Email vs Gmail

Difference between Email and Gmail

There are many methods of connecting and messaging digitally. The two most famous are Email & Gmail. These two platforms are used for professional as well as personal purposes. But yet differ a lot from each other.

Let's discuss in a little more detail these two separately as well as their differences.

What is Email?

• Email stands for Electronic mail. It is a medium available to us to exchange messages or documents over the internet using electronic devices like smartphones, laptops etc.
• A very short amount of time is required to send and receive the message. A message is referred to as a Mail.
• Messages are usually encoded in ASCII
• Every device has this in-built feature of Email.
• The Email has come a long way since it was first established in the 1960s and expanded with a better communication ecosystem by the 1980s, from text-based messaging to attaching multimedia content like videos, files, documents etc.
• The message in email consists of 2 main elements:
  • Header- It provides a detailed log of sender and recipient and the subject and date of the message.
  • Body- It contains the original message be it text or some data with some attachments.
• The current format for writing an email is defined under Request for Comments document "RFC 5322" specified in the internet message format (IMF) - it is a standard ASCII based syntax.

Advantages of Email

• Emails are delivered faster than a traditional post.
• There is no limit to how many emails you can send per day.
• It can be sent from anywhere in the world, from any device with a strong internet connection.
• Anyone can share Emails with a group of people at the same time.

Disadvantages of Email

• The recipient needs access to the internet to receive the mail.
• Huge risk of virus that can be spread through various attachments people send.
• Phishing - Sending a false email to a user to scam him into giving personal information and then use those details for identity theft.
• Spam- Junk mail is referred to as spam. Sometimes the mail is not sent to the receiver and is saved in spam folders.

What is Gmail?

• Gmail is the most popular email service offered by Google. It is also used for exchanging messages digitally.
• It is an application that the user on any device can use, be it android, windows etc.
• Gmail provides 15 gigabytes of free data storage on every account.
• It ensures the security of every Email sent and received.
• The two most used protocols by Gmail are POP (Post Office Protocol) - which allows the users to download the emails, IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) - which is mainly used for checking emails from different devices.

Advantages of Gmail

• Speed - You will be surprised to see the speed of receiving and sending mail without refreshing the page.
• Anyone can access Gmail in many ways, and it also offers free access to POP and IMAP.
• Storage space- Gmail provides free space to all users.
• Search - We can search the mail by searching the subject or the sender's name because sometimes it gets lost in many emails.
• Spam filtering- It does an excellent job in filtering spam mails.
• Security- If your account gets hacked, Gmail is very efficient and will recover your account in a blink of an eye.

Disadvantages of Gmail

Google auto reads all of your Emails. Google knows far too much about you. What are your interests, what your work is etc. This information is all available to the advertisers, and it's not a kept-in house at google.