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Google's Gmail To Offer 1GB E-mail Storage?
tstoneman writes "Wow, according to the New York Times (free reg. req.), looks like Google is really trying to push the envelope by offering 1 GB free storage for e-mail users via a service called Gmail, still in the testing phase, so that users never need to change their e-mail address. In addition, they want to offer their searching capabilities so that users can search through their entire set of e-mail, I guess forever. CNET News also has more details." Update: 04/01 02:38 GMT by S : The Google site now has an official press release, naturally dated April 1st.
I will sign up for 1000 accounts and get a free terabyte storage system.
well im all for peace love and happiness, but i serisouly have no clue how that could remain profitable, unless of course that 1 gig is space on your own hard drive
Woohoo, Finaly a place to send all that spam!!!
The first of April perhaps...
Why not Moogle?
meep
I can't wait to see what Google's anti-spam technology is going to look like. You can't do a webmail service these days without one...
Wow, that's a lot of spam!
But filling 1GB with it? That's going to suck.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Sweet Merciful Crap!
Thats like 3 WHOLE DAYS worth of SPAM!!!
....
On a more serious note, that would make your goodle mailbox a big jucy target for a lawsuit happy org (RIAA) or the goverment
If you want the GOP to stop helping the RIAA/MPAA point out that they are unions...
However, the email service sounds great. 1GB of space is incredible but I think I would like the ability to do a fast search through all of my stored email even more. Even though the article notes that 1GB per user will cost Google only about $2 to maintain (they didn't say if that was a annual cost or what), if they did get 100M users that would be pretty expensive! It makes you wonder if they don't have a tiered service in mind down the road. Of course, this will be "advertiser supported" so who knows how invasive that will or will not be when using their mail services.
Still, this all smacks of either "window dressing" for Wall Street, "war paint" for Microsoft, or, perhaps, both? Either way the users will be winners for a least a little while.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
For those who refuse to subscribe to NYTimes, you can use:
User: slashdot2003
PW: slashdot2003
Imagine the look on the NYTimes admins when they see how many logins that acct gets. LOL
The press release reads like a joke. Is it an (early) April Fool's joke?
I wasn't quite sure how to test my new internet connection. Now, I can see if my Pigeon Subscriber Line can really trasnfer a gig of spam in an hour.
http://www.beyourowneviloverlord.tk
http://www.frozenchickenthrowing.tk
http://www.killercamel.tk
The pigeons, this? The April fools joke this year is they bunk stories are coming today instead of tomorrow.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
I'm really looking forward to seeing what google does in this space. Hotmail and Yahoo just aren't very high quality/consumer oriented. If google can provide a feature rich interface that doesn't focus on upsell to the user, then they could capture a lot of interest/visibility. Right now I rarely use online email services because of the UPGRADE NOW! spam and the primitive interface.
All your preview button are belong to Hello Kitty.
Just use Google (how appropiate) to set your referrer.
What does having 1GB of storage space on Google's mail server have to do with never needing to change your e-mail address?
It might allow you to keep many more e-mails than possible with yahoo or hotmail, but how will this allow me to never change my e-mail again?
and while I am at it google news should really be called noogle. thank you and dont forget to try the shrimp
meep
Are we getting a little ahead of ourselves...April Fool's Day is tomorrow.
so that users never need to change their e-mail address
:-)
So after netscape.net, hotmail.com, yahoo.com, real.net I will have a google.com address which will never need to be changed!
I already have a lot of them you know
Edwin
bash$
If they go through with 1GB of searchable, indexable e-mail that would really be nice for those of us who are constantly changing ISPs and don't want to have to bother with telling everyone our e-mail address has changed.
Yahoo and Hotmail are useful but if you recieve and save attachments very much that space goes away quick.
With storage being as cheap as it is I still think it will be fairly expensive to support hundreds of thousands (millions?!?) of users each with a gig of space. Also the indexing and searching could become a bit of a resource hog in itself.
Oh well, I guess that is why they are doing this little test here to see how the resources pan out. Will be nice if it becomes a usable service.
I couldn't read the article because I refuse to sign up with the NY times... Is this a free email account? I have been checking around for other free web email providers and most of them are 2 - 4 MB for storage. 1 Gig is huge. I guess the G in Google works will with the G in GB.
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Last day of the month. Check out all the deals before some expire. Of course new ones will start in the beginning of April. No April fools jokes here!
That's what it is...
This is a huge amount of space warez groups will no doubt use this to distribute material.
It is quite easy to do, asuming the atticment size limit is 1mb, split iso's into 650 chunks and email them to yourself.
Get your friends to sign up and forward the iso to everyone using CC.
There is no god
Let the Piracy ensue!
I have to keep ALL the mail I get and send at my work. I my cabinet I have HDDs with 15 GB of mail, in duplicate, saved for life. My new powerbook has so far only 10 messages, but it will grow.
.
I would love an adress I could use for the rest of my life, but the storage is irrelevant. What I want is an address at a domain guaranteed not to disappear, that forwards the mail to my ISP du jour
My first thought is that they're going to give one GB of text storage and forbid the use of the service to transfer binary attachments. (with limits on how many e-mails you can get from a particular sender per day and how big each message can be enforcing the rule so that good old usenet encoders don't work.) Therefore, they can give everybody a full GB of apparent storage, while older rarely-checked messages sit in compressed space... readable text always compresses well. :)
If anyone finds the Beta Signup site, plz tell me. I would kill to get on that. 1 free GB of data storage. *Drool. SOMEONE MUST FIND IT AND REVEAL IT TO THE MASSES!
Recall that they have thousands of machines with HD's just sitting there. Thats tons of space that sits unused. Now, it can be filled with mail.
I remember the day when geocities was still geocities and you got 1MB of space for free and were happy with it. So in about 10 years everything is up 1000 fold.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
They really are pushing the envelope. I mean, how much will that cost, a gig per each registered person. All I can say is that I will sign up. I guess they must be making a great prophet to afford that. I hope this is their "killer app", as far as the other Mail Service's go. The way everyone worships Apple as far as computers go, or so it seems (I use Windows, ought oh), I think Google will soon become quite famous too if this works out.
http://www.beyourowneviloverlord.tk
http://www.frozenchickenthrowing.tk
http://www.killercamel.tk
Wouldn't it be great to have a place where you could store a gig of your most commonly listened to music. Just stream all of it straight out of your mailbox. This of course applies to other file types as well and the possibilites are really impressive. The only way I can see Google preventing this sort of behavior is either limiting incoming file sizes, or by not allowing files at all, either of which is sure to cause problems.
It always ticked me off how much companies charge to storage. I know that bandwidth costs money, and it costs money to maintain servers, but since the typical consumer price for a hard drive is approaching $0.50/gigabyte, it was just a matter of time before someone offered scads of storage for low-bandwidth applications. Maybe someone else will see what Google is doing and offer unlimited storage of photos and other stuff (with bandwidth limits, of course) that you can share with others.
Now I can archive all of those viagra offers and search through them to find the best deal! YAY!!
Wait...froogle already lets me do that
if they do this, their popularity might make them quickly become the number 1 webmail service.
then, if they implement a good spam filter, including the ability to cross-reference all their users reported spam or similar titled emails, then they could effectively eliminate non-POP spam.
of course their popularity will make them a huge target of spammers' attention, but I have more faith in Google's abilities than I do in the spammers'.
ZDNet Article
MSNBC Article
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
AN FRANCISCO, March 31 -- Google, the dominant Internet search company, is planning to up the stakes in its intensifying competition with Yahoo and Microsoft by unveiling a new consumer-oriented electronic mail service.
The new service, to be named Gmail, is scheduled to be released on Thursday, according to people involved with the plan. It will be "soft launched," they said, in a manner that Google has followed with other features that it has added to its Web site, with little fanfare and initially presented as a long-running test.
E-mail has become a crucial weapon in the competition to win the allegiance of Internet users, who often turn to one or two Web sites as the foundation of their online activities.
As Microsoft's MSN and Yahoo are preparing to attack Google's role as the first place most people turn to carry out an Internet search, Google is hoping to counter those assaults by moving onto the turf its competitors have already claimed in providing e-mail services as part of their portals.
Google is starting far behind Microsoft, which claims 170 million active users for its Hotmail service, America Online and Yahoo. But Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., is planning to play on its information search strength to compete with the existing services.
Google will offer consumers better access to searching their own e-mail and could well upset the industry balance by offering free access to services that previously were only available by paying a monthly subscription fee.
The standard industry practice is to offer tiered mail services, providing only limited storage for free and charging higher fees to users who want to preserve larger numbers of e-mail messages. Google, by contrast, is planning a service to be supported by advertising that will permit its users to store very large amounts of mail at no cost.
One internal Google study put the operational cost of maintaining electronic mail storage at less than $2 per gigabyte.
In recent weeks, Google has picked up the pace of updating and adding new features to its basic search service, as part of its effort to position itself as a strong business ready to sell shares to investors in what is expected to be the most popular initial public offering by a Silicon Valley company in years.
Early this week, for example, Google polished its appearance, making the company's array of services more accessible. The company also moved its Froogle catalog shopping search engine into a more prominent position on the first page of the Google Web site.
Google has been closely watched in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street during the past year for any indication about its plans for an initial public stock offering. The company has steadfastly declined to respond to speculation.
Its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, told The Wall Street Journal this week that the company was exploring many options, but he explained at a recent industry conference that Google does not necessarily need to move forward on an offering any time soon.
Google's entry into the e-mail business will sharpen the lines between the major competing portals like Yahoo and MSN and Internet service providers like AOL and Earthlink. Google recently lost its position as search provider for Yahoo, which has turned to a company it acquired, Overture, to take advantage of the growing amounts of advertising revenue available on search pages.
To date, Google has maintained a strong relationship with AOL. But as it enters a business that competes directly with one of America Online's core offerings, it could find that AOL, like Yahoo, begins to view Google as a more direct competitor.
Microsoft has also dramatically increased the importance of building its own capability to offer search services of its own. The company has been showing a range of features that it hopes will make its MSN service more of a draw to Web users who rely on search engines as starting points for finding information and services on the Inter
This is either an April fools joke, or we're seeing a headlong return to the days of 1999. Disk space is cheap, but it's not that cheap. Unless they're going to charge for this, I don't see how they're going to make any economical sense from gmail.
I bet the privacy policy on this has google owning your email and rights to search and index it.
I can't imagine that emails with unlimted attachment size would be supported. I could send whole ISOs to myself and use Google's servers as my own personal free storage space otherwise. My guess (I didn't get much else from the CNet article), is that either there's going to be some type of traffic cap per day/week/month etc, some maximum size on attachments, or some other system put in place to curtail this. Otherwise, Google's probably going to be in a world of hurt when nefarious people decide to take advantage of the system.
The sad thing is, the people who would exploit Google's offering will also be whining when the service has to be terminated or severely restricted because of their abusive behavior.
As always, there's probably more to the story - time will tell.
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Yup, heard that right.
1GB? Why I remember when 640K was enough for any man. It was 19diggity-2. We had to call it diggity, cuz the Kaiser had stolen our word for twnety. Now then......
http://gmail.com/
well.. they do have a domain set up for it..
but, searching through my spam?
I suppose if I need to trail a bayesean filter or something..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Now I will only have to delete my spam every other day.
I have an email archive with all of my personal messages (including spam and attachments) going back to 1994, and it's only about 4.5GB total. Unless somebody receives an absolutely incredible amount of mail, I don't see how you could realistically fill this up via a webmail service.
Of course, maybe that's the whole point. Like ISP's, Google may simply be offering the 1GB as a lure, while betting that most users will only utilize a tiny fraction of that space.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
I registered my first domain name after my ISP was down for a week and none of my clients could email me.
If you have your own domain, and the hosting service tanks, you can sign up with a different host and have the DNS switched over in a couple days. But if your email address is at someone else's domain, you're out of luck if they go down.
I'm glad I established my own domain when I did. I kept my old ISP even when I moved away, so I could get the odd email from people who didn't know my new one. One day, though, the national ISP that bought them out shut my old ISP down entirely, taking out the email addresses for a substantial portion of Santa Cruz, California's population.
I think each individual person on the planet should have their own domain name.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I was running outta places to put all my spam..
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
Especially if you are subscribed to high volume, non-public mailing list which are relevant to your job. I used to run a person search engine from altavista and the ability to pull up info from the devel lists at works was invaluable. Then I upgraded to win2k and it no longer worked all the time, and finally I had to reinstall and the software refused to install (it had been brought in origionally with an upgrade from 98SE). I would love to be able to search email so easily again but I doubt my employer would allow me to sign up an outside email address to the internal lists that would make it most valuable =(
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
Are we talking 10^9 bytes or 2^30 bytes? They wouldn't be fooling us with the cheap type of gigabyte would they?
Pros:
t ters :)
Google speed
Runs Linux!
1gb free storage for all your old mails
Cons: Your buddies can do a simple:
http://www.google.com/search?q=john+smith+love+le
to pull up all your old mushy emails to your ex-girlfriend
Check it out:
http://www.gmail.com/
http://www.advogato.org/proj/Gmail/ This page is funny cause gmail is dead.
I don't know that this is neccessarily a good idea. Do you really want a corporation holding 5, 10, 20+ years of your email? What if you're under investigation? All the sudden everything you've said over the past 20 years is very easily accessiable.
"Well Mr. Jones, it seems as though you're awfully interested in increasing your penis size for some pre-teen lolitas.. What do you have to say for yourself?"
gmail hrmm.
I can't believe you got modded -1, Offtopic. That is just fucking hillarious. I guess mods don't have sense of humor today.
So the official press release is here. Interesting that it's released March 31, 4:05 p.m. Pacific Time. Greenwich Mean Time is eight hours later.
Hmmmmmmmmm.....
I was thinking about setting up a terabyte server in my house. 5 X 250 (IDE) mb at RAID 5, plus Promise controller and and hardware I already had was going to run me ~ $1000. I assume Google can get it much cheaper. A solution like RAID 5 would allow them to neglect backing up everything all the time. Still, even if they could get a terabyt for $500 (which is 100o users), that seems really expensive for users. That is like 50 cents per user. Hmmm...
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
almost all mail servers will put a cap on the maximum size of a smtp transaction. Otherwise one dweeb mailing the latest windows xp iso to his mailing list. could bring to a crawl an entire (medium size) isp's mail server.
