Saturday, March 15, 2014

How far has GMail come? How clever has GMail become?

Me and also most born after in the early 90's have all had their first experience with email on Yahoo!. Email has undergone a lot of improvements since the early 2000's. However, there were few such occasions wherein I noticed the rapid pace at which all of it had been happening. One such moment had recently occurred and I wanted to share it. I was supposed to send an important mail with an attachment. It had non empty Subject and To: fields and all seemed fine and dandy, at least to my eyes. The mail read,"Please find attached....". Now, an unmindful me, hit the send button seeing that all the fields were filled. Remember I mentioned this was an important mail and shouldn't be resent. I was oblivious to the task at hand but GMail wasn't. Immediately an alert box popped up alerting me of the missing attachment which it inferred from the body of the email. I know it isn't such a big deal to write a code which does that, could've very well been the work of an intern; but the improvement it shows in user experience is very significant. It is also worth noting that GMail reads your email, only time can tell how dangerous it is or could be. Research in Natural Language Processing could have contributed to this application. In conclusion, it helps to take a step back from time-to-time and gaze in awe at the rapid changes that the world of internet is undergoing. This is exactly what I did and hence shared what I saw through this post.

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