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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?"
I was still under the impression that this could be an april fools.
I am assuming from the way this reads that it has actually been confirmed?
My god! They are building Skynet! When will it achieve sentience?
Here's my question: how are they going to make sure people only have one account each? What's to prevent people from getting dosens and backing up their harddrive?
If so, I think I'll put in a resume for a job on, what was it - the Copernicus base?
Gmail was an April Fools Day joke, yes?
its a different sort of tool, with the advantager of tracking etc and the disadvantage of not being private. just keep that in mind and there arent many problems. i love the idea, and ill use it if i can. i wont say anything extreme or criminal, and really, it is their property, so they can offer it for my use with whatever terms they like. IP rights and plagarism ideas are rapidly changing in our shrinking world, so keep that in mind
so I think they get the benefit of the doubt until further notice.
Does anybody have anything to the contrary?
I presume I probably wasn't the only person who put their email address into the 'interested in an account?' section on the gmail website before remembering that it could be linked to all my previous searches on this machine... http://www.google-watch.org/email.html suggests deleting the google.com cookie before and afterwards, but might be too late for that...
-jermy
I think Gmail is going to be great. It completely blows any other free email service out of the water. So what if privacy is in question? Nobody is forcing anyone to use it. You can use it, enjoy it, and if you really care you can just not send anything you don't want others seeing and use a different address for recieving sensitive emails. Or you can just NOT use it, and go on your way. This isn't a big deal.
Google is just providing a service. Use it if you want, or don't.
I am a filthy pirate.
What amazes me are the services that offer I'm acting as a mini-isp to friends, and with a $50/month dedicated server we're renting, $10/month gets us 10GB of email+web storage.
Hard drive capacity has gone up a lot since the time of HotMail - I'm amazed no free email service started offering reasonable disk space earlier.
"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."
Go ahead and horde my spam. I don't want it anyway.
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
I think this is what made it the best april fools joke - the fact that it wasn't.
So all those that came up with all the reasons why it must have been a joke, are the ones that were fooled.
Advanced users are users too!
They're going to have mirrors, snapshots, backups, offsite backups, remote replication... Expecting them to purge your email when you delete your account is crazy.
'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.'
If I can get a free account, myname@google.com, with 1 GB of storage, and with IMAP or POP3, I don't give a damn if they use my mail for marketing research, or if they keep it long after I'm dead. The reason is I don't work for M16, the KGB or the CIA, I only break little laws and I don't dig child porno. So basically who cares if a few of my mails get left on a server somewhere.
Privay is a real concern, but worrying about this is like worrying about the fact that postmen can read your postcard when you send it. The truth is they can, but they don't give a shit.
No-one's going to force you to use the system. If you don't trust it, don't use it.
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
torrents.google.com ... it doesn't have to be illegal contents.
There's a discussion about this discussion over in the Gmail community at Orkut.com.
Seriously, it is nice to see that the Google system is not so overly polished that they wipe out any traces of human emotions and cute little oddites.
Happy birthday, April!
I wonder if the Gmail service would be available to general public before their IPO? That might increase the value of their stock significantly. Also, once public, they have to answer to investors to maximize the return...and change of management/merger could very well mean significant privacy issues.
If/when Gmail is available, I would use it to store big file attachments (mainly storage) and still use my regular ISP for normal day-to-day communications UNLESS GOOGLE GUARANTEES COMPLETE PRIVACY NOW AND IN FUTURE and no caching of deleted emails and no tracking (seems highly unlikely)...
I thought Gmail was just Google Groups. Threaded group mail anyone? The press release was just an April Fool's announcement for a product that they already have. Or not. Maybe they are leveraging the technology of Usenet/Deja/Google Groups with a privacy layer on top to create a 'closed' Usenet.
A distributed system is something truly worthy of the doctorate pedigree of Google's staff. They have an incredible concentration of brain power and I have always found it hard to believe they need all that to add a few more boxes to run a simple page weight algorithm and a web crawler.
Finally, it all makes sense. They're trying to put all (but a few of) the sysadmins out of work! A noble enterprise, indeed. We hate them, they hate themselves.