My mail server refuses anything over 2 megs.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
One may also consider that if they are shelling out 1G of free storage, that the advertisers are going to foot the bills for the massive storage arrays. Think: Tagline: Goggle!
Let's keep in mind that patents are in place to keep lawyers employed and keep them litigating. -CatGrep
If Google was a woman, I would make sweet passionate love to her all night long, or at least for 10^100 minutes.
I'm hoping they'll next be able to have Google search my memories and "personalize" the ones I want to review.
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
It is quite easy to do, asuming the atticment size limit is 1mb, split iso's into 650 chunks and email them to yourself.
Get your friends to sign up and forward the iso to everyone using CC.
650 1 mb files? That's more work than paying for it. Let alone the fact that if you're CCing all your friends you're sending out 650mb * number of people - that's a lot of bandwith that adds up quickly and gets you noticed. I don't think any real warez group is going to be using this.
Track your TV Shows with your iPhone - FREE
Once a upon a time you used to be able to walk into a hamburger joint and find... well hamburgers. Now we have salads, chicken, ribs(?) and yes, hamburgers. But the hamburgers aren't as good as they used to be, and neither are the salads or chicken for that matter.
Quit trying to be everything (think Yahoo) and stick to being the best search engine on the net or one day you will find yourself in the back room frying chicken and tossing salads and wondering WTF went wrong.
yeah, I can see some people trying to send divx files as attachments now... Some old lady on dialup will wonder why it's taking 3 days to download her attachments on dialup. lol
--
Live deal updates. Finally a new and unique site.
I find this to be an invasion of my privacy. A personal letter with ads attached to it, based on the subject. If my girlfriend wrote a love letter, I could get an ad for roses. I would rather I just get regular ads. Sure, it may be what I want, but I don't want them to know what I'm thinking before they choose an ad for me.
I have found Google Adwords to be really annoying at times on the plain old web search as well. Sure, they're not images, but some of them are really abnoxious - not too different from typing in the wrong URL is sometimes typing in the wrong search terms.
Why 1GB of storage may dazzle, what I think could really be revolutionary is the possiblity of Google searching your email. Even with mail folders it's still easy to "lose" some piece of information you want to find later on. With 100 messages carrying the subject "re: meeting" its a pain to find (especially with webmail where each message requires a page load) the one that actually tells you when the meeting is.
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So, you claim to be able to post twice at a time instead of waiting the 2 mins between posts. How can we verify it? You're probably just sitting in front of two computers with different public IPs or something. Give me instructions, or you are just a douchebag!
But then looking at the Whois
Domain Name: GMAIL.COM
Registrar: ALLDOMAINS.COM INC.
Whois Server: whois.alldomains.com
Referral URL: http://www.alldomains.com
Name Server: NS2.ALLDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS1.ALLDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS3.ALLDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS4.ALLDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS5.ALLDOMAINS.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 25-mar-2004
Creation Date: 13-aug-1995
Expiration Date: 12-aug-2006
Shouldn't they call this Gig-gle?
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
Now I can't give excuse to someone that my hotmail mailbox was full and I din't get the said mail.
Instead of 1GB, if they made it 1MB, I will reconsider it.
1 GB ought to be good enough for anybody
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's owned by Google alright!
Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-425410)
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
CA
94043 US
Domain Name: gmail.com
Registrar Name: Alldomains.com
Registrar Whois: whois.alldomains.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.alldomains.com
Administrative Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
CA
94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
CA
94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571
Created on.: 1995-Aug-13.
Expires on: 2006-Aug-12.
Record last updated on..: 2004-Mar-31 16:50:22.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.32.10
NS2.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.34.10
NS3.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.36.10
NS4.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.38.10
Alldomains.com - The Leader in Corporate Domain Management
Thalasar
don't worry, when you grow up and your time is worth something, it'll be cheaper to just buy the software than go through all this effort.
unless you have no skills, in which case it sucks to be you.
Sure 1GB Gmail beats 4MB Yahoomail or 2MB hotmail, but I still can't store a single DVDs worth of data ( 1 DVD = 4.7GB ).
I predict future email providers are simply going to offer 1 DVD worth of space. Have a giant DVD-burner on the other end & pop in one DVD-RW per user, you have a good thing going...
.....OR you could just use edonkey, kazaa, bit torrent, ares, gnutella, blubster, winmx, freenet, direct connect, open nap, overnet, FTP servers, WASTE, http servers, or your own mail server.....
All of these would be much easier than using what you described. No matter how crap the network is.
650 separate e-mails for an ISO that I could download in almost the same amount of time and with MUCH less clicking.
Yah, The warez groups are going to be ALL OVER THAT!
Especially considering all those cached web pages. I am sure they can do very very fast compression/uncompression on the fly.
You will set up a GMail account.
You will use it for all your email.
You will point all your current email accounts to it, and have them copy all their traffic to it.
When we give you the opportunity, you will also upload all of your personal files for long term storage. All documents, archives, images, videos, spreadsheets, code, presentations, everything.
You will encourage all of your friends and relatives to do likewise.
You will zealously promote this as a Good Thing. Secure. Safe. Reliable. Trustworthy. Good.
When I snap my fingers, you will immediately go out and do all of these things. You will feel great happiness and satisfaction. If you are male, you will have erections during about 80% of your waking hours for the next 12 months, as long as you are carrying out these tasks. If you are female, the sight of anyone you like or feel even slightly attracted to will give you a rush and make you wet, also during the next 12 months only as long as you carry out these tasks. People you like a lot will make you gush like a fountain. You will need to stock up on panty liners.
That's a pretty impressive service! If it were free they would literally need petabytes of storage!! Not to mention the liberal abuse that would be rampant. Still, I like the idea because it would be really useful!
Hell, look at googles own news release date
http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gmail.html
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
...there was much rejoicing in the law-enforcement community when they learned internet users will be leaving years of e-mail online for easy searching.
capn
If it were real, spam would have been mentioned in the press release.
Where exactly does it say that users will get 1GB of storage? The only mention of storage is this:
All that I can see is that it will cost them less than $2 a gig to store user's email. The idea that they would offer 1GB of storage per user is insane at best and Google doesn't strike me as crazy.
Yahoo offers (now) about 4 megs of space for free and Hotmail is around 3 megs or so, I believe. Google only needs to offer 20 or 30 megs of storage that that would be on par with the other's paid for services to intice users away from them.
Or I could be totally wrong and missed where it states they are giving 1GB of space to each user...
One thing I think would be interesting is to enable each user to mark certain emails to enable them to be publicly searchable [munged addresses of course]. Something like that could potentially be a huge new resource.
Ender-
Nothing to see here
In addition, they want to offer their searching capabilities so that users can search through their entire set of e-mail, I guess forever.
With all due respect to Google, and god knows they're one of the few companies that seems to get "it" right, what with uncluttered interfaces, unbiased services, and unobtrusive text ads -- Google also records the IP address along with the search terms of every search.
Anytime you've Googled on "anime tentacle rape", "venereal disease STD symptom", "P2P download", "closeted gay", "arguments for atheism" or "overthrow government", Google has recorded your computer's IP address and has tried to set a cookie in your browser. To Google's credit, the search still works even if you don't accept the cookie; but Google is keeping the IP and search term log -- forever.
After just a few hundred searches, you don't need to be a Kreskin to do a little data-mining and get a good idea of a user's interests, proclivities, and possible "deviancy" from his search terms.
My fear then, is this: will you be the only one who can search through your database of email, "I guess forever"? Or will Google be able to search it too. Or even if they lock themselves out of search or reading your email directly, will Google, as they do now for web searches, keep a log of the searches you make on your own email?
Again, you can tell a lot about someone if you have a list of all his Google searches, but you can probably learn even more and more immediate information if you have a list of his searches through his email.
Remember the "Halloween X" email recently released, from Mike Anderer to SCO about Anderer's attempts to raise money on SCO's behalf? Imagine if Anderer had been searching for that email before -- or after -- the release of the "Halloween X" letter; I suspect you could learn even more juicy details by seeing what search terms he used?
What if Richard Clarke and Condaleeza Rice has stored their emails in Google GMail? Of course, the government wouldn't store email in GMail -- but imagine if the people in analogous positions in your company did -- say the head of security and her deputies? Could Google learn much about your company's financial dealings from the search terms they used to review their mail?
What if you stored and looked for emails regarding your company's Non-Disclosure Agreement or upcoming patent for some new technology? Could a competitor glean import information just from your search terms?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, are you still answering "yes" to wanting to try out GMail for yourself?
It's simple: too much information concentrated into any one set of hands -- even hands as apparently benign as Google's -- invites abuse or -- even if Google never bends to that temptation -- tempts others to steal that data.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
http://gmail.google.com/
NMG
Printing hoaxes isn't beyond some Times journalists.
Absolutely an April Fool's Day joke. There's no way it could be anything else. I like Google, and like seeing them put one over on the NY Times, but I'd have been plenty incredulous at 25MB... 1GB? Please.
Those evil b@st@rds at Goog$e are using their search monopoly to enter into the web email market!!!
Still, 100 meg is a lot of storage for a free service. Yahoo used to offer 15, then decided they couldn't afford it. If it were anybody but Google, I'd dismiss the whole thing as another dotcom boondoggle. But Google has a talent for making money on services you wouldn't believe are profitable.
From what I've heard AOL had a fairly decent warez scene at one point with users emailing the files to each other... I can imagine that something like this would be heavily used for piracy. I wonder if they'll cap attachment sizes or put a max on file transfers.
sig.
Slashdot preaches endlessly on privacy issues, but when it comes to the NYTimes, you are not allowed to help users avoid the anti-privacy registration page.
I, for one, would like to see a litle bit less hypocrisy on Slashdot.
as in the GNOME mail client? Where is Google's press release? Where is this story coming from, besides http://gmail.google.com/? This smells a lot like some April Fools.
On the other hand, they didn't put some comment in the source of gmail.google.com saying it was a farce. So confused!
They'll know every mail order item you bought, every person you talk to about it, all your interests so they can dish up ads for you. Who your contacts are. Every registration email you've received ala "The password to your account is :XXXXXXX"
:-(
Even better is the day someone hacks their machine.
Horray for Google!!!
I can hear the 'Department of Homeland Security' salivating already about that volume of searchable data.
Imagine what the minds at google will do to spam.
Interesting, I couldn't find any reference to gmail when I searched Google.
Doing a regular websearch yeilds a bunch of linux hits. Guess we'll find out tomorrow.
Readable text compresses well, but compressed text is hard to search, which they say you can do.
Didn't Novell used to own the gmail.com domain and offer it with free e-mail while they were testing their web-based Groupwise Mail product. Didn't Eric Schmidt of Google fame used to be a Novell-ite? YES!
I sure hope their TOS for Gmail is better than for Orkut. How many people would want to grant them "worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display" for their personal email? (yes, that quote is cut-and-pasted from Orkut's TOS page: http://www.orkut.com/terms.html)
All of my data on their machine, I pay them to access it. Sounds like .NET
Sign me up. I am a complete and utter jackass moron.
My site
I'm suprised nobody's posted this yet:
http://gmail.google.com.
"Coming soon!", it says.
That's the previous owner. Google bought this domain, they didn't register it.
Thalasar
I don't see why we always have to link to the NY Times. There are many others with the same story. (Google often links to NY Times articles too without requiring registration)
The "soft rollout" begins tomorrow. On April 1st. I think I'll just wait until Friday to sign up. ;)
Whether this turns out to be a joke or not, are there webmail services out there offering:
* spam blocking
* auto forwarding
* auto filing rules
Anyone out there delighted with their current webmail choice?
How many pigeons will it take to get my email from Google everyday?
Quote from that second link: "The way we'd like to say it is that part of our mission is to organize and present all the worlds information, and e-mail's part of that information that currently is not well organized. That is the rubric under which we offer this."
*All* the world's information controlled by one company ? Is that a good thing ?
That's right AOL. Don't believe me? Here's how it worked. Anyone who grew up on AOL knows what I'm talking about.
Each AOL account could have up to five screen names. Each screen name could have up to 550 e-mails* in their Inbox. Each e-mail could have a maximum file attachment of 15MB.
So...15MB times 550 is 8GB times 5 is about 40GB. That's per account, and thanks to the various account generation/phishing tricks, it wasn't uncommon to have several AOL accounts at any one time.
What did this mean? Well, it meant that AOL became one of the biggest warez havens in the blossoming Internet. And all with point and click easy, none of the file decoding nonsense of USENET.
How did AOL do this? I have no idea...but there were entire groups of people uploading warez non-stop so they could forward the mails around. At some point AOL cracked wise and started nuking attachments that had been downloaded X times. But for many years, it was glorious. Imagine sending several GB of software to someone with a single click of a button.
* actually you could have 550 in both Inbox, Outbox, and Read mail and various AOL tools helped you do this, bringing your capacity to a whopping 120GB.
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
for those who care, this is the Gmail site
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I had an account there. It made transferring files from home to school so much easier. I was pretty sad when they got rid of the free accounts. It's been a few years since I went to their site, and it appears they became iBackups or something now.
* Ability to download/offload messages from the webmail server to your local machine.
My current webmail doesn't let me do this...very frustrating when you want to archive old messages!
and assume they limit the maximum amount you can attach per e-mail. And using it as filestorage would require giving people your login and password.
Unless you can anonymously browse other people's e-mail it's really not going to work. At best there would just be people advertising their accounts and people would have to manually (or submit a form) e-mail them a request.
At any rate, any system that attempts to whore out Google will be public and no doubt Google will squish such accounts pretty quickly and have no trouble getting the authorities to act on it. I had free anonymous FTP for awhile but since I have an obscure IP (more warez people fish popular IP ranges and don't bother to go to a web-site to see the big giant ad) I only had to report a couple people to their ISP for attempting to store warez on it.
I offer POP3 accounts with no storage limits but with a 15MB attachment limit and I expect e-mails to be pulled from the server. The idea of no storage limits is so that you don't go on vacation only to lose e-mails because your inbox got too full and so you can get large files back and forth easily. Not so you can use it as your own personal harddrive.
I think Google is really overselling this service and once it's all debugged they'll most likely offer something a bit more sane.
Or maybe their next goal is the best spam fighting engine on the planet and offering people insane amounts of space they'll never use is just a way to get people to drop everything else so they can start collecting more spam than AOL for analysis.
