GMail for Real

Today is April 1st, so there are a lot of April Fool’s Jokes out there. Google for example has a luna job opening for 2007. That is an April Fool’s joke. The question going on in lots of people’s heads is if GMail, Google’s potential new eMail client/service, is a joke. I have to now say that it doesn’t seem like it is. Several things point to that. For one, the HTML code of the startpage includes:

So ok, no secret HTML code then. On top of that, there is even a press release about Gmail, and I don’t think you want to send out a PR message to lots of people without it being for real. Then I found an article on heise in German (here) which says that they got it confirmed to be not a joke twice. And in response to heise readers saying that this is a heise joke again, a heise reporter said that this isn’t the case (source).

All this points to this being true and having been delayed for April 1st on purpose to make everything think it is an April Fool’s joke, which again would be a good one ;) We’ll see later what happens.

Update : Based on a comment on Jeremy’s April Fools Jokes post, this is real. It is getting clearer by the minute actually. The thing is that 1GB of Data doesn’t cost Google too much and who would actually be using up 1GB? Practically nobody, so that’s settled. And Google has to provide something. Why? Because this will be online only, no way to get it into an eMail client. Why? Because they need to place AdWords on it and they won’t be able to say “ok, you will only get html eMails with AdWords in them, inline, in your own message”. It has to be seperated. It’s also to close to something Google should do to be a joke. And Marketing wise, this is brilliant. Everybody knows now, everybody, and if only because they are thinking it is a joke. And tomorrow everybody will talk about it again when they find out it is not a joke.