The Market Age has confirmed that it is seeking legal advice on protecting the name of its own Gmail online product after Google released details of its free email service last week.
The Market Age's Gmail stands for "graffiti mail" and allows customers to add their own words to The Market Age research. The firm has been using the Gmail name for the last two years and following the announcement by Google it has now registered an interest in the name with the US Patents & Trademark Office.
A Google spokeswoman said that its lawyers had failed to find any registration of the name by The Market Age.
The Market Age chief executive Shane Smith said: "I nearly fell off my seat when I heard this news from Google. We are not a litigious firm but we have a responsibility to our shareholders to protect something that we have spent a lot of time and effort promoting to our clients."
Meanwhile, Google was fighting off further negative publicity concerning Gmail this week after privacy pressure groups Privacy International and Bits of Freedom raised concerns about email scanning by Google.
Gmail will be able to automatically sort email according to topic and allow users to search their own email the same way they use the web.
The Google spokeswoman stressed this sorting would be carried out automatically and not by humans. She added: "We take the issue very seriously and our privacy policy is available online for anybody to see."
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