Slashdot Mirror
Forbes Reviews Google's Gmail [updated]
An anonymous reader submits "Forbes.com has what looks to be the first hands-on review of Google's forthcoming Gmail service. Aside from the 1-gigabyte storage, the searching features sound pretty useful for what the writer calls 'email packrats' which I think fits me pretty well. But I can't say I agree with the writer's opinion that privacy fears, as discussed this Slashdot thread, about the Gmail service are 'overblown.' Still and all, I'm curious to try it myself and see what I think." Update: 04/13 00:55 GMT by T : notEA writes "A California state senator is drafting legislation to block Google from releasing Gmail. Seems kind of silly, since all anti-spam filters read your messages anyway."
I think Google is being VERY forthcoming with information and making it clear what they do and do not do...
Why the uproar... if you're against having them sort your mail and deliver ads based on content, don't sign up!
With 1GB of storage, it won't be long until someone writes a perl script
to run backups to multiple Google accounts. The money I'd save on tapes
alone--wow!
Go to www.spymac.com and sign up for 1G of free email
E-mail is an inherently insecure medium. For the most part messages are sent in the clear, meaning almost no attempt is made to obfuscate the contents of a message from someone with prying eyes. All Internet service providers store e-mail on a server in order to deliver it to you. Technicians with time on their hands and lousy ethics can--if they want--read your mail. ...
Google insists quite clearly in its privacy policy that "No human reads your mail to target ads or other information without your consent." The process by which it pushes ads at its users is fully automated. Fears about privacy problems inherent with the Gmail service are, in our opinion, overblown.
All of the privacy fears surounding Gmail are based on Google breaching their own privacy policy, which would be an unethical violation of trust. But, since e-mail is unencrypted, every e-mail provider on the face of the Earth has the same ability to breach that trust, including MSN Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink, and whoever/whatever you trust your e-mail to.
So, when it comes down to it, the bottom line question is, do you trust Google to do what they say they're going to do? If you don't... just who are you going to trust to handle your e-mail?
If your tin foil hat is firmly on, you can't use e-mail at all. Most people will just not e-mail you rather than jump through security certificate hoops. That means their ISP's SMTP server could be logging everything that's sent from them to you, and you'd be powerless to stop that.
It's hardly a good review. It's descriptive of the features, but the author makes it a point to emphasize apparent facts. He dedicates one paragraph just defending the fact that 1 GB is good for you, as if there was strong opposition and people lined up with posters "Give me back my Hotmail 2 MB!" outside of Google's offices.
Then in two paragraphs he explains what "clear text" means, providing gratuitous analogies of your ISP techs potentially reading your e-mail.
Here're some more interesting first-hand experiences:
GMail review, about spam filters and all
Another review with screenshots
Review from a current user with pictures and information on ads
Mark Pilgrim, complaining GMail's JavaScript broke his Firefox shortcuts.
Even if Google is a "cool" company, I'm not so sure that I really want to let them have rights to my private information as their licence can be interpreted to give them.
Remember, Netscape used to be "cool" too. And Caldera. And so on and so fourth...
Then again, maybe McNealey was right and privacy is dead. What a wonderful world.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
I don't think there are any privacy concerns at all. The ad system is no different than their current ad system for seaches. It is 100% automated, no one will actually be reading your mail. If you're concerned about a computer scanning through your e-mail than you can't use any e-mail service that blocks spam and/or viruses as that is what they do.
"Once you find the one of the e-mail messages that is part of that exchange, Gmail displays it with related messages in the window. Gmail calls these exchanges "conversations." And clicking on one expands it so that more than one relevant message is displayed at a time. A link at the right of the screen says "expand all," and it expands all the messages that are part of a conversation.
Similar to threading in Thunderbird / Moz? That is a pretty handy feature, except under Thunderbird it sometimes tries to thread EVERY message sent from a mailing list, instead of individual topics within the mailing list.
Still, one of my fav mail features.
Slashdot sucks
Spymac already offers free 1GB e-mail accounts without all the privacy issues of GMail. However, not everyone wants their email address to have the word 'mac' in it.
I went to college for this?...