Until MyDoom came out and Cox blocked incomming port 25 on top of the already blocked outgoing port 25 I was running a spam can for that very purpose: get all the spam you can where you don't care and then use the info to preemptively block spam from your real inboxes.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
There is no way I want my personal email forever in someone else's colocation storage site.. If the allure of having it there in the first place is taken away, then there isn't a point. Other than to abuse the 1gig storage limit.
This idea needs a rethink. Even if it is true.
Not any "warez dood" over 12 year old.
Actual warez groups distribute their stuff via multi-terabyte ftp sites on high speed (gigabit) lines.
And 650 files for one measly little CD?
The URL and accompanying article look authentic, but the article makes no mention of a 1 GB allowance. Looks like this year the editors are trying out an innovative tactic of augmenting real stories with April Fools embellishments.
What Would Jesus Do
(for a Klondike bar)?
Did anyone else think of some new GNOME e-mail program when they first read "Gmail"?
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
April Fools!
eTrade SUCKS
So not only will Google put Spam in my legit mail, my Spam will have Spam? Odd.
Tomorrow perhaps?
Google search = providing me with other people's stuff. Google mail = potentially providing other people with my stuff.
You could have read the article, you just chose not to.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
=Smidge=
*snicker*
Yahoo is SO 90's.
Google is now!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Check out www.google.com.
Then go to froogle.google.com.
Then go to gmail.google.com.
What do you notice? Right, no "TM" at the corner of the logo!
I don't think their lawyers would be this foolish if it were meant to be real.
Forever? Perhaps if there was no spam...with the level of spam and other nonsense out there, no way...try about a year tops for many folks.
And most folks I know with email delete all of it from time to time anyways; lose it all when they do their seasonal reformat of Windows.
Do most people really want to keep their email for a year or two, let alone forever...I doubt it.
Lastly, while gmail may be a April Fool's joke, the economics behind it aren't really that crazy when one considers the low cost of HDs these days - for example Hotmail has been around for what 5 years or more...look at how little it cost them to provide each 1 MB of storage now verses way back then.
Ron
It's probably like SpamCop Mail. SpamCop Mail can download and filter e-mail from your existing account using POP3, IMAP, or WebDAV. Then it splits the ham from the spam and stores them in your folders. When you change ISPs, just set the service to POP your mail from your new ISP's mail server.
Looking forward to Yahoo and Hotmail stepping up to the plate and prividing gig-mail too, (maybe 5G, to better compete?) :)~
In fact, that's about the funniest reply I've seen in a long time. Way to go.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
The following has no evidence to back it and is idle speculation.
Could such moves lead to an attempt to shut down the distributed email system as we know it? Consider the following scenario:
Complete paranoia, but the cynic in me says 'what if'?
Would anyone be willing to posthumously open thier email history publicly?
I mean, how cool would that be if 200 years from now anyone could look up your or anyone elses life in great historical detail.
Historical letters are wonderful because they not only reflect the events of the time, but they show the lives of those who lived there.
imagine that, billions of historical emails, searchable.
Of course there may be an event or two you wish to take to the eternal recycle bin, but I'd leave in a couple that I think people of the future would prbably enjoy reading...probably.
...The dumb-ass evil educators conspired to prevent your knowledge of NATURE'S HARMONIC SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME CUBE
'nuff said.
come on, kvetched? no other Google press releases have this kind of informality. So, this is either April Fool's, or something trying to _look_ like April Fool's.
Google is smart. Most people will not use all the space. Hard drives are cheat, and the 1 gig thing will PULL people away in droves. Especially if the only ads are the nice polite AdSence crap they have! Hotmail sucks without Mozilla and AdBlocker.
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
Hey, if it's only sending the data between Google email accounts, no problem - everything stays in the LAN / SAN networks instead of hitting the real Internet, or optionally just sends pointers to the original without duplicating it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I know lots of Hotmail users enjoy that email they receive as soon as an email arrives. I'd love to see google have such a service as well. Without it lots of people will continue to use hotmail.
dear google,
:)
i love you. please listen.
please allow for pop and imap connections to your new web mail.
i love you baby, but you have to do this if you want to keep me.
sincerely,
your smiley face,
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
If you look at Google's press release on the matter, you will note it is dated April 1, 2004 UTC.
All of their other press releases are simply dated, without the timezone...
Hmmm.. That's odd. Wonder why?
Since when do serious press releases contain a quote like "Heck, Yeah" from a company's founders? Business Wire gives this press release a time of just about 0:00GMT - the start of April Fools Day. Page's tone in the release's first quote is far too conversational for a corporate product launch - "kvetched"? "delete email like crazy"? I'm going to say it's a joke. And if it's not, this post was a joke.
GIM ? gmessager ?? as msn or yahoo messenger ...
$ du -sh Mail
1.6G Mail
Hmmm. That's just for about 5 years worth of email. Do you think they'd have a pay-for "power user" option?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Wow.
That's a really good point. Thank you for sharing that though. If i had moderator points, i'd mod you up.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
And I suppose you think that when 50,000 people on a system all have disk quotas of 50MB, that means that there must be at least 2.4TB of physical storage to back it up? Or that AOL actually had 10 million modems at some point? Do you think that's air you're breathing?
Here's a hint: if most users aren't using that much storage, then there's no need for that storage to actually be there.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
ok, I'll go mod myself down now....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
You must work for a hard drive manufacturer.
Hehe.
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
I've got several addresses on fastmail.fm - both at the free and the one-time-fee "Member" levels. It has most of what you ask at the "Free" level, but in order to get custom filtering and forwarding rules (and access to the raw sieve script) you need to be a "Member" - for fifteen bucks, one-time.
In terms of things I've spent fifteen bucks on, Fastmail is one of the best ones. Try the "Free" service (which in itself is a fine service), and you'll see that these guys are fully deserving of your cash. Plus, the two owners regularly read and participate in the forums, and will respond to your complaints/questions/issue directly.
fastmail.fm - call this a plug (for the record, I have no connection to these guys besides them providing email hosting for a conference I run), but I have no problem paying for a good service like FM.
Cue The Sun...
http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gmail.html
I was really excited until I read that. That release reads like a joke. In fact I know what it is, they are increasing the internal email storage hence the 1,000 beta test users - ALL the Google employees!
Thalasar
1GB, that's a pretty hefty size. My concern is that such a wealth of storage is going to be abused by pirates.
Those of you who are familar with AOL back in the early days found their large capacity email to be a haven for piracy. Large file attachments that once initially uploaded, could be forwarded and shared with hundreds of people in seconds, once recieved, it could be forwarded again to yet even more people. All without the delay of re-uploading, nor even having to download the complete file.
I hope that Google has something up their sleave to preemptively nullify this problem before it starts. I used to make entertainment software for PC's and eventually had to disolve the S-Corp due to dwindling sales lost to piracy. The above mentioned method the result of...
Possible solutions would be to limit the size of attachments. Possible disallow forwarding attachments greater than 50MB. Dunno, just hope this is just paranoia talking and not an omen commanded by my Rice Krispies.
If you notice the google press release says nothing about controlling spam, it talks about speed, space n such.
Knowing google and the amount of space in question, spam mails would increase too and why waste all that computing power on archiving and indexing SPAM.Makes it look more like an April fool thingy?
Lord of the Binges.
Yup. My Outlook mailbox is currently 986MB, mostly powerpoint/word/excel attachments, and that's _with_ archiving most of it to separate files (and CD-R) every quarter or so, which requires hacking it up into pieces under 700 MB. All in one big binary undocumented file. It's a dangerous and stupid mail storage approach.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Werd!
Seriously though, I'm sure that an explosion in piracy would cause Google to require a SSN, Driver's License number, thumbprint and a blood sample to set up an account.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Isn't dated till tomorrow.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
here's another possibility:
every time somebody emails somebody else an URL - at the moment - they do it for a reason. and if my experience is even close to typical, this happens often. if a thread results, something was interesting. if the thread is related to the content at the URL (which google will have, one way or another), then chances are the content was interesting.
this could be a *very* good way to slow down people trying to "optimize" for pagerank. it would also allow google to be on top of memes travelling through personal networks, and react accordingly in realtime.
[|]
Google plans to make money from the service by inserting advertisements into messages based in part on their content, effectively extending its AdWords program for presenting contextual ads in Web pages to e-mail.
So... if you get porn spam will it insert MORE porn spam into the email? Or more penis enlarging drugs? Sweet...
sig.
is that everybody else on the planet gets to search your email too.
C'mon guys, it's april first in many parts of the world now. You really think google can afford to have millions of users have a gig of storage? We're talking petabytes of storage here! It was good for a laugh though, seeing how many major news outlets picked this one up.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
With the name recognition of google I suspect this will be as popular or more so that hotmail and yahoo. Tommorow is the day to get in early and grab up all the good login names for your mail account so you're not stuck with georgebush23455412@gmail.com FirstnameLastname@gmail.com FirstinitialLastname@gmail.com Lastname@gmail.com ....etc.
I wonder if this is related? Today I got this in my yahoo mailbox: Dear Yahoo! Mail User, We've made changes to your Yahoo! Mail account -- we've upgraded your email storage quota to 25MB, at no cost to you. As a loyal Yahoo! Mail user, you've been randomly selected to receive this free benefit effective March 31, 2004. You'll also be able to attach up to 10 files to an outgoing email message (increased from 3); and your outgoing message size can be up to 10MB (increased from 3MB). It's just our way of saying thanks!
Would it take to fill up 1 Gig of space with spam. My Yahoo account only took 1 month to fill with spam... I know we can have a race!
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
I get 100Mb available on my very french provider, I've been using this address for five years, and I'm still at 30% of the total capacity.
Binary attachments, furthermore, are rarely re-used over time, and only constitute evidence against you in court... :)
Tip : when you visit pr0n, or any kind of sensitive contente / untrusted source, just use another email address previously registered only for that specific use. So far, only 2 spams a week on my normal mail : and this is only because I began to work (ah... the basement.).
Regards,
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
Google will soon have the largest searchable archive of spam and ham messages in existence. Their spam filter will be *tight*, because it will be able to use pagerank in reverse. 2 trillion emails contained links to goatse? SPAM. Only 30 messages link to whitehouse.gov? Let it through.
Remember, the same spam messages get sent repeatedly. Storing all of that gives you a massive working set.
In a year, will point at this post and say I told you so.
Passport is dead. Long live Google.
A uniform centralized data center that is personalized to each individual with tons of storage. What more can you ask for from a service?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
So...15MB times 550 is 8GB times 5 is about 40GB. That's per account, and thanks to the various account generation/phishing tricks, it wasn't uncommon to have several AOL accounts at any one time.
So that explains why warez releases are always broken up into 15MB RAR or ZIP files.
I, for one, welcome our Google overlords.
So being able to search your own email falls into their domain ^^
GPL Deconstructed
really.. some very few websites think it's an error and require a .com/org/net
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
It's a live link:
gmail.google.com
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5182805.html Quit posting those damn links which require registration! GRRRR
Now I know where all the old 5 MB IBM full-size 5 1/4" HD's went when the 3 1/2" size came out.
Great post, and yet you didn't even scrape the surface.
Google has documented links with the primary user of computing power on Earth, the one that controls literally hectares of the most powerful supercomputers in the world... you know, the U.S. National Security Agency.
Who knows what they're up to behind closed doors.
I wonder whos gonna be the first to auction off some short and easy names. billg@google.com
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
How do they plan to get that much space.. We're talking 47.6837158 petabytes after they get 50 million users. 50 million is a bit high, but who wouldn't want to take advantage of this? You also have to account for people who sign up for more than one account if it's possible to do so.
Buckethead
Well, ok, seeing how the current binary groups do it, say you wanted to get something out there that was about 700mb. UUencode to maybe 800 Mb. Say the attachment limit was 1Mb or even 2 mb. Maybe say that breaks up into 20 parts (20 individual emails). Hard limit (max total message sizes sent to it per day) was 10 mb.
In that case, you only need 80 accounts. While a bit crazy for a single person to do, I can see it happening.
Obviously though, a good usenet server trumps that (traffic between networks is handled automatically by the feeds... all the enduser has to worry about is their connection to their local news server)... but then you probably knew that already.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
$2/GB sounds realistic, and sounds like it's in the range that advertising might be able to pay for, if there's any kind of profitable business model. Part of the key, of course, is that the average user won't using anything close to one gigabyte, at least not for a while, and disk drive costs keep dropping rapidly, so that may be $1 or $0.25 by the time the average user is really using a gigabyte. Also, depending on how they handle spam-filtering and mailbox indexing, they may not need to store more than one copy of each spam message :-)
Database servers and similar high-speed systems tend to prefer Storage Area Networks and 18GB 15000rpm SCSI drives instead of 200GB 7200rpm IDE drives, but you don't really need that for most of the storage in this kind of network - maybe for the core metadata and middle-level caches, but not the raw storage.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Okay the tone of the press release obviously makes this an April fool's joke - but it's a damned stupid april fool's joke if you ask me. What's unreasonable/funny about 1G email storage? Seems like a pretty decent product if you ask me, and certainly something google could pull off almost overnight if they wanted to (they already have the distributed storage and search infrastructure). And 1G per user is perfectly doable given a) storage is cheap b) oversell ratio is extremely high
April fools?
Hmmm... unless the joke is that everyone thinks it's a joke but they're really doing it. Ha ha!
Between consumer storage and enterprise storage. Our users always bitch about their UNIX quotas. 100MB unless a professor oks more up to 500MB, more that that requires clearence from one of the department heads or associates. They ask as you do, why if hard drives are so cheap don't we give more storage?
Because when you implement a consumer level storage solution, the drive is your entire cost. You buy it, store data, and our happy. That's not the case with our UNIX storage. First, it is Sun hardware so more expensive anyhow. Second, it is all SCSI RAID-5 with a hot spare, more expensive disks and 2 of them wasted space. Finally, it's all backed up. Nightly, tapes rotated weekly, with monthly trips to a secure offsite vault.
It's not so cheap to implement sotrage of that level. To expand it requires not getting another disk, but getting more disks, hardware to hold those disks, a tape backup unit capable of backing up ALL the storage in one shot, tapes to hold those backups, and space in the storage facility (we actually get that last one for free).