But seriously, this has been a dream of admins for a long time. 'Bout time somebody sat down and did it. Why can't a single box manage 100,000 others? If one man can do 100 with the right tools he could do them all. The difficulty of transparency is incredible, but even small teams in universities utilizing a few phd's and transient graduate students are making headway in the area. No reason a well funded lab of hundreds of phds working full time can't achieve it.
Wow... I guess the BIG question is what they'll do with it. I mean... are they just doing it for their existing products? Are they going to license it out for astronomical sums to places like Lockheed and Sandia? Will they (gasp) open source it? Or, most frightening, they will run the world's largest, most efficient super computer and charge pennies for utility based computing and put Sun and IBM out of business in the process of creating a mainframe monopoly out of whiteboxes. Heck... they could probably buy out Sun to get that sweet Solaris technology for themselves. IBM has all kinds of retarded patents for toilet seats and ways to dance on an office chair. I guess they're worth getting for a laugh.
Here's my question: how are they going to make sure people only have one account each? What's to prevent people from getting dosens and backing up their harddrive?
They don't limit the number of accounts, they just limit attatchment size and keep an eye out for abuses, like hundreds of downloads of from 1 account, or a scripted mailing of hundreds of 10 meg attatchments to any one account.
obviously if this is the goal they want to achieve, why would they hide it to the world?
2 49&mode=thread) that xserves G5 were going to power such a thing, 100 000 xserve G5 (Virginia tech made it clear they didn't get any deal so why Google would) can reach between 299 million and 579 million US dollar. Add to that the cooling, the room, the interconnect and all those little niceties that comes with it and it turns out that the project will cost a lot of money, not impossible but still. It will also probably need to come with its own electrical system, a mini-central if you wish, else it will cost them quite a lot per month as far as the electirc bill goes.
What would be the point? This is not a new concept or something no one ever though of, the only true obstacle to such a thing is money, they'll need a lot of it.
I read here (http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/31/2341
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!
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
There are technical solutions like PGP for those who are concerned about their emails being read.
For those people who are concerned about google monitoring thier searching habits, why not use a proxy server?
For those people concerned about privacy issues: If you don't understand the medium enough to protect yourself, don't trust it. The best solution for protecting yourself online is understanding the battlefield. Knowledge is power, therefore you should arm yourself. It is as simple as that.
This is the Internet. You can say "fuck" here. - AC
I don't see why the privacy zealots are all up in arms about this. Don't they have something better to do like bitch about the Patriot Act? Seriously!
Google has been very up-front about what they will or will not be willing to do with the cookie "trifecta" (Google-Orkut-Gmail, as mentioned in the Register article) that they are gunning for. Not only is it spelled out quite clearly in the Gmail Privacy Statment, the co-founder is going on recrod saying "Hey, that's not such a bad idea."
What's my point? If you're neurotic about your privacy and you're apprehensive about giving someone the ability to cross-reference your search info with your personal info and your mail info, turn off cookies and don't use Gmail.
Let's all repeat this slowly, just to let it sink in: If you don't want to use Gmail, you don't have to use Gmail.
If Google goes ahead with Gmail and includes 1E9 bytes of storage per user account, as it plans to, there's obviously going to have to be some sort of cost involved to offset their decision to provide an extremely valuable service. Much like Hotmails users are required to pawn their eternal soul to the Prince of Darkness, Gmail users are going to have to bite the bullet and accept that their privacy may not be so private anymore. Why is this such a big problem?
[END rant]
--
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
Does anyone see the potential for Gmail to be used as a huge shared spam database. Include a simple "classify email as spam" on the webmail interface, add the spam to a shared Bayesian filter dictionary. Allow mail clients to compare incoming mail with Gmail's database. At the least, this could eliminate the need for new mail users to having to train their filters for a couple of weeks before it starts becoming effective.
If gmail wants to store a bunch of my obsolete PGP'd mails please let them do so. Email's never been really private. If you really care about email privacy you should encrypt your mail. And you can still do that using gmail, I suppose?
