Speculating About Gmail

rjelks writes "The Register is running an article about Google's new email service that was mentioned earlier, here. The story details the new privacy concerns about Gmail's privacy policy and Google's tracking habits. The policy states that Google will not guarantee the deletion of emails that are archived even if you cancel your account. 'The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.'" Reader cpfeifer writes "Rich Skrenta (founder of ODP, and Topix) speculates in his blog that the real product Google is creating isn't web search or email, but a massively scalable, distributed computing platform. 'It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers.' If he's right, the question isn't what product will Google announce next, but what product will they not be able to announce?"

Comments

Re:Hmm

[dorsey]

Yes.

orkut

[pollock]

There's a discussion about this discussion over in the Gmail community at Orkut.com.

Very Real

[irokitt]

Yes, it's real. The 1000 MB storage limit is listed at the GMail homepage here.

If you are ainterested in an account, you can give them you current e-mail here
and they will send information once GMail goes gold.
Also note that Firefox and Mozilla support is explicitly mentioned!

Re:Very Real

[irokitt]

Here[USA] too, via a POP3 arrangement. But a web-based solution is better for some(most?) people because it's more flexible. The sad thing is that Hotmail & Co. have discontinued POP forwarding (note that GMail may support POP3 forwarding, but may also charge a small fee.). So it's harder now because you have to juggle back and forth between multiple addresses.

Re:Very Real

[lfourrier]

Remember, as explained on google-watch, to remove your google cookie before and after you register, or else, they now have the mean to associate your ID (and this way all your searches) with your email.

It's a wind up guys

[LondonLawyer]

Check the bottom link on the Gmail front page (linked to by your piece even). "Happy Birthday April"?

Relevant section of privacy policy

[ashot]

What types of personal information do we collect and how do we use it?

Account information. When you register with Google, we will request some personal information, including your first and last name, a user name (which will be used for your email address) and password to create your account. Your password will be maintained on our system in an encrypted form. Just in case you forget your password, we also may ask you to choose a secret question and answer and provide a secondary email address where we can contact you to re-access your Google account. If you already have a Google account, we may ask you for some additional information to enable an email account.

Email contents and usage. The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Google's computers process the information in your email for various purposes, including formatting and displaying the information to you, delivering targeted related information (such as advertisements and related links), preventing unsolicited bulk email (spam), backing up your email, and other purposes relating to offering you Gmail. Residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account. Google employees do not access the content of any mailboxes unless you specifically request them to do so (for example, if you are having technical difficulties accessing your account) or if required by law, to maintain our system, or to protect Google or the public.

We also may collect information about the use of your account, such as how much storage you are using, how often you log in and other information related to your registration and use of Gmail. Information displayed or clicked on in your Gmail account (including UI elements, ads, links, and other information) is also recorded. We use this information internally to deliver the best possible service to you, such as improving the Gmail user interface, preventing fraud within our advertising system, and better targeting related information.

Google will never sell, rent or share your personal information, including your Gmail address or email content, with any third parties for marketing purposes without your express permission.

SpyMac

[OneBarG]

Anyone notice that SpyMac is already offering a free 1GB E-mail account? No keyword based ads (not that I have a problem with Google's use of them). It even gives pop3 access, which last I read, gmail won't (at first).

Re:disk space is cheap.

[Slack3r78]

Except Microsoft didn't start Hotmail - it was bought by them later on. That's where all the jokes about "even Microsoft runs FreeBSD" come from - the Hotmail servers ran FreeBSD before and for a good while after Microsoft bought them.

Screenshots!

[rffmna]

Dear hungry world, here are some Gmail screenshots...

http://fury.com/article/1990.php

Re:disk space is cheap.

[Knetzar]

If you offer 1gb to a lot of people, you can find ways to compress all that data. For example, when mail (example: spam) is sent to 100 people, keep 1 copy of the message and give everyone a link to that message. Also, text compresses pretty well, so using some CPU power they can save on hard drive space. And I doubt that most people will come close to the 1gb limit, so google might be able to offer this while only having to have a fraction of the storage space.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

The article says Google owns gmail.com.
Doing a whois on gmail.com corroborates this.

What is the problem?

Re:Of course they won't delete mail...

[mistshadow]

If you'd read the paper attached to the article, you would have known that:
1) files are assumed to be large -- 64MB chunk sizes.
2) old files are kept around for a couple days, before deleting them. (freeing up their chunks)
3) old chunks are deleted asynchronously, in a garbage-collected fashion.

And in any case, the data will be lying around on the hard drives until overwritten -- guaranteeing that you click "delete", and some user-response-level time later, the e-mail (or e-mail associated with the account) is inaccessible would be an impossible constraint to fulfill.

Google is just (sensibly) trying to set expectations, and avoiding making promises they can't keep.

Andrew Orlowski

[MythMoth]

This guy pops up on The Register from time to time, and comes across as less balanced than average even by their standards.

Particularly he has a bee in his bonnet about Google. I've never found his shrill arguments very convincing.

I'm sure Google will go bad one day (perhaps when they've gone public, or when the founders leave), but for now they're relying on quality rather than marketing, which gets the thumbs up from me.

I'd trust them at least as much as Hotmail if I wanted such an account.

D.

Google don't use RAID...

[blorg]

...but rather (all this according to the article) their own distributed, fault-tolerant Google Filesystem (GFS) [PDF]. Apparently each of their 1/2 depth 1U servers has only one or two drives. If a server fails (which happens routinely with 100k servers) then it's simply left in place and the data is automatically replicated onto another server from one of the redundant copies.

Re:Google don't use RAID...

[ron_ivi]

Thanks for the links. I was going to mention the same thing, but didn't find the article as fast as you.