We don't just get to drive to CompUSA, drop $200 and boost the disk space. It takes thousands of dollars, not to mention staff time spent planning and implementing the changeover to result in no loss of service or data. Because of this, it is expected that when we put a solution into place, it will last a number of years. We are currently upgrading it, but that'll be the last time for a minimum of 3 years.
There are compenstaions though. Users expect, correctly, that if they accidently delete a file, we will be able to recover a copy only 1 day old. They expect that if a disk fails, there will be no interruption to their work. They expect that even if the building were destroyed, their data would survive. This is all correct, but all expensive.
This is also what is offered by most online webhosts and the like. They aren't whacking single IDE drives in their servers and hoping that they survive. They run some kind of RAID setup with regular backups. That costs a good deal more money.
There is also the problem that high storage most often infers high bandwidth. For a long time I had about 5MB stored on my website. Not supprisingly, I used less than 500MB/month. I then had more to store, and now use about 500MB. If I provided only my website to transfer the files, I'd exceed my 21GB/month quota, I have two other servers that combined tend to do around 30GB/month. What I offer would be considered low demand files (OGG soundtracks for the old iD (Doom/Doom2) and Raven (Heretic/Hexen) games.
Bandwidth is expensive, and companies need to turn a profit. They also don't want to risk lawsuits over lost data.
After looking at the actual Press Release on Google.com, It's looking more like a joke to me.
The date at the beginning of the release is "April 1, 2004 UTC". If you look at all of the other press releases by Google, they never use UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) after the date.
Along with the supposed inspiration from a "kvetched" user and the comments from Brin, this is yet another fishy item in this press release.
We'll find out tomorrow. Can't wait to try it though :)
(2) your scheme will flag all mail for popular mailing lists as spam.
A subpoena is a court order that compels something. It can compel you to show up and testify, compel you to turn over information, etc. Now while it can't compel you to do something incriminating (as per the 5th ammendment) there is nothing incriminating about turning over someone else's e-mail. So if the cops show up with a subpoena Google, or anyone else, will turn over your e-mail. They simply don't have a realistic choice*.
* If they resist, those resisting will be arrested and their hardware siezed and the e-mails will be had anyways. They'll also be criminally charged.
Google better not try to build a brand around my race's reputation, kupo!
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
....
Guess I can't read much news today.. "April Fools" is simply tiresome and "unfun".
Most "jokes" (99.9%) aren't funny at all.
Great tradition.. I wouldn't be surprised if "Microsoft to open source Windows under GPL" made the front page.
Rarara.
don't tell anyone taht way hotmail and yahoo will announce increases in their storage limits ;>
This post patent pending.
Today is March 31st. The PR is dated April 1st. You do the math.
Well look at google's press releases page.
http://www.google.com/press/pressreleases.html
March 31, 2004
Google Gets the Message, Launches Gmail
March 29, 2004
Google Introduces Personalized Search Services; Site Enhancements Emphasize Efficiency
Putting the romance back into necromancer.
but, then again, I'd never mod a post up to +5 that just says "great googley-moogley" either.
oddly enough, googling for "gmail" or "Gmail" gets more hits like:
:PHP Foundry
gmail 0.4.3 Gmail is an experiment in an sql vfolder-based email system - from LWN 1999(!)
and much more, including many uses of gmail like:
Email it to AJBourg@gmail.cjb.net
http://www.gmail-london.freeserve.com
http://gmail.garfield.com
G-LINKS@gmail.newsavanna.com
and a project on sourceforge that was released in 2001 (although it appears to be inactive):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gmail/
initial release: gorun - 2001-03-16 10:27
Gmail
Script php permettant d'envoyer un mail a partir d'un formulaire sans que l'adresse email apparaisse. Sa particularite est qu'il peut gerer plusieurs destinataires
Development Status: 5 - Production/Stable
Environment: Web Environment
Intended Audience: Developers, End Users/Desktop, Other Audience
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Natural Language: French
Programming Language: PHP
Topic: Email, WWW/HTTP
Project UNIX name: gmail
Registered: 2001-03-10 06:37
Activity Percentile (last week): 16.8966%
View project activity statistics
View list of RSS feeds available for this project
"...that's as white as it gets; all the bits are on..."
I'm currently doing my time as a tech support person, and as such, we sometimes get more... interesting... customers.
Case in point: we got a guy calling up having trouble sending email. He said he kept getting a bounce message. The message really didn't make sense, so we got his username and went to talk to the email sysadmins.
Turns out the recipient server was choking, because the user had sent a 700(!) Megabyte attachment! So we cleared the message out of the queue, and let it be.
Half an hour later, the user calls up again, saying he got another bounce message. Back to the sysadmins for a closer inspection of the mail server.
Turns out that what was REALLY happening was the mail server was TIMING OUT after 700 Megs, and the message he was really trying to send was 1.4 GIGAbytes!
We repremanded the user, cleared out the queue, and sent him on his way.
char sig[120] = "\0"
Get off you high horse ya tosser.
...Phil Katz (creator of PKZip), announces that an angel visited him in the night and bestowed upon him the secret to infinite compression.
Hard drive makers are subsequently scrambling to produce 0 GB hard drives.
And in addition to GMail, Google now finally has the capacity to fully index the porn sites.
-JT
Ahh, I remember those days. Especially the month(!) it took to download a movie on dialup =)
The reason it worked, I think, is because AOL only kept 1 copy of the attachment. So you might have 40GB in your inbox and forward it to 1000 people creating 40TB of messages, but it's still be the single 40GB shared among everyone.
It's not actually that bad, if the advertising taglines are always only attached to the mail messages they correspond to - so you'll only see the Google ads for Fake Herbal Viagra if you open the Viagra spams, and you'll only see the Google ads for Nigerian Banking Services if you open the Nigerian scams, the ads for real pr0n sites if you open the pr0n spam, etc., while the email your mom sent you about replacing her old Windows machine with a Macintosh will get ads for Macs, crunchy red fruit, Dell, Microsoft products, glass cutters, and X10 cameras.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Everyone hates it when you say, "I told you so," but I told you so.
how many vote this is an april fools, joke on yahoo and msn, plot for world domination or over ambitious?
At first i thought this was real... I'm retarded. April FOOLS!!!
In linux libertas
You know in the heady days of '99 I worked at a company called myplay.com - we managed to sidestep the whole 'online music' problem by letting people store music on our website. - we gave people 3 gigs to store music - of course I had some neat 'compression' technology on the backend that removed file redundancy, but still it's a lot of space . so 1gig for mail just doesn't even cut it, even as an april 1st joke.
Scott Manley
yes, cultural differences. not being born in america but living here for a while, I was surprised at the lack of adequate consideration for april fool's day. where I come from there is pure madness in the madia on april first; the weirdest and most insane stories are published/presented with the straightest of faces in all newspapers, tv newscasts, radio shows, etc, from the silliest teen magazine to the most serious financial paper. it seems that this april first tradition is almost nonexistent in the US, but might explain google's latest press release (doesn't at least one of the founders have a non-american sounding name?)
then again, the story might be true and i could finally get rid of that dreaded red bar in yahoo mail.
What I really like is the blue bar that tells you what your query was. So many times I come back to a window and forget where I was, what I was doing, etc. Now I can look up and see "Web" and remember that I'm searching the World-wide Web.
Thanks Google, for just doing it right.
Rubbish. Everyone who isn't a Tool or an Idiot knows that the world is built on a mis-named heptagon, creating seven simultaneous days. They call them "week-days" for a reason, bub.
in 1994 there was no limit to email sizes on aol..at least not the aol that I remember. I remember getting windows 95 beta in a single email, downloading it over a 2 week period (couldnt stay connected like u can now, and 14.4 modem sux)and breaking it up into many 1.44 floppies.
they didnt implement any sort of file size limits until like 1997
Heheh
g le .email.ap/index.html
It made it to CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/31/goo
Look at the actual google press release on their site. It starts with April 1, 2004 UTC. UTC stands for Coordinated Universal Time and none of the other google release have that added onto the date. Hmmm.....
i wouldn't touch this service with a 10-foot pole given google's lack of a serious privacy policy. i didn't notice any statement regarding privacy in the announcement. but the privacy policy for the whole site includes, "Google may decide to change this Privacy Policy from time to time." also, do you know what google *really* does with those cookies?
talk about a profiler's goldmine. don't tell me any of you believe google (a for-profit company) wouldn't scan every last email for "marketing" reasons?
peace
One of two situations are true... I'm just not sure which:
A: This is Google's April Fool's prank that they'll fully put on display tomorrow, and somehow a ton of media outlets including the NY Times, Reuters, Forbes, Wired News, ZDNet, and Slashdot have all fallen for it hook line and sinker.
=or=
B: Google's really going through with this...
My sister downloads 20GB of anime a month using these guys.
http://www.streamload.com
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
this is an april fools joke, falls right into the pigeon cluster one they did a few years back.
note the similarities of the writing on both pages.
Hopefully /. will do a better job this year with the April 1 article postings. Last years sucked, way to obvious.
When AltaVista started trying to be a portal, it was the beginning of the end.
RTFOPA (Read The F'in Official Press Release): "Storage: Google believes people should be able to hold onto their mail forever. That's why Gmail comes with 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of free storage - more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offer."
My point is this: If you're going to have 1GB of storage, and the idea is so that you never need to switch addresses, you better have a perfect spam-filtering system!
--<Mike>--
Damnit, that should be RTFOPR. I hate myself.
If they stopped caching pr0n, they'd have tons of server space to give out for email accounts.
... APRIL FOOL?
http://gmail.google.com/...Hrm...
BytesTemplar.com
At least it push hotmail to be a bit larger...
3MB is not enough for receiving 1 hr spamming...
; du -ms Mail
4260 Mail
And I junked my pre-1997 mail back in 1997.
I won't be impressed until they offer a googol bytes (1 with 100 zeroes). Otherwise it's false advertising.
I have a short one cbrown at (an EXCEPTIONALLY well known domain). Through some fluke, I NEVER gave that email address to anyone for use or posted it anywhere. I now get 300+ spams per day to it with ~15 per day getting through the spam filter. ALL phonebook spam. Granted, Google plans to do a better job of spam filtering, but that's yet to be seen.
About Gmail
As part of Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, we're testing an email service called Gmail.
Gmail is a free, search-based webmail service that includes 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of storage. The backbone of Gmail is a powerful Google search engine that quickly recalls any message an account owner has ever sent or received. That means there's no need to file messages in order to find them again.
When Gmail displays an email, it automatically shows all the replies to that email as well, so users can view a message in the context of a conversation. There are no pop-ups or banner ads in Gmail, which places relevant text ads and links to related web pages adjacent to email messages.
1. What makes Gmail different?
Gmail uses Google search technology to automatically organize and find messages. And because Gmail includes 1,000 megabytes of storage, a typical user won't ever have to worry about deleting mail. Everything just gets archived so it can be found again if needed.
There are other differences in the way Gmail provides access to your email. For example, Gmail automatically groups an email and the replies to it as a conversation. That means you always see a message in its proper context. And there are no pop-ups or banner ads in Gmail, just relevant text ads and links to related pages. Gmail's other distinctive features include a labeling system, a spam reporter and a system for filtering your mail as it comes into your inbox.
2. How much does Gmail cost?
Gmail is a free service and includes 1,000 megabytes of storage with each account. However, Gmail is still in preview mode as we test it to work out the kinks. So for now, it's not generally available.
3. How do I sign up? When can I get a Gmail account?
We're currently only offering Gmail as part of a preview release and limited test. We don't have details on when Gmail will be made more widely available, as that depends in part on the results of the test. If you're interested in receiving updates on Gmail, submit your email address using the form at the bottom of this page.
4. Is Gmail available in other languages?
During this testing period, the Gmail interface is only available in English. However, we're committed to making Gmail available to as many people in as many languages as possible. And Gmail accounts can already be used to read and send email in most languages (even Klingon).
5. What are Gmail's system requirements?
Gmail currently supports the following browsers:
* Microsoft IE 5.5 and newer (Windows)
* Netscape 7.1 and newer (Windows, Macintosh, Linux)
* Mozilla 1.4 and newer (Windows, Macintosh, Linux)
* Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and newer (Windows, Macintosh, Linux)
Regardless of the browser used, you must have JavaScript and cookies enabled. We hope to expand this list of supported browsers in the near future. To get updates on our progress with Gmail, add your email address using the form at the bottom of this page.
6. Does Gmail support automatic forwarding and POP3 access?
Not at the moment, but Google believes in helping people access information whenever and however they want to do so. Your email should never be held hostage by a service provider. In the future you will be able to access Gmail messages from non-Gmail accounts for free or at a nominal fee.
7. What about spam?
Google is committed to keeping unwanted messages out of your inbox. Gmail includes a sophisticated spam filter that we're continuing to improve. The Report Spam link in Gmail is a way for users to help with this effort. It removes spam from the inbox and sends valuable data to the Gmail team working on spam blocking.
8. Are there ads in Gmail?
There are no pop-ups or banner ads in Gmail. Gmail does include relevant text ads that are similar to the ads appearing on the right side of Google search results pa
[alk]
I think these two events probably best exemplify how perverted journalism has become.
If you print lies that official government sources give you, it absolves you of all responsability.
this isnt funny, like the pigeon thing. it sounds like it could be completely real, except for maybe the 1 GB per user part... i mean, if google developed a webmail service, it would probably be way better than yahoo, hotmail, etc. how is this an april fool's day joke?
So the mainstream press have fallen for it. Ha ha, it is to laugh. Problem is, when Google does eventually IPO, they're gonna be looking for favorable coverage from those same media outlets they made look like gooses. I wonder if the individuals in those media organizations will remember how Google made them look stoopid.
Not quite so clever. Also, Google News has picked up this story itself, linking to the mainstream stories that don't include the tip-offs that its a joke.
Thus it has become a self-replicating disinformation virus, quite disconnected from the original "joke" press-release.
Google: "You are all individuals."
Slashdot: "We are all individuals. Now, about a gig of email."
Google: "It's just a joke. April's Fools? It's April, you're fools."
Slashdot: "I do not think you have properly examined all the possible avenues for abuse--"
Google: "IT'S A JOKE. IT'S A FUCKING JOKE. DO YOU NOT HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR?"
Slashdot: "--where someone can use this tremendous amount of space for genera file storage in an attempt--"
Google: "Joke. Wokka wokka? Hey, look, SCO is threatening IP litigation!"