Most of the 1G storage quota will be taken by large attachments of movies and other stuff that gets forwarded around. Google are figuring out that if they merge identical copies the actual average storage consumption per user is going to be far less than 100mb.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I tend to skip all articles about Google on The Register, because they are all written by Andrew Orlowski -- who seems to have a personal vendetta against Google. I suspect it doesn't rate his personal website high enough :-).
Check the bottom link on the Gmail front page (linked to by your piece even). "Happy Birthday April"?
A project like this would take garbage and sift through it to find, make, stamp and press gold.
The skynet jokes while funny, don't do anything to curtain the tin foil wonderment at possibly the greatest data mining/data tool created to date.
This story is bigger than it appears. ((um...and greetings to the new data overlords :P)))
Let's keep in mind that patents are in place to keep lawyers employed and keep them litigating. -CatGrep
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.
-ashot
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).
I'm starting to think this isn't the best place to promote my Anti-Sig Campaign.
http://fury.com/article/1990.php
-------
FM Clan
Anyone who uses Gmail (or Hotmail, or Yahoo, or *any* webmail) for confidential material is fooling themselves about its confidentiality, but as a mail service for shuffling data around it will be very useful, but Gmail is going to have cover itself and protect itself from being the biggest mp3, warez and pr0n distributor in the world.
In related news, excentric millionaire and communication guru Bob Page aquired Google today. "With Bob Page vision's, Google will reach new heights in consummer services" said a Google representative. In answer to the question of where would the facility be found, Bob Page said it would be "near Groom Lake in Nevada".
Wow! Google always get a free pass on Slashdot, it seems.
"Privacy isn't a concern because, after all, *you* choose to give it up by using the service"? I think it's wrong. I think the facts that Gmail reads your incoming mail to choose which text ads it will show you is a very bad precedent. Isn't it the first time someone offers a communication service and they tell you that they will know the content of every message you get?
The fascination with the power of technology blinds the Google team it seems (like it blinds people on Slashdot), I wonder what Norvig thinks of this issue...
Is the system to instantly correlate the billion biometric files that might be created if everyone falls for biometric passports.
If every European, Japanese, American, basically everyone with a passport is made to deliver up their fingerprints, photographs and maybe iris scans, there will need to be a system to cross check all of this "At the speed of Google", every time a passport holder crosses a border anywhere in the world. Google will provide this service to governments, over an SSL secured web interface.
Google has the experience, they have the hardware in place, and they are going to make a fortune out of this. If they do it, it will be the greatest switch from good to pure evil in the history of software.
I use the word "might" above because this Biometric Net may not be created if everyone simply refuses to be fingerprinted and photographed. Of all the countries in line for this, the Americans will probably shout the loudest. Fingerprinting is for criminals; to be forced to get fingerprinted and biometrically photographed to get a passport, the data of which will be stored by other governments and anyone with an RFID reader is simply too much to swallow for any freedom loving person.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
There's papers already written about Google's existing file system. It is 'append only', they build up large 40GB+ chunk files on Linux servers and flag stuff within the file as deleted, without actucally deleting it.
So they probably only compact a file when it becomes mostly deleted entries.
They're probably using the same system for GMail, so even if you delete stuff, its not really deleted until the file store its on it compacted.
Hence the terms of service.
Hi,
Don't forget that while people will be allowed to have up to 1GB of emails in their mailbox, it doesn't mean Google will have users x 1GB of disk space. Most people won't use the 1GB of mailbox space.
I worked on the mail system of the largest provider in my country. We had 700,000 customers with 15 MB mailboxes and we had something like 1/10 of the disk space required if all the mailboxs were full. And this worked just fine.
Not only Google won't need all that disk space, bu they will probably purchase additional disk space as it becomes necessary. It's smarter to buy new hard disks later than all the disk space immediately, they'll be cheaper.
Yahoo Groups have an option to automatically email some files to new members.
;-)
Needless to say, this has immediately been (ab)used by pr0n forums (e.g. HCMF). They slice the movies in parts, put it on a group, and then to get the movie all you have to do is join. No more hassle with reluctant servers or anemic download rates !
The only limitation to this scheme was that you needed to have a rather large mailbox, usually larger than what most free webmail services provide.
