Gmail, Google’s new Web-based e-mail service, has sparked commentary, controversy and even calls for congressional action. eWEEK’s Steve Gillmor explored the perils and possibilities of the free software-as-service in an exclusive conversation with Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Obviously, there are privacy implications of Gmail that I do want to touch on, but I’m just as interested in the opportunities for programmability of this technology. If you could establish an API for this, that would be something really spectacular.

That’s an interesting idea. I haven’t thought too much prior to your mentioning it now, but there are certainly a variety of processes that I have in the past done with Unix, because I can basically program it to do all kinds of things with my e-mail—forward certain messages automatically, erase other ones automatically, trigger programs—and it would be interesting to consider doing those here.

Source: eWeek