Slashdot: "--to,WHAT? Where? Quickly, man your posts..."
Someone asked if I had patched against MSBlast; I said yes, I installed Linux.
Post has been moderated properly. Thank you.
--shadowcabbit
And even better, Google will be able to search your email to find out about your habits, friends (what do you think the point of Orkut is?), and who you purchase from!
What a great thing! Now Google can target advertising to college students who have redeemed free Pepsi iTunes and shop at Amazon.com who live in medium sized cities!
What a revolution!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
My first question was why is google doing this? Then the answer came to me....money. I predict google will develop an anti-spam process by using this service as a testing ground. They could then sell this technology. With the google name behind it, people will pay attention!!!
This is all speculation but to me it seems reasonable.
Yes, obviously forwarding didn't necessitate extra copies, but it still was 40GB of information that had been uploaded and stored somewhere. Forwarding kept those files alive while uploading continued. For a brief time AOL groups were keeping track of files in their group inboxes and the arguments were about TB.
See AOL had broadband connectivity right around the same time as all this was going on so people could connect from college networks and do most of the uploading on those speedy T3's.
In fact, a lot of people were using AOL accounts to backup their home systems. This was back when hard drives were 2-4GB so it wasn't unthinkable that someone on a fast connection could back up their entire system segmented into their AOL mailbox.
Despite the fact that this "feature" had absolutely no legitamate business use (in fact, your AOL webspace was around 10MB total)...AOL continued to invest what must have been millions of dollars on this mail attachment system. It wasn't until they became the largest ISP in America that the gravy trade ended. Coincidence? Nah.
-JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Ok, if this is an Apr Fools joke from google.... I gotta say it's the best one ever.
[alk]
Looking at the Gmail site, you see the following Robots.txt file User-agent: * Disallow: / Also, none of the links work. Nope, its a hoax.
gmail.com has existed since 1995, but gmail.ca was only aquired today? hrm.
Look again. The "TM" is there now.
Now we can finally gets some use out of those "homing pigeons"!
... should link to /.
Would make for the perfect April Fool Joke =). Would be hilarious to see slashdot.. well.. slashdotted =).
There is a TM on gmail.com
There would be no such safeguards on consumer-grade data storage (business-grade data storage suffers from 'misplacement' even today). The electronic parts of your life (photos, music, thesis, novel, home movies, and so forth) will be in the hands of a company that can (a)run out of money; (b) have a change in Management (Caldera?); or (c) follow the whims of stockholders. Your life could suddenly be open to 'anonymous' market profiling. Other sorts of profiling as well. You could suddenly be confronted by a price increase that ransoms your data.
As much as I hate to say it, any company offering such an intangible yet essential service would need to be watched and/or regulated in some fashion.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Not that I don't agree with you that this is an April Fool's Day joke ^_^
suso.org already offers multi-GB of email storage for its users.
2000 - MentalPlex
http://www.google.com/mentalplex/
2002 - PigeonRank
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
[shrug] It sounds like a Google AF joke to me, but it seems like it'd be a bad idea for Google to mock free e-mail when it would be a good idea for Google to get into that (even if it wasn't a gig worth of space). If it's a joke, then it's almost like they're saying, "Haha, free e-mail. Riiiiiiiiight."
As far as bandwidth and space are concerned, think about it... they have 4 billion web pages cached. How big's a web page? 4 KB? Not even including images, that's a lot of hard drive space. And bandwidth goes without saying.
Of course, they probably want attention. They got it. But Google gets attention for pretty much anything.
I rarely use my hotmail address yet I have to clean it up everyday or I will hit my quota. I had to turn on their spam feature and set it to autodelete. Knowing spammers use brute force tactics it won't take them long to start filling up unused email accounts.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Woohoo, you hit the nail on the head!
Google waited for midnight GMT, the tricky global f*ckers!
Uhh ... there's a TM there.
Not that I think it makes it any less of a joke.
Sort of
Merry 01Apr04
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The idea that there could be a better way to handle email caught the attention of a Google engineer who thought it might be a good "20 percent time" project. (Google requires engineers to spend a day a week on projects that interest them, unrelated to their day jobs). Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born.
I hope the Google engineer got some help. Consuming millions of M&M - how fat could you get? How many trips to the dentist?
Is that John Markoff fell for it
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Seriously.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
On this page: About Gmail | Frequently asked questions | Interested in an account?
About Gmail
As part of Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, we're testing an email service called Gmail.
Gmail is a free, search-based webmail service that includes 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of storage. The backbone of Gmail is a powerful Google search engine that quickly recalls any message an account owner has ever sent or received. That means there's no need to file messages in order to find them again.
When Gmail displays an email, it automatically shows all the replies to that email as well, so users can view a message in the context of a conversation. There are no pop-ups or banner ads in Gmail, which places relevant text ads and links to related web pages adjacent to email messages.
Frequently asked questions
What makes Gmail different?
How much does Gmail cost?
How do I sign up? When can I get a Gmail account?
Is Gmail available in other languages?
What are Gmail's system requirements?
Does Gmail support automatic forwarding and POP3 access?
What about spam?
Are there ads in Gmail?
What is Gmail's privacy policy?
Why is Google offering email? I thought you were a search company.
1. What makes Gmail different?
Gmail uses Google search technology to automatically organize and find messages. And because Gmail includes 1,000 megabytes of storage, a typical user won't ever have to worry about deleting mail. Everything just gets archived so it can be found again if needed.
There are other differences in the way Gmail provides access to your email. For example, Gmail automatically groups an email and the replies to it as a conversation. That means you always see a message in its proper context. And there are no pop-ups or banner ads in Gmail, just relevant text ads and links to related pages. Gmail's other distinctive features include a labeling system, a spam reporter and a system for filtering your mail as it comes into your inbox.
2. How much does Gmail cost?
Gmail is a free service and includes 1,000 megabytes of storage with each account. However, Gmail is still in preview mode as we test it to work out the kinks. So for now, it's not generally available.
3. How do I sign up? When can I get a Gmail account?
We're currently only offering Gmail as part of a preview release and limited test. We don't have details on when Gmail will be made more widely available, as that depends in part on the results of the test. If you're interested in receiving updates on Gmail, submit your email address using the form at the bottom of this page.
4. Is Gmail available in other languages?
During this testing period, the Gmail interface is only available in English. However, we're committed to making Gmail available to as many people in as many languages as possible. And Gmail accounts can already be used to read and send email in most languages (even Klingon).
Did I say this was all I did? Hell no. This is a minor thing. We've talked about how we want to do it, gotten quotes, and are now ordering hardware. Of coure while with was going on we were still busy doing other things from setting up new systems to making sure the chip fab is working to the every day hand-holding.
Oh, and take a real quick guess as to what we are implementing as our new disk solution. Hint: It has three letters and rhymes with LAN.
Get off your high horse (and get an account, you high and might AC trolls are just dumb) and get a clue. That I mentioned that staff time is one of the costs of an enterprise storage upgrade (it is) does not imply that the staff spends all their time on it. However time I spend on that is time I do not spend rebuilding a system, configuring a sniffer to catch the latest virus, or explaining to a user for the 50th time why not to open an unknown attachment. It is not the major cost of the storage upgrade, but it IS a cost.
By the way, I'm the Windows guy mostly. However storage effects the Windows side too and I'm not such a one-sided tech guy that I also don't understand and work on the UNIX side as well. I simply mention our UNIX storage since it is the reliable part. The storage on the Windows servers is not as reliable. It's RAID 5, but not backed up. The UNIX storage is mapped on Windows domain accounts and users are instructed to use it for important storage.
This would be because our implementation is old, probably older than your company. Our univeristy got in on this shit a LONG time ago. We had a network (albeit a shitty one) when ethernet wasn't even a draft. It used to be UNIX or fuck off in terms of deparment provided systems. There is still a legacy there. We now have extensive Windows support (about 3:1 Windows:UNIX systems) but the reliable big iron remains the UNIX servers. We have, as of yet, not moved to a SAN. Being a university department and therefore of limited funds shapes this as well.
Oh, and it's not like the UNIX system in question just holds disks. It also runs several apps that are too heavy for our Sunblade or shell servers to handle. This isn't a little Ultra-5 with an array attached, it's the heavy duty mini-computer.
It wasn't there when the parent post were made. I specifically looked for it.
Do Slashdot subscribers get their April Fools content on March 31st?
Mailinator is your friend.
... like this? Nope, it's not a joke... shame it's only an obscure little project, because there are things to improve in the UI design... but... it IS really cool.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
yeah yeah yeah, OT, I know.
If you see this in the next half hour, (just after midnight Eastern time US), check out Cartoon Network - they're adding mustaches. Not sure how, but on still shots people get mustaches. Same on some motion, but it's hilarious to see- the mustache may stay still and the person move, or the mustache may move before the person does. Anyhow, happy fools day!
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
...is there anything like this client side? I've often thought about using a relational database backend to store my mail. I currently use MH for lots of e-mail, even after removing the spam, and it's a bear to find stuff sometimes, even with MH's folders.
From the CNET article:
"The way we'd like to say it is that part of our mission is to organize and present all the world's information, and e-mail's part of that information that currently is not well organized. That is the rubric under which we offer this."
Who needs domain keys when you don't traverse domains?
Why waste CPU cycles?
Shit, if the Blu-Ray DVD technology can really put 23.3 - 100 GB of info on a DVD RW, storage space won't mean shit in 6 -9 months. Google can archive every damn thing in the universe.
What's cool is we get a chance to cybersquat again!
Stuff that matters.
I dunno but www.gmail.com is owned by google.
GMAIL.COM
Registrant:
Google Inc. (DOM-425410)
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View CA 94043 US
Domain Name: gmail.com
Registrar Name: Alldomains.com
Registrar Whois: whois.alldomains.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.alldomains.com
Administrative Contact:
DNS Admin (NIC-1467103) Google Inc.
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View CA 94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
DNS Admin (NIC-1467103) Google Inc.
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View CA 94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571
Created on..............: 1995-Aug-13.
Expires on..............: 2006-Aug-12.
Record last updated on..: 2004-Mar-31 16:50:22.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.32.10
NS2.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.34.10
NS3.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.36.10
NS4.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.38.10
Pigeonrank (2002)
Mentalplex (2000)
The shareholder is always right.
Why dose anyone trust April 1 announcments anymore?
This has GOT to be a joke. Unless Google has discovered some fantastic storage technology such as storing data in subspace this isn't going to be practical.
I don't actually exist.
Not AOL, but Usenet.
Many (If not all) Usenet providers have a size limit on messages (even if it is a binary) and not all pieces get through to begin with, so files become a web of pieces.
A bunch of Messages make up a rar.
A bunch of rars make up a file.
And if you are missing any, pars and par2s replace what you are missing.
It definitely wasn't there before. Maybe someone at google reads slashdot.
See, the way this works is you first change your email address to a google address, and then...
oh.
is USA today has already posted this joke as fact. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-03-31-googl e_x.htm
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
I saw it in on the default Safaari Apple homepage as a primary link!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is 1 GB "enough for anybody"?
See subject.
I thought the government already logged every email anyway. So who cares if Google has it too?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People tend to use thoose spaces as file servers. P2P and FTP is old download my new DivX movies from my GMail! Hopefully this wont slow down Google as a search page.
They already have "industry analysts" (the guys in the next cubicle) quoted
Well, it's already +5, but everybody who thinks this is a prank should read the MSNBC story ....
there is no such thing as bad press
;-)
or: "mock free e-mail when it would be a good idea for Google to get into that"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm also not sure if this is real or what (at least anymore - I thought it was real for sure when I first read it on a news site). But it does seem like the perfect way to take the wind out of Microsoft's FUD machine trying to soften up the Google IPO.
This announcement makes it look like Google is gunning for Microsoft...
And one last thing that makes it brilliant and I think real is the context ads based on email content. My girlfriend was a little freaked out by that but google could do really well with context ads from email, though I hate to see what those look like when you get some of the juicier spam - sort of a spam-enhancer effect if you will to make the spam even more obnoxious.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I will join you, good sir!
(april fools)
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
I didn't have aol very much but a lot of people I knew did and I had heard about the rampant warez trading. I remember once being at a friend's house who had AOL and I wanted to mess around with it, we joined a couple of chat rooms and stuff, and I was like, I wonder if there's a huge private chatroom called "warez"? So I typed in warez and tried to join a chat, and was in the room for all of 2 seconds before I was kicked out of the room and the computer disconnected. When my friend went to reconnect it wouldn't let him, and it cited TOS violations as the reason. He had no idea what warez meant, but he thought it was hilarious that I got him locked out of his AOL account for abusing the system within seconds by typing a single word.
Well, I'm not sure about them picking this name. Searching 'gmail' in Google shows up one project from 'sourforge', 'debian' and one from 'gnome' too. So is it going to be gooMail ?
Oh, come on. What are the odds?
Check out http://gmail.google.com/
there's no date there, and here on the west coast, it's not the first yet... just some food for thought. ( the help like has some pretty detailed info, while the 1GB seems extreme, the rest is pretty reasonable/ sounds like google )
Vaporware. P (it's the kind of April Fool's joke that pops up year-round)
Yeah, but that's a separate limit -- what you'll usually see with a large archive on Usenet is several .rar segments, with each of those segments, in turn, split across several articles.
.rar segments, and this really might explain it. I'd wondered about it myself.
The 15MB size really is common for those
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I'm pretty sure this is a joke (the PR's a giveaway). But I also wouldn't be surprised if Google are releasing something related to email shortly at local.google.com. This would make sense given their recent release of email-based information services such as the Web Alerts (a poorer cousin of Google Alert) which followed their previous News Alerts. Maybe a central location for managing Google-based email notifications?
It would be more interesting if googlecache cached your emails ;) Wives checking husbands checking mistresses...
fun fun fun
In fact you can still get yEnc encoded binaries from Google Groups. I'm sure they'll start discarding them eventually but if you made an encoding that isn't used much those messages would stay permanently.
Lol I love april fools day. For a list of other sites pulling april fools jokes check out:
http://www.urgo.org/aprilfools.html
Heres the list so far:
www.urgo.org
mrtwig.net
southparkx.net
www.suprnova.org
www.cowsponge.com
Google
Belive in Technology and AMAZE yourself. -- RIP ZDTV/TechTV
The sign-up if you're interested form/button doesn't work.
