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Gmail offers several features, some of which were previously not utilized by competing web mail systems before being proposed by Gmail.
The main innovation in Gmail is a new mode of categorizing e-mails, which Google calls Conversation view. In this view, Gmail will keep track of "conversations" (back and forth e-mail sending), displaying summaries of all previous mail correspondence when displaying a mail. Google argues that this makes it easier to look back to check what was being discussed in earlier e-mails. However, as Gmail must resolve how conversations fit together, conversations may be fragmented or unrelated conversations become attached together. One problem, which probably has no easy solution is the fact that a minor modification of the subject line by the sender will fragment a conversation.
Gmail offers 1 gigabyte (1024 megabytes) of email storage space, which was hundreds of times more than what the competition offered at the time of the announcement. The large capacity is intended to allow users to keep thousands of emails permanently, through their Archive system. The service also allows the searching of a user's emails with Google's searching technologies. Attachments of up to 10 MB each are allowed.
Both the number and percentage displayed in advertising and in the Gmail interface itself are sometimes abbreviated 1000MB, and the Gmail Help Center states that a user receives "About one thousand megabytes"[1], which is clarified with the statement "Gmail includes 1,024 megabytes"[2].
In the initial beta phase, Gmail makes heavy use of JavaScript for its user interface and tools.
Gmail provides an interactive spell checker. In the Gmail spellchecker, one can select the spell check mode while composing a message. In the spell check mode misspelled words appear in place and can be replaced in any order. In this regard, the spell checker is different from a web-based iterative spell checker, which usually go through each spelling error one at a time, and different from a batch spell checker, which lists all misspelled words at once.
An interactive address completion tool allows users to quickly fill in email addresses of friends while composing email. This feature allows you to click on the name of the contact after you've partially typed in his or her name or email. Gmail will then fill in the rest of the name and email address.