to an online email client has many benefits, such as: constant program improvements without patches or updating, accessibility from any computer, and not having to synchronize an individual email accounts on multiple computers. Most importantly google would be moving the concept of online applications forward towards mass acceptance.

As we reach an age where computers have permanent connections to the internet, (currently 36 million homes have broadband connections according to TNS Telecoms) a private label like Gmail would come into straight competition with desktop applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Eudora. Most importantly offering an email service that could be accessed from anywhere in the world frees up the all important desktop resources and eliminates the hassles of storing and backing up emails. Irrespective, of the push to move applications online, the current online media star, Google, should take note of the market opportunity and need for anti-spam email service and act on it, extracting as much value and profit from it as possible.

Author’s websites

Brian Glassman www.TechRd.com   Rafael Sosa www.RafaelSosa.com

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