Well I guess that's no longer a problem...
My bet: GMail will soon be to pr0n storage what the Tower of Babel was to anitquity construction.
(Maybe that's the real reason why they're doing it after all
Thomanonymous Micowardni
I see this as a great benefit for a lot of mailing lists, where the information is public. How easy would it be to just search for some keywords rather than reading through screen-fulls of irrelevant posts on a particular subject, especially since messages are kept after deletion? As far as personal email accounts are concerned, I do view this as a privacy issue.
email compresses, really, really well
I suspect they will have at least 5:1 compression ratio, and they aren't going to allocate one gigabyte per person the moment the person signs up. So the storage requirements aren't as daunting as one might initially imagine?
Also, their spam detection will probably be superb with as many people as you might expect to sign up and the quality of their search/compare algorithims.
Email is one of the few applications that bring people back for many pageviews. Note how Google state on the GMail page that you'll only see 'relevant ads'?
;)
I've been seeing Adsense popping up on all sorts of new sites recently. Having ads delivered based on the content of your email is pretty clever. I wonder what adverts it will show when the spam comes rolling in?
A few good ones:
Transmit content that may be harmful to minors
Illegally transmit another's intellectual property or other proprietary information without such owner's or licensor's permission
Promote or encourage illegal activity
Who decides what's harmful to minors? Google? will they ban my account for sending my friends offensive images/jokes?
If i email an mp3 will they use their compute power to check if I own the copyright? Could the RIAA force them to report me?
Since they're scanning the mail anyway, would they have to report users if words like 'civil disobidience' are in their messages? Could the government give them watch words?
I hope that GMail is real - because it would solve a significant problem for me - though I'd really need GMail to support IMAP4 for my purposes...
I've three types of email I need to manage:
1) Secret, private emails - always with known contacts - encrypted.
2) Confidential email - again, known contacts only - stored only on my intranet - not sensitive - doesn't need encryption.
3) Public contact - frequently new or unknown contacts. Enquiries; replies from Usenet/mailing lists etc.
Types 1 and 2 are low volume and can be easily managed with current infrastructure. Tailored email addresses and white lists can virtually eliminate spam. Type 3, however, is a much bigger problem... because I can not easily control who contacts me. I think Gmail offers the hope of a solution here. For my purposes (at least) - given that Gmail would be used for initial contact only - I couldn't care less about the less than private nature of these communications. I don't really care if Google, law enforcement or even the government gets to see these messages - their content would be considered public. Provided that Gmail can be integrated into my current email system - such a service would offer an interesting and convenient alternative for "Type-3" email.
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.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
People keep saying "how will Google limit people's accounts". The whole point is, Google is giving a gig because they want to gather as much data as possible, for their search analysis algorithm tuning and contextual ads. They've got a web text stream pouring in, a USENET feed, a news feed... now they want to add email as one of the main untapped sources of huge amounts of text. So they don't want to limit accounts. They're giving you free storage in exchange for providing them with tons of data that they can use to attract advertisers and better target their ads.
When you stop to think about it, package management could be a key factor in the smooth running of the Google Gmail cluster. What software would be used to make sure each one of those 100,000 mail-handling nodes was running the latest, most secure version of sendmail, qmail or postfix? We know Google uses Linux extensively. It is fairly safe to assume that they are using apt-get to sling packages. But what do the Slashdot community think about apt-get's long term suitability for these types of projects? Can the open-source, Free Software package management poster child scale to meet the 100K-node challenge? I look forward to hearing the community's response!
...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.
I'm wondering what happens when people figure out they can use Google's email system as a 1GB off site backup drive. How many accounts can I get? 2? 10?
I've written more about this here.
Oh, and I never thought G-Mail was a joke. There was grumbling about it in the days before April 1.
Gmail service is natural step in Google's provision, because Google actually *is* the Echelon. A capability of matching search activities and personalities is a missing feature for its controllers, for sure.
You can check Google's behavior difference in handling "normal" and "dangerous" 5-word queries by comparing amount of processing time. It differs by order of magnitude 10 or more. Google is definitely communicating somewhere *before* issuing a reply.
