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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.
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 $2 to maintain (they didn't say if that was a annual cost or what), if they did get 100M users that would be pretty expensive! It makes you wonder if they don't have a tiered service in mind down the road. Of course, this will be "advertiser supported" so who knows how invasive that will or will not be when using their mail services.
Still, this all smacks of either "window dressing" for Wall Street, "war paint" for Microsoft, or, perhaps, both? Either way the users will be winners for a least a little while.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
The press release reads like a joke. Is it an (early) April Fool's joke?
What does having 1GB of storage space on Google's mail server have to do with never needing to change your e-mail address?
It might allow you to keep many more e-mails than possible with yahoo or hotmail, but how will this allow me to never change my e-mail again?
so that users never need to change their e-mail address
:-)
So after netscape.net, hotmail.com, yahoo.com, real.net I will have a google.com address which will never need to be changed!
I already have a lot of them you know
Edwin
bash$
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.
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'.
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.
I could see this really being a haven for pirates, assuming they have a web front-end. Imagine if everybody had a gig of storage on an absurdly fast pipe and the ability to move files back and forth practically instantly.
We'll have guys writing p2p applications on top of this which let you automatically find the warez you need, then automatically trigger a forward from the mail account where the file is located. And the anonymity is so much easier because the files are being moved by someone else.
Send? I'd be more worried that this will *lead* to more spam.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
They say they'll give 1GB of storage space, but that doesn't preclude them from setting limits to attachment sizes and bandwidth usage.
---
Open Source Shirts
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
I am retarded, this is an April fools joke.
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.
Just because the ad a mail provider shows you is related to words in your email doesn't mean they are "watching" you or invading your privacy in any way.
Just because the ad a mail provider shows you is unrelated to words in your email doesn't mean they aren't "watching" you or invading your privacy in any way.
Adwords by themselves imply nothing relating to personal privacy.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Google search = providing me with other people's stuff. Google mail = potentially providing other people with my stuff.
The difference here is that Google does not (as of yet) have a burning desire to add clutter. They're already searching images, newsgroups, news websites, the web, good deals (Froogle), and business locations. They make an IE toolbar for blocking popups and searching. I've seen a piece of searching hardware they sell. You can buy ads, too.
Google is huge.
And yet still, every piece of the puzzle is simple as can be. Google realizes that each piece is its own piece and should be used independantly of the others without sucking the user to a page he didn't intend to visit.
What's the primary complain about computers second to "It doesn't work?" "It takes up so much time!" Who wants to visit a website which requires drudging through links, ads and banners to do what you want? People want a simple interface and want to get their task done.
To illustrate the point: on Yahoo, you'll see distractions and clutter attempting to get you to spend more time at their website and use more of their utilities. Most people are annoyed by this. On Google, you won't find link upon link cluttering up the page trying to get you to go elsewhere. You won't find animated ads. You won't find banners. On the other hand, you WILL find what you need -- in a search or otherwise.
Google shoots for a great user experience -- and users come back. Google focuses on quality of product, not quality of marketing.
There's no reason that something this big can't be great. With the right management and the right motives, as Google has had on their very long journey thus far, this can work. These types of successes don't happen often, but Google is already a long way down that path and doesn't appear to be wandering off of it.
Cheers
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
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.
Since when do April Fools Day jokes have to be funny for anyone other than those behind them? People never laugh when the sink sprays them with water in the morning...
It is a joke, it's going to have to go down in history as one of the biggest pranks ever pulled... both the AP and Reuters have put out wire stories which means it's going to be in hundreds of newspapers tomorrow morning.
It'll say a lot about the gullibility of the news media if this is indeed a joke...
Yeah but an even cooler joke would be throwing something up that everyone thinks is an April Fool's joke, and then doing it for real. A meta-April Fool's joke, if you will.
This is definitely not nearly as far off the deep-end as, say, PigeonRank, for example. It's not even really very funny. And it sounds a little outrageous, but not a lot. I'm 50-50 on the fence as the whether this is real or not. (It seems like it would be rare for NYTimes, Reuters, and CNet to all get suckered, for example.)
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Nope, because they still haven't done their IPO, so their stock isn't being traded on the open market. SEC has no jurisdiction over Google until they file for an IPO.
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!