Digging a bit further on the website, it seems they also have a pretty serious-looking Terms of Use page dated March 31st (bottom of page)
I don't think this is a joke. The questions we have gotten from them leads me to believe that this is NOT an april fools day joke, but does explain some of the PO's we have gotten lately... I could be wrong, but hey, I'm just an AC.
CNN bought into it!
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Google just posted this (http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html) on the search page, which looks to be the REAL April Fool's joke --- which may mean Gmail is for real??
I don't think this is a joke, I think they just picked a bad day to release the information. If it is a joke, they sure are going a long way with it. The email submission form on the bottom doesn't seem to be working for me, though. Also, normal email users will never get anywhere near that 1GB quota.
An excellent looking Job Oppurtunity!
a while back - one day they started really getting freeform - all the djs had pseudonyms, they brough in all their own music, played whatever they wanted. Were taking requests for (and actually playing) some really random stuff.
...Until the transition to the new owners took effect and it changed to "Smooth Jazz." :'(
This went on for several days - everyone really loved it.
We seem to have slashdotted google. Im getting wierd errors whenever I try to search for anything. Check it out for yourself. http://www.google.com
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
Check out gmail.google.com now. There is a FAQ, and even a signup so they will send you email about new updates. Either real or more elaborate joke than before.
For those of you that haven't seen it... So I'm inclined to subscribe to the "taking you all for a ride" theorem. Ryan
View source on the main gmail page, and you'll find:
;)
<!-- There is no secret html on this page -->
But isn't that itself secret HTML?
John C. Worsley - Artist, Musician, Coder
Portfolio
Check this out right now!
http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html
As we're in a testing period, we don't have more details for when Gmail will be made widely available, but we thank you for your interest in Gmail. In the meantime, if you'd like to be updated about Gmail, feel free to submit your email address below. We will only use your email to send you more information about Gmail. It will not be shared with any third parties.
I guess they're asking people (suckers?) to prove that they fell for the joke! If you sign up, I'm sure all you'll get is a big "April Fool's Joke" kinds email.
Well using the only e-mail address I could find on the site I e-mailed google to ask them if it was an April fools joke. So far this is all I got back:
Hello,
Thank you for your feedback. Gmail uses completely automated
technology to give you search in your inbox, highly relevant ads, and
other useful information. Your comments will help us make improvements
to our email service and policies as Gmail evolves over the next
several months from a limited testing period to wider availability.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
They must have caught that too, because there is a TM now, and a privacy policy, FAQ and email interest list.
If this is an april fools joke, it's by far the most extensive one I have ever seen.
Their news site (which is computer generated without human input) already shows 120+ news sites with the announcement of gmail.
google also has a very believable FAQ and Privacy Policy.
I for one think this is a hoax, but I hope it's not. I'd sign up in a heartbeat.
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
I did the obvious, and checked the source of the gmail.com page, looking for odd bits. Try it yourself, and see if there's anything about the source page that looks...suspicious. (I won't say what, because I strongly suspect the google-eyed bastards are using /. to beta-test the joke. People keep finding flaws and then the flaws "disappear". Hmmm. Check it out.)
The Real Joy of Mail comes when you are free from Advertisments in the content. These sometimes occupy 1/3rd of the Content of the mail and that really irritates the users. Had come across this Myrealbox from Novell. Highly customizable and Free Pop3 SMTP and No Ads in the Content Email service. (It is a testbed of Novell Netmail) and have really enjoyed using it. How is Google Going to use Advertisements in the Content of the Email ( mind not the Email Web Interface). This could really be a catch area to differentiate from the other Web Based Email Providers.
Senthil
This year's Google April Fools Day joke is at
:D
http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html
Doesn't preclude them from doing two, though.
I know this is probably already too late in the huge pile of bullshitted comment, but this is real and not a hoax. I have a buddy at Google that told me so.
Intersting Terms and Conditions from the gmail.com info page:
Gmail Program Policies
To uphold the quality and reputation of Google Gmail, your use of Gmail is subject to these program policies. If you are found to be in violation of our policies at any time, as determined by Google in its sole discretion, we may warn you or suspend or terminate your account.
Please note that we may change our policies at any time, and pursuant to our Terms of Use, it is your responsibility to keep up-to-date with and adhere to the policies posted here.
Prohibited Actions
In addition to (and/or as some examples of) the violations described in Section 3 of the Terms of Use, users may not:
Generate or facilitate unsolicited commercial email ("spam"). Such activity includes, but is not limited to
sending email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act or any other applicable anti-spam law
imitating or impersonating another person or his, her or its email address, or creating false accounts for the purpose of sending spam
data mining any web property (including Google) to find email addresses
sending unauthorized mail via open, third-party servers
sending emails to users who have requested to be removed from a mailing list
selling, exchanging or distributing to a third party the email addresses of any person without such person's knowing and continued consent to such disclosure
sending unsolicited emails to significant numbers of email addresses belonging to individuals and/or entities with whom you have no preexisting relationship
Send, upload, distribute or disseminate or offer to do the same with respect to any unlawful, defamatory, harassing, abusive, fraudulent, infringing, obscene, or otherwise objectionable content
Intentionally distribute viruses, worms, defects, Trojan horses, corrupted files, hoaxes, or any other items of a destructive or deceptive nature
Conduct or forward pyramid schemes and the like
Transmit content that may be harmful to minors
Impersonate another person (via the use of an email address or otherwise) or otherwise misrepresent yourself or the source of any email
Illegally transmit another's intellectual property or other proprietary information without such owner's or licensor's permission
Use Gmail to violate the legal rights (such as rights of privacy and publicity) of others
Promote or encourage illegal activity
Interfere with other Gmail users' enjoyment of the Service
Create multiple user accounts or create user accounts by automated means or under false or fraudulent pretenses
Modify, adapt, translate, or reverse engineer any portion of the Gmail Service
Remove any copyright, trademark or other proprietary rights notices contained in or on the Gmail Service
Reformat or frame any portion of the web pages that are part of the Gmail Service
Use the Gmail Service in connection with illegal peer-to-peer file sharing
Security
You must promptly notify Google of any breach of security related to the Services, including but not limited to unauthorized use of your password or account. To help ensure the security of your password or account, please sign out from your account at the end of each session.
Account Inactivity
Google will terminate your account in accordance with Section 9 of the Terms of Use if you fail to login to your account for a period of nine months
I think Gmail might be real. Because this is clearly Google's joke for today:
http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html
Heh. "Massively parallel lava lamps".
"Don't bother me with that pocket calculator stuff" - Deep Thought
Not bad for an April Fools.
I'm just wondering why none of you guys have pointed out gmail.google.com yet... that's the best part of it!
Use Google search to find the exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received.
1000 megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.
Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation.
You see only relevant text ads and links to related web pages of interest.
Here's a tool for converting sizes using decimal as well as binary prefixes.
google's april fool's Joke
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
host -a gmail.co.fr
Trying "gmail.co.fr"
Host gmail.co.fr not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
Received 77 bytes from 206.13.28.12#53 in 24 ms
Notice anything here?
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
"gmail" is a dead trademark (service mark, specifically), according to the US Patent & Trademark office. It was registered in 1999 to a guy named Milo Cripps, but it was abandoned the next year. Google has not registered it (as opposed to, say, "Froogle").
It seems that AP has fallen for it as a legitimate article: http://apnews.myway.com//article/20040401/D81LNO2O 0.html
I have proof! Check out their newly posted place-hodler page. If you look at the source, the content-type is set to... are you ready for this...
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=windows-1252>
What gives!?!!??! windows-1252? What about UTF-8?
Oh, and if you belive this, you'll belive this whole joke anyway.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
They have a detailed FAQ about it, registered gmail.google.com and even international domains like www.gmail.se (even if it's not even mentioned by Google officially yet), professional terms of use documents, etc. The news about Gmail is also said to have been published by Cnet back in March.
They might have used this special date to gain extra PR from the confusion about it, however I doubt it's a joke.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'd be very interested in capturing all the names of posters who declare this a joke, and then later reviewing the list on 4/2.
Same goes for the people who declare it is real. Sure why not! Although, this list would seem to be shorter.
They have registered international domain names like this too, like gmail.se. Just checked. :)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
For example, searching for "Go Elsewhere" gives you a page 10 links plus links to at least 10 more pages trying to get you to go elsewhere (btw, the fact that hell.com is the first link kind of makes me laugh).
As you said in the first paragraph of that sentence, Yahoo wants to keep you there.
cheers.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
isn't it april fool?
Now, if she has a number of chins 4, that would be a miracle.
paintball
Wouldn't it be interesting if they kept only 1 copy of words or even phrases, then as emails came in they were encoded, and hence compressed once.
(Like if they kept spam, only 1 need be saved, and just re-served to everyone that received it, DB style.)
When a user goes to read the email, it's reconstructed on the fly. Compression possibly better than one would expect. Especially since there's only so large a set of words we use in our everyday communication, 1GB of generated email could be stored in something much less, for almost everyone using the system. Uber-consolidation.
Somehow I don't believe they're going about this the traditional way of just throwing storage at it. Seems too inefficient.
-- Robi
The discussion of potential abuse for warez, etc. is sure to be a useless waste of energy. Google would have considered all these things well in advance. They understand the gravity of what they have proposed and they're fully aware that monumental schemes invite vandals of all kinds. So, leave the worrying to google. Sign up, read your e-mail at liesure, don't discuss any secure matters over public channels, and pray that more companies pick up on google's beautiful vision - that a company doesn't have to be evil to be successful.
... would be something like saying April 1st has been removed from the calendar to avoid the timewasting due to pranks. Or maybe pretending there has been a tradition of playing practical jokes on this date. We've all been taken in by that one...
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
No, actually warez of this era used 1.4MB floppy-sized pieces. AOL'ers would repack multiple pieces into AOL-sized 15MB attachements. It was a tad sloppy, since the original releases were often ZIP files that had been RAR'd, so you would sometimes need to unarchive three or four levels just to get the original release.
Group releases were divided into 1.4MB floppy sized pieces probably because every archival program could make floppy-sized pieces. It was a convenient way to disassemble a large program and then reassemble it on the other end. Also, if there was a bad bit, you only had to download one small piece not the whole program.
As things grew, some groups moved to 2.88MB sized pieces, I suppose in honor of the IBM format nobody used...but with CD-ROM game images (not just rips) and movies becoming popular, it became clear this wasn't enough of a bump. So 15MB became the standard. An now, we enter the DVD era and so we move to 50MB pieces. These sizes are small enough that it's not an enormous burden to redownload one, but large enough that the total number of pieces is under 100.
Incidentally, they aren't really 15MB or 50MB...it's 15000000 or 50000000 bytes...which is actually 14.3MB or 47MB...but well...no one wants to have to remember the actual number when they are typing it into RAR.
-JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
What about the Bill Gates memo.
Yahoo story. Could this be real?
Its dated Mar31 but even Billy isn't dumb enough to send out a security memo about
getting rid of lying in spam, etc on the eve of April Fools Day.
Here's the mail I got:
X-Apparently-To: XXX@yahoo.com via 216.136.173.86; Wed, 31 Mar 2004 21:52:23 -0800
Return-Path:
Received: from 207.46.248.40 (EHLO delivery2.pens.phx.gbl) (207.46.248.40) by mta193.mail.dcn.yahoo.com with SMTP; Wed, 31 Mar 2004 21:52:22 -0800
Received: from TK2MSFTDDSQ03 ([10.40.1.67]) by delivery2.pens.phx.gbl with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.0); Wed, 31 Mar 2004 21:52:20 -0800
Reply-to: "Bill Gates"
From: "Bill Gates" Add to Address Book
To: djmcke@yahoo.com
Subject: Microsoft Progress Report: Security
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 21:52:20 -0800
Message-ID:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-Mailer: Microsoft CDO for Windows 2000
Thread-Index: AcQXrX9dhe8nXbw3RNmXh0O5AoIFsQ==
Content-Class: urn:content-classes:message
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4910.0300
Return-Path: billgates@chairman.microsoft.com
X-OriginalArriva lTime: 01 Apr 2004 05:52:20.0838 (UTC) FILETIME=[7F752060:01C417AD]
Content-Length: 10294
Malicious software code has been around for decades. But only in the last few years have the
Internet, high-speed connections and millions of new computing devices converged to create a truly
global computing network in which a virus or worm can circle the world in a matter of minutes.
Meanwhile, criminal hackers have become more sophisticated, creating and distributing digital
epidemics like Slammer, Blaster, Sobig and Mydoom that spread almost instantaneously, threatening the
potential of technology to advance business productivity, commerce and communication.
The kinds of threats are evolving too. Blaster, for example, hijacked individual computers,
turning innocent users into unknowing and innocent worm propagators. These kinds of attacks - "swarming"
attacks that are coordinated to cause multiplied, cascading effects - change the landscape of
security threats. They put new demands on IT professionals and consumers to take preventative
measures, and on the technology industry to continue to innovate and develop new solutions.
While there are considerable challenges ahead, Microsoft and our industry are making significant
progress on the security front. I'd like to share some insights in this email, which is one in an
occasional series of emails from Microsoft executives about technology and public-policy issues
important to computer users, our industry, and anyone who cares about the future of high technology.
If you would like to receive these emails in the future, please go to
http://register.microsoft.com/subscription/sub scri beMe.asp?lcid=1033&id=155 to subscribe. We will
not send you future executive emails unless you choose to subscribe.
As a major focus of Microsoft's R&D efforts, we're making significant investments in four areas of
security:
- Isolation and Resiliency
- Updating
- Quality
- Authentication and Access Control
Additionally, we are committed to major investments in customer education and partnerships that
will help make the computing environment safer and more secure.
Given human nature, evolving threat models and the increasing interconnectedness of computers, the
number of security exploits will never reach zero. But we can dramatically blunt the impact of
cybercriminals, and are dedicating a major portion of our R&D investments to security advances.
ISOLATION AND RESILIENCY
Central to our security ef
Looks a calendar just after hitting "register interest" button.
Hell, even if they were only to provide 10MB of space, a non ad-supported web based mail service would be really nice.
Surely they wouldn't call it something as cryptic as "Gmail". It would be more alont the lines of "Moogle" (which is a cool name by all acounts!)