Who needs 100 megabytes of e-mail? I use Yahoo! and stay way under the limit. If your e-mail is really that important you can save it on your own computer in a text file. Durrrrrr
They can go ahead and search my 1 Gigabyte encrypted zip file all they want.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Is everyone prepared for the 'oklahoma-land-rush style' name grabbing?
I'm sure there will be people who will try and speculate a few names for themselves and then sell them just like domain names.
I have a script that refreshes the gmail page daily to try and get a jump on my name but I don't have faith that I'll actually get it.
-- dK
I am looking forward to google email. I am not concerned with privacy as contexual advertising is now way more intrusive than preventing spam.
A First Look At Google's Gmail
Arik Hesseldahl, 04.12.04, 10:00 AM ET
Having tried most Web-based e-mail services, we were eager to try Google's new Gmail, which offers up to a full gigabyte of storage.
Google invited us to experiment with the early version of the service, and taking into account that it remains under construction, we have a few preliminary observations.
At first glance, it looks like pretty much every other Web-based e-mail service out there. But there are a few interesting features we haven't seen before.
First, Gmail is good for the e-mail pack rat that many people are becoming. Most people delete old e-mail messages because they have storage constraints--or think they do, or because they just don't like to see a cluttered inbox. But if you're the type who likes to refer back to old e-mail in order to remember what you or another party said, Gmail's 1-gigabyte storage is certainly a welcome change.
Another feature that makes it easy to re-trace the steps in an e-mail exchange: say you need to remember a few action items sent by e-mail from the boss. Once you find the one of the e-mail messages that is part of that exchange, Gmail displays it with related messages in the window. Gmail calls these exchanges "conversations." And clicking on one expands it so that more than one relevant message is displayed at a time. A link at the right of the screen says "expand all," and it expands all the messages that are part of a conversation.
Finding those messages is far easier and faster than with any other e-mail program or service we've ever experienced. A search field at the top of screen lets you search for practically any word that may appear in any part of the email, including the subject, the name of the sender or what may be in the body of the message. If there's one thing Google does well, it's search. We entered in words we knew we had used in messages sent and they popped up instantly. Another search using the last name of the moderator of a certain mailing list we subscribe to was equally fast and comprehensive.
On other e-mail programs or services, the most effective way to search message content without taking a long time is to rearrange e-mail by date, sender or subject and then try to zero in on the message you're looking for. Gmail has solved this problem brilliantly.
Organizing messages from your inbox is also different with Gmail. Gmail's approach is to use labels, instead of folders, which allows messages to have overlapping types.
For instance, you might subscribe to a mailing list where you discuss politics, but also correspond privately about politics and other things with a personal friend, with whom you're also making vacation plans. If a message from your friend addresses both an ongoing political discussion and vacation plans, it can be labeled as "politics" and "vacation." On the left side of the inbox screen you can click on these labels and instantly see all the messages labeled as politics or vacation or whatever you want.
Finally, you've probably heard much of the hot air surrounding Google's plans to push ads at Gmail users. The first night we started using Gmail, late April 9, we saw the text ads, which were nearly identical to the text ads you're used to seeing in on the right side of the screen after a Web search at Google.com. As of this morning, we noticed no text ads at all.
E-mail is an inherently insecure medium. For the most part messages are sent in the clear, meaning almost no attempt is made to obfuscate the contents of a message from someone with prying eyes. All Internet service providers store e-mail on a server in order to deliver it to you. Technicians with time on their hands and lousy ethics can--if they want--read your mail.
The only way to prevent this is to encrypt your e-mail so that only those who have the keys to decrypt it can read it. But consumers have shown that they overwhelmingly don't care to use encryption, mainly because it adds too many steps in t
Maybe that does not cost them so much as it seems.
Google:
No human reads your mail to target ads or other information without your consent
What about programs that target ads to you based on your email or ``other'' information? The way the article is worded infers that this is happening. What is to prevent google from coming up with human-readable statistics of what email messages a person or group of people are receiving or sending?
I've heard people saying google doesn't expect all users to use all 1GB, but what happens when users get spam and don't remove the spam? This and all email viruses will quickly fill up even 1GB of storage. Will google remove all unread emails after N days or what?