Varied results are given with traceroute communications to Google, and it would be an interesting community project to create a network map of near-to-Google topology. An example of device of interest is 64.233.175.250, just before Google machinery, as seen from Europe. It is supposedly part of Google network, but it's trip time is not adequate to be located in California. What this box is? And who does it serve?
There you are, staring at me again.
I read this as meaning that they won't go messing with their backups to purge your data, which is perfectly reasonable, especially for a free service. Backups are supposed to be write-once recordings. If you've got a problem with that, don't transmit sensitive data over a free webmail service. Nothing spooky here. In fact, I imagine every webmail service works this way. Gmail is just kind enough to warn you about this.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
When I first heard about GMail, it sounded great. But as more time goes by and the terms of service become known, it seems to me that GMail could be a problematic service. It would also seem to me that Google would try to use e-mail to build profiles of its users, which could eventually fall into the hands third parties. (Even if Google doesn't intend for that to happen right now, once it is a publically traded company things could change.)
So for right now, I would have to say no thank you.
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.
TRUST.
i personally don't think the question here is the what-ifs and whos and whats that Gmail might mean. i think the core issue here is whether we are willing to entrust Google with that information.
Hotmail, Netscape Mail, @ddress, et. al., all provide a service similar to Gmail. the only real difference i can see (looking specifically at the privacy policies) is that Gmail is more open about their policies and is more willing to state openly that there is redundancy in their storage system. i'm sure Hotmail, et. al., have redundant storage for their email services, and that there are concerns similar to if not identical to the concerns addressed by the Gmail privacy policy.
i commend Google for being open about this, and because they specifically address it, i'm fully willing to open a Gmail account and use it for my personal email. hell, i'd use it for business email without a single worry.
why? i trust Google. they are opening up and telling me what they do with my emails and what happens to them. that's important to me. that's why i'm willing to trust them.
i, for one, welcome our new email overlords.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
I'd question whether people would be as receptive to targeted ads in their email, however. I often search with the aim of making a purchase, and will happily click on the Google ads if they are relevant. This is not so often the case with email, however - the only situations that I can think of where I'd be responsive to targeted ads would be pre-sales query responses from merchants, or the one or two price bulletins I'm subscribed to (e.g. if they can mention somewhere I can get X cheaper.) But these types of emails would not be half as common as my use of search.
So to me, GMail looks like a service that will be massively more expensive per user for Google, with a lower return from click-throughs.
Anyone have any ideas of other situations where these ads might be successful (e.g. clicked on)?
Americans already give their fingerprints out for ATM and debit/credit cards today. The vast majority of Americans have no qualms about recording their fingerprints if they believe it will add to their own security.
Another thing freedome advocates like you miss is that most people dont care if their information gets out, because, they have nothing to hide and they have nothing to lose.
I dont know about you, but I can find a lot more uses for a GB of space other than E-mail. Google is going to find out about a year after this thing's official release that 60-90% of the mail stored on Gmail will be Viruses/Spam.
What I would like to see instead of this thing would be something along the lines of online storage like XDrive but free. That way I can store files from anywhere in the world, using just a web browser to access them.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Storing and processing the email of millions of users could be a good way to make PageRank more effective. What's a more valuable indicator of a page's importance than for its URL to be sent in an email ("hey! check this out" )?
Of course, their spam control would need to be stellar...
I would be first in line to buy hosting on Google clusters. If they are planning to offer virtual servers running Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/Linux, EROS or OpenBSD with fool root access, I am willing to instantly move all of my domains to Google, even if it costs more than my current provider.
Do you hear me, Google?
(Do you hear me, my current provider?)
What do you people think? Whould that be a good idea? Google might actually become Internet! Seriously. They are capable of hosting everything. Imagine how it would simplify spidering and indexing.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Imagine for a moment that this story was about Microsoft, and the ensuing madness that the statement "Maybe this is the first step of Microsoft trying to provide universal storage for everyone" would cause.
But because it's Google, Slashdot readers give them a free pass. What makes you all think that Google's intent is so purely benevolent? I would think that the suspicious nature of Slashdotters would regard such an expansive enterprise with much skepticism.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
... failed systems. It might not be cost effective for google to deal with them, but I bet you could piece together a lot of functioning boxes from the scrappage.