You fool! You've given cheese to a lactose intolerant volcano god! Do you know what that means?
Just ask :)
"Google welcomes feedback on this document and policy as the Gmail service is currently in an early testing stage. As Gmail evolves over the next several months, we expect to incorporate improvements in response to community feedback. Send comments to gmail-feedback@google.com."
-mobilebadboy, who's login attempts continually get refused
I held out hope until I saw this... http://www.usegmail.com/ if you need me I will be in the corner crying.
Full Story: http://www.personalvacationplanner.com/techcorner/ 0403gmail_slashdot.html
It looks like AP Business Writer Michael Liedtke and Rachel Konrad gave Google the best possible publicity for their upcoming free email service.
News results for "april fool" google - View all the latest headlines
Google's Gmail To Offer 1GB E-mail Storage? - Slashdot
Forget that. What's funnier still is that they actually placed an ad for the lunar job in the adsense ads panel on the right! lol
They have added "Privacy Policy - Program Policies - Terms of Use" at the bottom of the pages with detailed information and a method to contact them to give suggestions. I very well doubt this is a prank, if it is I will eat Gmail's terms of service.
There is a possibility of multiple April Fool's jokes, with the google lunar job opening along with gmail.
First off, GMail from another company exists, although in a different context. http://www.usegmail.com So whether Gmail from google is real or not, if I owned usegmail.com I would be smiling right now at the possibility of a brand confusion LAWSUIT over this fake/real service.
Secondly, check the wording -- which I've quoted verbatim -- from the about page from google's gmail site.
"4. Is Gmail available in other languages?
During this testing period, the Gmail interface is only available in English. However, we're committed to making Gmail available to as many people in as many languages as possible. And Gmail accounts can already be used to read and send email in most languages (even Klingon)."
Riiiight. Klingon. If that's not a goofy tone for a professional service, then I don't know what is. Either this is a REALLY UNFUNNY April Fool's Joke or, if it is legit -- it will go down in history as the web's most successful META-APRIL FOOL'S joke capitalising on the timing.
Perhaps Google knew that Slashdot would get wind of this, and some of the geniuses that parade here would offer their 2 cents. That way they get public opinion for free, and more likely than not have things pointed out that their team didn't think off... /. admins check your logs for internal google.com addresses reading these comments!
About 2 years ago i found a site which offered episode downloads. You ran a java application on the command prompt, it would connect up to a server and list available episodes. Select an episode and it would show the last time it was downloaded &/or checked to be complete. Any corrupted or missing parts could be automatically reuploaded by anybody who downloaded it. the actual files were downloaded from a free webspace provider with only a meg or so stored in each account and files were split into hundreds of pieces. I believe the info file was encrypted and it held the username and password to each account. it was completely automatic and worked great... until of course the provider went broke.. damn eh.
Not true. The SEC does have some sort of jurisdiction (sorry, not an investment broker) over companies that are in the process of becoming public. There is a lead-up phase to going publically traded where certain behavior is not allowed, like doing certain types of press releases.
I have no idea whether this is an April Fool's Day joke or not. Slashdot *did* post this on March 31rd, so if it is an April Fool's Day joke, it wasn't scheduled very well.
It's also fairly financially feasible to have 1GB email accounts (something that used to drive me *nuts* with the IT people at the company I used to work for -- why do these people insist on 100MB email quotas?) 1GB is what, about 30 cents of storage in terms of physical media costs? Can't be *too* hard to make back in terms of marketing data that you can make on each person in the system, what their interests are, who they interact with, how trends spread, etc. You figure that Google is going to go for a cheap system, that access time and bandwidth doesn't need to be especially high, that they can compress spam very efficiently (any similarity between letters in multiple boxes gets ironed out) and the fact that most people aren't going to be using a full GB, and I'd say that this could certainly be done.
May we never see th
... you insensitive (and humorless) clods!
At least the moderators do. +5 funny.
Google Copernicus Center is hiring
After thinking about this all day, I have come to the conclusion that Google is introducing Gmail (i.e. it is not a joke). However, I am also convinced that the timing and style of the announcement was specifically designed to maximise discussion. Very clever!
Anyone else waiting for the big news corps covering google's entertainment magazine - G-Spot?
Reasoning: It's too damn good an idea to waste on a joke.
Is there anyone here who wouldn't switch to being whoever@gmail.com? A clean interface, non-intrusive adds, nigh unlimited storage, from a brand you trust.
Their ad system would read my mail? That's fine by me. Free webmail accounts are hardly secure now, are they? Encrypt if you need privacy.
If it's still there tomorrow we'll know.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
(n/t) stands for no text.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
'course, I used Google... http://www.urbanlegends.com/misc/april_fools_day_o rigin_of.html
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/aprilfools1.html?li nk=tmplnav
With one GB of free network accessible storage, it would actually be useful to be able to access it as a file system. Either as module directly in the kernel, as a nfs-on-gmail user space server, or as one of the virtual file systems supported by the gnome / kde / emacs file system abstraction layer.
I guess we will see all three (or five) of those.
Google News (UK) does not have the news item in the full list of "sci-tech" news...
Suspicious?
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
-1 Wrong.
It does have a TM - like all the all the others. Just because it's small - it doesn't mean it isn't there!
At least they bothered to put a subject in. What really pisses me off is those fucking morons (i.e. most of my coworkers) who can't even be bothered to put any subject line in. Excluding spam, I get 200+ emails a day in my work inbox. Of which about 10-15 needs immediate attention, 40-50 need some action and the rest are just FYI type. No subject line means I have to go into every mail and read the damn thing so waste loads of time reading FYI mails.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
It'll say a lot about the gullibility of the news media if this is indeed a joke...
Heise (of c't fame) have twice verified with Google people that they're serious about this. If this is still a joke, it's a bad one.
1st april, which means it is....
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Every thing is ok.u can find the news in AP ,eWEEK,and lots of others website but it could be a real great joke by google.
just imagine 1GB for each account.a relly great number,u can start 10 account and have 10GB on the web for free.wouldn't it make bandwidth problem for our Dear Google?
we will be sure till tomorrow :D.
Looks like gmail is really really real. Here's a blurb from msnbc:
Google spokesman David Krane, reached Wednesday night, admitted that the "color and personality" of the press release -- which is dated "April 1 UTC" and includes phrases such as "millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born" -- "was indeed in the spirit of April 1" but said that Gmail was a serious product.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
Looks like This is their April fools joke.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Well, if anyone wants a chuckle, on the cnn web site this is written up as a real article. CNN Article
Because J.K. Rowling would sue them for trademark confusion with "muggle"?
And because somebody already owns it (and every other [a-z]oogle domain).
In other news, I notice the domain G-MAIL.COM is up for sale.
Somebody stands to make a lot of money soonish....
---- scrm
According to slashdot users I'm funny, insightful, and interesting! So why arn't girls all over me?
:)
Because you are so damn informative. Girls hate know-it-alls.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
Who says they're going to do backups??
Would Google be able to copyright the name Gmail? Looking at this search on dogpile.com we see that there are already freshmeat/sourceforge projects and products out there named "Gmail". Seems like they have been around a lot longer than Google's newly announced service.
Also, Alexa has a snapshot of what Gmail.com recently looked like.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Does anybody know how they can achive the $2 per gigabyte rate ? Looked at SCSI prices; that's out of the question. Are they using IDE drives ? If so I assume that they're under RAID; looking at the cheapest per byte drives they could have 4 200G ones in one chassis. That's 600G usable for about $500 just for the drives. Throw in at least another 500 for the rest of the box. Then I was thinking it through a little more: let's say the avarage user takes up 100Megs; so 6000 users to a box. Even at 60 million users that is 10k boxes. And what happens if a box gets a few power users; how do you move gigs of mailboxes between servers ?
Are they using some other technology ? Maybe big central storages ?
Who did what now?
talk about a profiler's goldmine. don't tell me any of you believe google (a for-profit company) wouldn't scan every last email for "marketing" reasons?
Fine; so I'll use them for all my technical email lists and so forth, I get the awesome searching power (instead of the crappy or non-existant archive searches that email lists usually have).
If they want to give me free stuff, I'll just use it how I see fit. Sounds good to me :)
Look at all of the email that is duplicated, especially spam and mailing lists. Store one copy, hash it to a unique key somehow, and only store the key in the user's mail directory.
This same technology could be used to detect and eliminate spam -- even if spammers randomly generate bits of the message. The report spam button will generate a case history of spam patterns and deal with it. Idiots, of course, report spam falsely, so a reputation index can be learned through past behavior to weight the legitimacy of the reports and to minimize abuse.
I think it's real. Let's see. I'm going to be co-workers real money it's real, so it better be!
Was to see how many Slashdotter's they could get to post about the "lunar job".
uummmm... April fools?
Google is recruiting engineers for a research facility called GCHEESE due to open on the moon in 2007, according to the company's recruitment pages. Surely they wouldn't run TWO April Fools in one year?
Apparently, todays's prank is here:
"Google Copernicus Center is hiring"
(research center on the moon, oxygen provided with Huge Lava Lamps...)
It may be true after all...
Those guies are great!!
Apparently, todays's prank is here:
"Google Copernicus Center is hiring"
(research center on the moon, oxygen provided with Huge Lava Lamps...)
It may be true after all...
Those guies are great!!
From the privacy policy
We serve highly relevant ads and other information as part of the service using our unique content-targeting technology. No human reads your email to target ads or related information to you without your consent.
Pretty clever... At least we know how they will fund the service :-)
Here ;-)
This is not my opinion. Actually, it's not even an opinion. And I'm nowhere to be seen near it
>1GB looks very much like a joke but google can make it (gmail) real
Definately, google has disk storage out the wazoo. The question is, what will be attachment size maximums and how will they throttle download/upload speeds to avoid people treating it like an FTP depository?
1 gig of storage isn't so hot when attachment sizes are small. Google obviously is betting that 90% of their users wont even come near 1 gig of storage, or it will take them years to do so with regular everyday email.
Odd thing is that CNN is running this story too...Then again, they ARE using Google's site search engine...
e .email.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/31/googl
Never look down your nose at others. Someday, someone is bound to see your boogers.
I remember being pleased as punch to get a free Bigfoot address, "for life" they said. Oh yes, then a year or two down the line suddenly you had to agree to receive all sorts of spam in order to continue using it, or pay a fee. After that U turn I registered my own domain and told them to go hang. That was just forwarding. As for 1 GB free storage, I really can't see that being sustainable.
~CGameProgrammer( );
Is that Slashdot's moderation policy?
Google might start compressing text files on the fly. They certainly have the computing firepower, with their linux Beowolf clusters and stuff.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
LINK
Piece of cake -- incorporate that into the Google toolbar that everyone has already downloaded. (unless Yahoo's toolbar has a pending patent on the concept, in which case you're on your own)
<crocodile-dundee>
That's not Google's April Fool's joke.
This is Google's April Fool's joke!
</crocodile-dundee>
Et cetera.
I think that should dismiss speculation about whether the mail story is real :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Sorry, hadn't noticed that Ulky had this news six hours ago.
Securities law requires private companies that exceed a certain level of stock distribution to file quarterly financial data with federal regulators. If the law is applied to Google, company executives would have to disclose the company's closely guarded financial information. If your already doing that then you might as well go IPO. Microsoft had a similar experience.
More information here
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
"It's not a joke, because this is [insert link to lunar job page here]!" So what? They can't possibly do TWO things? And the fact that they registered gmail.se, and probably a whole lot of other gmail domains, doesn't say a thing to me. I would too if I were to do something like this. They probably don't want gmail domains to lead to porn sites or other companies.
Also, the press release states, and I quote, "That's why Gmail comes with 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of free storage - more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offer". Sure, that statement is correct, but it's also more than 500 times more than Hotmail, and companies usually state the biggest difference between them and the "other guys". Things like this makes me feel like it's just a hoax. I promise I won't be sad or angry if I'm proven wrong though.
Oh, and a final note, something that's published on major news sites and/or printed in major news papers doesn't have to be true. It has happened before, it WILL happen again.
Remember ? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/19/201521 3&tid=
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
Why cant we have email address portability like the way we (barely) have portability for cell phone numbers?
I think it is a prime opportunity for the government to interfere and open up the market!
Last night I was amused by the thought of some manager at Yahoo crapping their pants as they realize that they have no business model anymore, since their whole thing is to provide a small mailbox, shitty spam blocking (no whitelist even), and no forwarding or POP3, but have better services in all areas if you cough up. This morning I log in and see that they're trying to compete:
Don't wait! For a limited time, you can upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus and get more - for less. Learn more
Too little, too late. Unless Gmail is an April fools joke...
Permanent target for spammers ...
Note that Rob Pike of Plan 9 fame works for Google these days. The Plan 9 folks have Venti file server (use Google...), which only stores each unique data block once, and then checks all later writes for identical blocks. Identical blocks are only stored as pointers to existing blocks. This way an April fools email circulated for a million times perhaps in a dozen variations would propbably consume "12 * message_size bytes + some per user minimal overhead" on the whole Gmail system, even if all users would receive it and keep it forever.
This is only one very general idea for compressing. I can think of many reasons, why a specialized application like email could benefit from related statistical pecularities in implementing its own super-compression.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
Apple gets the hardware bid. Of course, the next article is "Steve Jobs To Sell All His Stock", so let the reader beware.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
Is it a bad sign when the really good ideas are hoaxes?
To those suggesting that they should have called it Moogle:
Registrant
Domain Deluxe
GPO 7628
Central,
HK
Registrar..: IARegistry.com (http://www.iaregistry.com)
MOOGLE.COM
Created on..............: 05-May-2001
Expires on..............: 05-May-2004
Administrative Contact:
Deluxe, Domain sales1@domaindeluxe.com
Domain Deluxe
GPO 7628
Central, HK
+852.9102.8527
Technical Contact:
Deluxe, Domain sales1@domaindeluxe.com
Domain Deluxe
GPO 7628
Central, HK
+852.9102.8527
Name servers for this domain:
NS1.BLACKCAB.COM 64.40.99.7
NS2.BLACKCAB.COM 64.40.102.7
1. will require one time registration for whitelisting all correspondents for an accountholder - i.e. joe emails you, google e-mails joe asking him to answer a random question like 'what color is the sky without clouds on earth when the sun is up' - joe emails back 'blue' - proving he's not a spammer - joe is whitelisted as a goodguy
2. non-goodguy addresses don't get through
3. traffic in/out of account will be quotaed by bandwidth so that porn and warez look for easier targets - i.e. no more than 5 incoming/outgoing emails RECIPIENTS per minute.
