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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
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...
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 $2 to maintain (they didn't say if that was a annual cost or what), if they did get 100M users that would be pretty expensive! It makes you wonder if they don't have a tiered service in mind down the road. Of course, this will be "advertiser supported" so who knows how invasive that will or will not be when using their mail services.
Still, this all smacks of either "window dressing" for Wall Street, "war paint" for Microsoft, or, perhaps, both? Either way the users will be winners for a least a little while.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
The press release reads like a joke. Is it an (early) April Fool's joke?
I'm really looking forward to seeing what google does in this space. Hotmail and Yahoo just aren't very high quality/consumer oriented. If google can provide a feature rich interface that doesn't focus on upsell to the user, then they could capture a lot of interest/visibility. Right now I rarely use online email services because of the UPGRADE NOW! spam and the primitive interface.
All your preview button are belong to Hello Kitty.
What does having 1GB of storage space on Google's mail server have to do with never needing to change your e-mail address?
It might allow you to keep many more e-mails than possible with yahoo or hotmail, but how will this allow me to never change my e-mail again?
so that users never need to change their e-mail address
:-)
So after netscape.net, hotmail.com, yahoo.com, real.net I will have a google.com address which will never need to be changed!
I already have a lot of them you know
Edwin
bash$
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. :)
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
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(^.^)
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*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
Yup, heard that right.
Check it out:
http://www.gmail.com/
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?"
They must have had this idea for a while then:
Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-425410)
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
CA
94043 US
Domain Name: gmail.com
Created on..............: 1995-Aug-13.
Expires on..............: 2006-Aug-12.
Record last updated on..: 2004-Mar-31 16:50:22.
Either that or NetSol's in on the joke...
Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
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
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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Shouldn't they call this Gig-gle?
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
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
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
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?
Send? I'd be more worried that this will *lead* to more spam.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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
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.
Google search = providing me with other people's stuff. Google mail = potentially providing other people with my stuff.
Maybe not so. They don't read all the text on every search: they index it before it's saved and they search the index. That returns pointers to saved messages which are then decompressed if requested by the user.
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'?
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
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?
ok, I'll go mod myself down now....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You must work for a hard drive manufacturer.
Hehe.
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
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.
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!
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.
don't tell anyone taht way hotmail and yahoo will announce increases in their storage limits ;>
This post patent pending.
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
My sister downloads 20GB of anime a month using these guys.
http://www.streamload.com
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
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.
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.
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.
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
An excellent looking Job Oppurtunity!
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.
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.
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
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!
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!
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?
Is it a bad sign when the really good ideas are hoaxes?