As the parent pointed out (mod him up), Google's GFS is better than a large raid system in many ways. While a RAID system tolerates the failures of individual disks (which then need to be replaced), Google's GFS _expects_ the failure of most components, including CPUs, memorys, disks, systems, etc -- and in google's case nothing has to be replaced.

Their system is so fault tollerant, Cringly writes: "Now here is the part that sticks in my mind: the fault tolerant nature of the cluster is such that if a machine fails, the other machines simply take over its functions. As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus. "

This is far cooler than any RAID from a fault-tollerance point of view.

(apparently since then google went to rack-based systems so it probably detects dead ones so they can replace them easily)

Was Gmail a birthday present?

[Psychic Burrito]

Hmm, is this the girl started the idea of gmail in the first place? According to their press release:

• The inspiration for Gmail came from a Google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services, recalled Larry Page, Google co-founder and president, Products. "She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them," Page said

So the girl's name's April and this gmail thingie was her birthday present?

In other news, this seems to be the only hidden page on the gmail server, there are so far only 4 pages on it.

Re:disk space is cheap.

[davi_slashdot]

And for what - Something that amounts to a community service project? Hey, I'll give Google full credit for their current image in the geek community, but this seems a tad ridiculous.

They will get money from Gmail. Actually, the same money that is driving the next generation of search engines.

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 pages. The matching of ads to content is a completely automated process performed by computers using the same technology that powers the Google AdSense program. This technology already places targeted ads on thousands of sites across the web by quickly analyzing the content of pages and determining which ads are most relevant to them. No humans read your email to target the ads, and no email content or other personally identifiable information is ever provided to advertisers.

Re:Prohibited Actions

[the_greywolf]

missed an important line there:

# 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.

Re:disk space is cheap.

[cls_rskv]

It is the other way around - Microsoft buys Firefly Passport in april 1998 and Hotmail in december 1998.

Re:huge spam shared database?

[xandroid]

They're doing something like that.

"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." [link]

Re:disk space is cheap.

[GodsFlaw]

Um can you say IPO. Like any company you push up your public image before hand. Google is expected to issiue the largest IPO ever! 1/2 a million or 10 million is a small investment given the money the IPO will probably produce. "Analysts' estimate Google's value at $15 billion to $20 billion, and they say an IPO could generate up to $4 billion. The company won't release figures, but analysts have estimated its annual revenue at $500 million to more than $1 billion, with profits in the range of $150 million to $300 million. The money pours in along two primary paths: by giving advertisers the chance to display links to their sites based on a user's search terms, and by providing Google search capability on other Web sites -- such as AOL and washingtonpost.com." Again 100 million is small change. By the way it could be 100 mil for the disk space for all I know. I do know that one clerian disk array goes for 1/2 a mill alone. (1 tera)

"File Sharing" Possibilities

[ThisIsAnExampleAccou]

Back in the mid 1990's, there was a very active Warez scene that operated via AOL. While it seems sort of goofy that anyone would use AOL for anything, AOL's mail infrastructure at the time allowed for a pretty clever scheme.

Remember that this was a time that most people did not have broadband. These Warez rings would get someone who did have broadband (normally through school or work), and have them send an email to themself via AOL, attaching whatever file they wanted to share.

Then, they would go into some AOL private room, and run something not unlike IRC's SDFind. However, what made this really clever was that because the file had already been uploaded to AOL's mail server, the person "hosting" the file only had to upload once, and from then on the file existed on AOL's mail server. Therefore, you had a system like SDFind, but with no queues.

If you were looking for, lets say, RedHat ES2.1, you would enter a server room, and type @find RedhatES2.1. If anyone in that room had it in their mailbox, the script would notify you. You would then type @get "filename", and they would automatically forward you the email that included the attachment in question. You were then free to download that file at your leisure, without having to wait for queues, etc. The person hosting the file had sent it to you with a very minimal bandwidth impact.

I fully anticipate someone writing a similar piece of software for IRC using gMail.

Re:People more receptive to ads during search?

[fgodfrey]

In their FAQ Question #6 they say that they don't currently support POP/IMAP but might in a future service which you might have to pay for.

Re:Prohibited Actions

[SwarmOfOne]

I think you missed the parents point, no human has to read your mail to do those things. Google already has an image search which can filter out mature content, if they compare the md5 of your attachment to the images they've already flagged as mature they could identify you as a porn. The point is that "Transmit content that may be harmful to minors" is a very low standard and it's not clear how actively google will enforce the prohibited actions


Here's the complete list:

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

Silly conspiracy kiddies.

[slumos]

The policy states that Google will not guarantee the deletion of emails that are archived even if you cancel your account.

Ugh. Guys, they are just being up front about what has always been true. E.g. do you think admins at your university went through old backup tapes expunging your account when you graduated? No.

Re:disk space is cheap.

[cls_rskv]

Further info in the press release from then. It was part of MS' strategy to get on top of the race on who should control users private information. At the same time Firefly had had a cooperation with Netscape about setting standards within W3C on how to store private information. Guess MS wanted to undermine that as well.

Opera M2 = GMail with privacy

[Xojo]

M2 offers features similar to GMail: it keeps all mail in one big glom, but offers "access points" (automagically indexed views) by all messages, unread, sent, drafts, contacts, active contacts, active threads, attachments, custom views and more. All searches are saved as views.

When I abandoned my old MUA and imported my old mail, all old folders were converted to custom views, but I find that I seldom refer to them and I haven't needed to make any more, because M2's automatic built-in views cover my needs.

And all this happens in the (relative) privacy of your own machine. I have no fiduciary interest in Opera Software, and I don't play one who has on television. I just think M2 is a good (not perfect) commercial product, and probably safer (more private) than GMail.

See "Opera Software - M2 E-mail Client"