4. BCC and CC will affect bandwidth meter in #4 above
Google mail - It's real, and it's a direct response to MS getting into the search business
Is this an April Fool's Joke or for real? Larry2161941
Google's Free E-Mail: Real Or April Fool's Prank?
I remember in 1997 when I was cracking passwords on aol. I forgot what the name of the password cracker was though, does anyone else remember? I had Bellatlantic(switched from aol since it was cheaper) and the password cracker used either a ppp connect or tcp/ip connection to try passwords. Does anyone know the name of this program? I cannot remember it.
Even in 1996-1997 when I used aol, there was still alot of warez to be had. Is there still alot of warez on aol?
I have 3 gigs with my hosting plan, and I can create mailboxes to fill that space, and includes webmail. I have 90 gigs on my computer, and can archive my emails. I have grep to search through said archive for patterns. I have a CD burner, and therefore have unlimited backup for my email. Oh, and my hosting plan includes spamassassin and I use Apple's Mail, which together have caused one false positive in a year of using this combination, with probably a million disgusting spams kept from my sight.
Remind me again, why do I need 1GB of space that puts my personal correspondence in the hands of a corporation, subject to archival and advertising?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
See here: http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/01/technology/google_ email/index.htm?cnn=yes
Google themselves said that while the press release was in the in the "spirit of April Fool's" the annoucment is legitimate.
I've swung to and fro all morning on whether this was an April Fools joke or not, and I'm firmly of the opinion that it is NOT. The news was specifically designed to be released on April 1st to garner the extra attention of "is it or isn't it?". Sure looks like its worked to me!
gmail
They say: 1GB of storage They mean: Don't worry about stupid space limits (a la Hotmail) Companies do this sort of thing all the time. They offer a hugh amount of something knowing that almost no one will actually use that much.
One bad monkey spoils the whole barrel.
I think the REAL joke here is making a real annoucement on April 1st and having all these people thinking it is a joke.
It is not a joke because it would be a damn lame one. The only "funny" thing in it would be the 1GB limit. Hahaha. Most users wouldn't get to that anyway. It would be as if they are saying "Free email, how ridiculous is that?!?" or "1GB, did you really believe we were THAT good?!?"
They store a lot of stuff for the web already, and if they are serious about it they can make the 1GB limit thing (especially if you think in the long term).
Apparently, this is not an April Fools joke, although
l e_ email/index.htm?cnn=yes
http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/01/technology/goog
Quoting:
" But Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of the products group at Google, said the Gmail announcement was legitimate. He did concede that the company did get caught up in the spirit of April Fool's Day in its press release. "
The sad thing is the services from Yahoo and MS have lowered expectations so much that anything dramatically better than the ineffective status quo is thought a joke first, and smart business move second.
Even those who stick with yahoo or hotmail will appreciate the benefits as the webmail market (that is, the market to advertise to people reading their webmail) becomes more competitive, potentially upping the account quota, lowering the obtrusiveness of the advertising, adding new functionality like searching, IMAP/POP support, or slashing the price for the paid services. Another big web player will have a vested interest in squishing spam.
Even if gmail isn't the huge success I think it will be, the challenge it poses to the status quo is good for everyone.
I read at +3, so pardon me if you already stated it somewhere, but I don't understand how people can presume that it's an april fools joke and don't see how insanely profitable this will be.
Among all the cries of "you'll NEVER, EVER have to erase any of your mail", the only thing missing is the "or we'll kill you" suffix. Combine this with the "search-based, no browsing, all indexed, all the time" approach and there you have it - a huge, ever growing base of keywords for customized ads delivery per user.
It's evil and I would never use it. Call it what you want, I'm just not sold to that particular feeling one gets when after a ten-mail long-distance breakup with one's fiancee one starts getting ads for "Russian brides" services. I'm funny like that.
Now search your spam even faster..
"Google Says E-Mail Plan No Hoax"
Search Giant Plans To Offer 1 Gigabyte Storage
POSTED: 8:32 a.m. EST April 1, 2004
UPDATED: 2:46 p.m. EST April 1, 2004
You know about e-mail, but are you ready for Gmail?
Online search provider Google is introducing a free e-mail service called Gmail. Do you think you will sign up for an account?YesNo
Online search provider Google said in a news release that it is introducing a free e-mail service as it raises the stakes in its battle against Yahoo! and Microsoft.
The company is promising to provide up to 500 times more storage space for users than the market-leading e-mail services provided by Yahoo! and Microsoft Hotmail. Gmail will offer 1 gigabyte of storage space, roughly 500,000 pages of e-mail.
Hoping to make money from the service, dubbed Gmail, Google has told its computers to mine the topics in the e-mails and then deliver text-based ads related to those subjects.
For instance, an e-mail from one friend to another discussing an upcoming concert might prompt Google to include an advertising link from a ticketing agency.
For now, Google is only opening up the service to invited users but expects to make it accessible to everyone within a few weeks. People interested in signing up for an account are being encouraged to register at Gmail.com.
In the news release, Google cofounder Larry Page said that the company developed the project after e-mail users complained about having to stay under storage limits on other web-based e-mail systems.
There was some speculation on technology related message boards that the plan was an April Fool's Day prank.
Google representatives later said that an online job listing for a position at a lunar station was a prank, but that the e-mail service is a legitimate project.
Distributed by Internet Broadcasting Systems, Inc. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
We all know that email attachments are an ad-hoc kludge of an extension and being able to search through binary attachments adds no value, therefore GMail should forbid attachments. Such functionality could be offered by a parallel network or even protocol for file transfers. After all, if ISPs don't need to host email text anymore they'll have space freed up to host files.
Such a policy would not only alleviate many potential problems with GMail, but save the world from email worms overnight.
The Press Release on google's site reads: "If a Google user has a problem with email, well, so do we," said Google co-founder and president of technology, Sergey Brin. "And while developing Gmail was a bit more complicated than we anticipated, we're pleased to be able to offer it to the user who asked for it." Does that mean that they will offer it to "the one" user that asked for it??? Happy April Fools Day!
http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&oi=news&start=0&num =1&q=http://www.forbes.com/technology/newswire/200 4/04/01/rtr1320652.html
This is currently linked from the front page of ABC news: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1078997.htm
Look, if you think that you can come in and politely explain the situation to the department technology policy committee why they should give us lots of money for this stuff, and get that money, be my guest. Of course you'd fail.
We DO try to support the needs of our users to the best of our ability but that is limited by money, time and shared resources. The main purpose of the UNIX systems is NOT personal file storage. You have a desktop with it's own harddrive for that if you work here. It is for running high demand applications, and providing services like web, authentication, etc.
We are also not here for project labs. If a professor has a project, they need a lab with the systems to do that. They are responsible for having their own systems.
We can't provide special support for every single high demand request of one kind or another we get. We do not have the money for that. Professors have their own research budgets to spend on that kind of thing. We'll support their systems, but we don't just have computers lying around to throw at a problem.
And of course we HAVE plenty of scratch space, I think 70GB on a system that anyone can use. Of course users don't want to because it's inconvinenet (they'd rather have stuff in their home directory) or because it's shared, or because it's not backed up, etc.
IT exists to support the needs of the ORGANIZATION, not the users directly. This support is often in the form of supporting the users. I spend probably 70% of my time dealing with direct user support like installing software, teaching them how to use it, fixing problems, etc. That doesn't mean I'm here to be a personal assisstant. We have a clear list of duties, oriders of priority, and so on. This is a published list that is deparmtmental policy. The reason for this is that there are a finite number of us with a fininte amount of time. We need to ensure that we aren't being asked to do more than our time allows.
But tell you what, try it sometime. Try supporting every request from every person in a huge organization. This includes all those you lack the resources to deal with, those that require more money than you have, and those that would take tons of your time for just one user.
Time and money are both finite. They are also dictated by higher ups. We do not decide how large our budget is, we do not decide how many staff we get to have. We present our case with what we need, and they determine how much we get. Given that we are competing with all the research groups, all of whom want about 10x the amount of money they get now, we go with what we can get.
They will take over the world by offering free services with little to no advertisements! Beating out their competition with innovation!
And they say all they want is to "organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible."
HAH! That's just another way of saying "take over the world."
:wq
they're working on the idea that ~85% of people will not have any amount of mail remotely approaching 1GB...
Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of products quoted in Forbes.com Says it's real. And quotes /.
Make that a Microsoft EULA instead and it's a deal.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Google could get Ali G to express his 'respect' for his new email address and "dat all doze who want more dan bling bling need to get one a deez"...
Just a thought..
So, it it "gee-mail" or "gmail"?
Well right now they have the most popular search technology, and soon they will be the most popular email provider. I bet they are going to introduce Messenger also, something like Google Messenger, which I hope is multiprotocol client like Kopete. They can leverage their popularity and customer loyality to screw Microsoft, yahoo, and others big time. I wonder what sinister plans Microsoft has under consideration to deal with google.
Rosenberg says this is not a joke. The lunar jobs were the joke.
I'd love to permenently archive my email, except for the spam. Google may have the brains and the plans to build the world's best spam filtration system. This mail system could be the world's best testbed to develop it.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
And once they get the email system going, they will have the world's best testbed for developing a great spam filtration system, and someday, they will have that, too.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Then you really aren't thinking about the problem outside the box...
Consider if they integrate a Slashdot-like moderation system to add a human touch to their spam filters... 50 million users (a very low number, by the way) of whom 100,000 get an identical email. Google automatically flags it as "spam" -- moderators who got points that day (let's say 5% or 5000 of those 100,000) could then click on "This is not spam" if it turns out that that message, for whatever reason, really wasn't spam. You randomly assign the mod points to ensure that the spammers can't stack the deck and mod-up spam... people with mod points happily do their civic duty because they realize that, working together as a community, they are doing away with spam... and then Google has a real-time white list/blacklist that they can sell to ISPs who want to block spammers.
(1) Google gets great PR -- having the best web mail client in town.
(2) Google effectively kills the spam problem by hosting the most massive volume of any e-mail service
(3) Google makes a tidy profit
Frankly, I've often wondered why a distributed moderation system combined with heuristic algorithms haven't been used to combat spam before and my guess is that Google might be attempting to do just that...
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
Yes, plenty of email storage space is good. On the other hand, long-stored email can be blamed for recurring outbreaks of various old jokes, hoaxes, urban legends, etc. Recently my Dad forwarded to me a message asking about the "tax on email" which was a hoax making the rounds back when I was still running a dial-up BBS. I realize recent micropayment ideas for slowing spam have given this particular rumor new life, but I wondered if possibly it hibernated a few years in long-stored email, message boards, etc., waiting to make a renewed appearance when seemingly-related circumstances re-optimized the social hack.
Eh, I'm babbling now... I hate having a cold...
I've created a text message group so even if you're not at your computer, you can find out that Gmail has launched (if the time is going to be a surprise) and get that name you want.
Go here to join - http://www.upoc.com/group.jsp?group=gmail - and make sure to post a message as soon as you find that Gmail has launched or after any other important updates.
Call me paranoid but I don't like the idea at all. When I read the article it said that you'd be able to search any message you ever sent. To hell with that, when I delete a message, I don't want to be able to search it ever again. I suppose Yahoo! *probably* archives all messages and they're never truly deleted but I can't be sure. I love Google but not Gmail. No thank. :)
My $.02, your mileage may vary.
IMHO, IANAL, TINLA, etc...
The pages att http://gmail.google.com are still there. Also, in this article today on Forbes site Google say Gmail was no prank.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
Perhaps there idea is to give 1gb of email only space, meaning that they will have a per message limit of a couple mb. Sure this system still could be abused to distribute 1 - 2mb rar files as someone mentioned above, but it would really be very impractical.
This limit would still allow virtually unlimited honest use of the system (how often do you send files over 2mb? by email?) And most people will probably abandon their accounts well before they reach the 1gb limit.
Sure, Google could set an attatchment limit, but people could write programs to get around that.. Say you have a 700MB ISO, and google sets a 10MB attatchment limit: you could write a program which disassembles the ISO into 70 blocks of 10MB (much like is done often in the warez world these days), and re-assemble on the other end--You could even put compression into play, if you wanted to make the most of it... compress, disassemble into several small blocks, send, reassemble and decompress on receiving side.
And about attempts going public, this would be a serious blow to the public image of just how secure GMail is..
Even if they combined attatchment size, # of attatchment limit, and bandwidth limit, why not have some sort of system to grab different files from different addresses?
So, the fact is, if the warez community is patient enough... it's plausible..
Interesting... as the page is now, if you go to Forgot Your Password?, type in your email (whatever it is, you don't have to actually have an account with them), they send you the info on "resetting" your password. If you go to the link you can make a password and then try and login with that username (your email addy provided)/pass - it seems to work except for the whole "The page you requested is invalid." you get then, although you'll notice if you type the wrong password it says wrong password as opposed to this (or if you type another email address it gives you an error), so it seems that this lets you create an account (who knows when it'll actually work, though)
automaticly delete >>> reply lines. :)
quite low as sent and received emails are the same. Quoting received emails is the equal to linking (pagerank) interesting stuff that matters for you. It might work. Hmmmmm. :!
You pointed to the biggest threat. As storgae goes up so does the value to the hackers. And when they figure out your password ...
Is'nt comment history something like public email? You post under slashdot story but your comment will also show up as a post on googleblogmail.com
Why is there a link at the bottom of gmail saying Happy birthday April? Click it and you get a picture of a couple.... curiouser and curiouser....
Honest
Da Blog
Is this an April Fool's Joke or for real?
Real.
Da Blog
I doubt it's a joke.
You are right.
Da Blog
Mi>It sounds like a Google AF joke to me
Nope.
Da Blog
I'm 50-50 on the fence as the whether this is real or not
Real.
Da Blog
I am retarded, this is an April fools joke.
Go with your first instincts.
Da Blog
It'll say a lot about the gullibility of the news media if this is indeed a joke
No joke.
Da Blog
I have been able to get to the Googlunaplex since April Fool's Day with no problem! Google has a history of keeping their April Fool's jokes up for the enjoyment of everyone! :-)
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