Gmail is NOT April Fools it seems... Check out www.gmail.com I am assuming the e-mail addresses will be somebody@gmail.com, and NOT google.com as people have thought. I have already put my name in to be notified for any beta testing. You can do this at the GMail Site in the FAQ. What worries me is that if they're offering 1GB per account... If Gmail is going to turn into a huge warez/porn/etc dump.
Imagine your mother is opening a day care center, is anyone going to start screaming in horror, picketing, filing lawsuits? Probably not.
Now imagine that your mother has been convicted of making and selling kiddie porn.
Whoops! Maybe reputation makes a difference.
Infuriate left and right
It took about 15 seconds to search Orkut for "April" and find:
9 42 57033126
http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=112460702
(April Buchheit: 80% trusty, 70% cool, 70% sexy)
Privacy is a two-way street, Google!
It is intereting to see a group of people that are always so quick to talk about security, and how leet they are, then go nuts over google storing e-mail. USE GPG. Encrypt your private e-mails and no body will read them.
If Gmail promised to do a 7x DOD wipe of you e-mails when you close your account, plus purge every old backup tape they have of your e-mails, within 10 minutes of your account closing, you should STILL encrypt private e-mail.
So much for talking about it and not doing it! Anyone who uses encryption doesn't care about google's privacy policy, as things are already as private as they get.
Has it occured to anyone that keeping residual copies of e-mails, possibly even for a time after the account is deleted, is necessary, even required, to back up the data? Google's privacy policy is unique in that it tells you what they do with your information, rather than (only) what they'll let other people do with your information.
The other large privacy concern here, that of ad-delivery, requires Google to scan e-mails for keywords. Yep. Big woop. They do that every time you search, you know -- and in the e-mails, their privacy policy specifically says that no humans will read it without specific permission to solve e.g. technical problems.
Tin foil hats can go back in the closet, boys.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
massively scalable, distributed computing platform
Rather, how about
which makes the most sense to me.Google already has a special advantage in knowing what kinds of search terms consumers are throwing at them, as well as which of the presented links are being clicked from which IP addresses. That kind of knowledge could actually help them to maintain their grip on the search market compared to newcomers.
By offering an email service where they can comb through the email archive using search technologies, they can determine, for example, whether ad-sponsored emails work, what makes them work better, etc.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I'm signing up for this as soon as I can - not because I want it or need it at the moment, but because if I'm going to use it at some point in the future, I'd rather be myname@gmail.com rather than myname3478998634@gmail.com
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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.
ThisIsAnExampleAccountGL@yahoo.com
Gmail screenshot
so it's simple, simple is good.
can't wait for it goes public.
...because Google will store every piece of spam exactly once. (Well, actually, their storage system is redundant so it will probably be stored a handful of times. But that's all.)
.signature file appears at the end of every email I send. That .signature could be stored once and then referred to by a pointer. More savings.
If 10,000 Gmail users receive a piece of spam, Google will index the spam (storing it 5 times for backup purposes) and each of the 10,000 users will get a tiny little index number that points to the indexed spam.
This system will be pretty efficient, because most of the email in the world is highly redundant, if only because most of it is spam.
If Google engineers cared to do so, they could also do things like break your emails into chunks and index each chunk. An identical
Of course, a good question to ask is: if Google starts allowing users to flag spam for other users, how long will it be before the spammers adapt? Spammers can certainly make every piece of spam different from every other piece if they want to. They may be doing this already... I am not up to speed in the world of spam and anti-spam.
As for the free online storage... have you ever tried emailing an attachment to yourself with your web-based email? Hmmm... "store files from anywhere in the world... use a web browser to access them." Yep, sounds about right to me. Although attachments will probably be limited in size, as some people speculate, so don't try storing any feature films or anything.
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.
Google is the internet!
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
So you'll get ads for PGP, GnuPG, Enigmail, GNU/Linux, and Mozilla.
Hope this helps!
Fellowship 9/11
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"
Regards, -- Chris Johansen