What next for Gmail: Gmail for domains

Google’s Gmail has been an innovative web-based email service, ever since it launched, offering unique concept of conversations, heavy use of AJAX based interface, Intellisense for contacts while composing emails and last but not the least: the concept of filters to fill the huge 2GB mailbox.

Now, after integrating the Gtalk’s chat logs into the Gmail accounts as another label, Gmail is geared to go even further and all the more alluring.

If code is to be believed, found deep inside the javascript source, Gmail is all poised up to offer Gmail for domains. Hold your breath: Yes, Gmail for domains!

The following code snippet is suggesting this:

function vJ(){
if(uy){
;return''+"Manage this domain"+" "}
else{return""}}

Gmail for domains would mean that any user who owns a domain can utilized Gmail as a Mail Server for his domain in addition to just being a client. Unarguably, this would be one of the big challenges to its competitors Yahoo, MSN & AOL. Yahoo offers a similar commercial solution & Microsoft is offering this solution in the form of MS-Exchange Servers.

Let’s imagine how the domain owners could use this feature. First of all, the domain would have to be authorized by the domain owner to use Gmail as the Domain Mail Server through some verification emails. Once, the domain is authorized, there must be some link/tab in the administrator’s Gmail inbox to manage the domain.

That will directly mean that incoming emails need to be filtered for the users, most probably as labels, of course the limit of this solution would be limited to the inbox size of the administrator i.e. 2GB. But we can also expect Gmail to offer the features of sharing the contacts, building mailing lists, customization of the interface by changing the images/logos/colors etc.

I guess now the imagination is going wild, so we should restrain ourselves from that and wait till this feature is silently introduced in our inboxes sometime in future as another New Feature of Gmail.