I may be an exception, but I use my web e-mail addresses as backups for my more secure accounts. Google, then, will just be another backup...one with a lot of storage. :)
I know I can't be the only one that thinks this way...can I?
Goo goo g'joob.
Why do we have to rely on free gmail or Hotmail services to get our e-mail kicks. Can't we go back to the old days and just set up our own exchange servers using freeware software and choose our own domains? I can just imagine it: Ramdux@IveGotTwentyGigsOfEmailStorageSpaceSoKissMy Ass.com
!!!
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case with other email providers - especially ones that outsourced support to other countries.
It seems that Google has little to gain by not just capitulating to every concern raised about security, as this seems mostly to be a way to put a permanent end to yahoo.com. It doesn't really matter though, as most people don't really want to change their e-mail so these account are probably going to just be used for data backup as has already been stated.
_____
Thank you.
Organizing messages from your inbox is also different with Gmail. Gmail's approach is to use labels, instead of folders, which allows messages to have overlapping types.
Now this is exactly the kind of simple-but-fantastically-useful thinking that makes me love google. I can only hope that Apple `borrows' the idea for mail.app
-Colin
one gig of storage? wow. in theory, i could use that space to store a fair amount of warez, tunes, and flicks, and spread them around with relative impunity. for that matter... who's gonna stop me?
-knowles
"Still and all" - what does that mean?
Am I alone in thinking of hotmail or yahoo or google as the kind of e-mail you use when you have no better alternative? I can't imagine why anyone who can afford the price of an Internet account wouldn't prefer Pegasus, Eudora, or even Outlook.
Beyond that, I want my e-mail archives on my computer, not on some random server that I don't control. I want to know that I'm the only person who is accessing my files, and I don't want to wake up some morning and find out that the message that I desperately need to review is lost because of a server failure or DDOS attack.
Relying on a webmail system for your primary communications just seems foolish.
Three Squirrels
You must explicitly request Google by name to use their services. You can't be unaware of their existence like you can with Microsoft or Apple (comes with the computer).
Google does not surreptitiously install spyware on your system and record everything you do on your computer, requiring you to meticulously hunt down and remove its components or employ third party scumware removal utilities.
All you have to do stop using Google is to stop typing their name.
Switching to Google did not require a 15MB download, or a registration process, or a credit card. As the average joe, you've invested very little in Google, and you can replace them as simply as you can type a 4-8 letter word.
The only thing that keeps you typing their name is that you believe they're the best way to find the answer. Once you stop believing that, once a significant group of people become fed up, Google is finished. They know this, you should too.
In fact, type "search engine" and Google will tell you about altavista, lycos, excite, alltheweb, etc.
Google's servers are a lot more than your crappy little computer. And I'm sure they will do offline backups of all their servers in case of whatever you think could happen to them.
People are complaining because google is scanning their email with a computer. We have our private email scanned all the time, for viruses and for spam. In fact, many of the spam based filtering approaches look at the words and their structure and generate statistical models based on that for the purposes of identifying legit email from illigit.
So google will scan to add ads to my email. This info wasn't buried on page 200 in small legalese, but was in their FAQ! Google has been very forthcoming with how they will scan and store individuals email. Given that they are upfront about this, some of the privacy groups seem to literally have gone off the wall.
People say, ads are obnoxious in my email. Clearly you havn't used hotmail recently. They are in the frame and in the email! Google invented the unobtrusive ad.
Compared to the hotmail and yahoo accounts people will be coming from (have you read your SBC/Yahoo terms of service recently), it is hard to see how google will be so much worse for them, even from a privacy standpoint.
While the airlines are giving my flight info to private contractors to profile me so that I can't travel anymore, without telling me, google posts how they will scan my email to advertise products to me.
Personally, I couldn't care less about their mail scanning to associate ads. It's a free service.. Ad's are the cost of usage. If they can get legitimate advertisers and successfully achieve directed advertising, that's even better. I am much more concerned about transit and authentication security.
Some of the privacy areas that would be more valuable to me are:
- Ability to access securely. I am much more concerned about sniffers on public networks grabbing my data than google's software seeing it. Can I use a fully SSL encrypted session for mail access (rather than Yahoo's SSL authentication, then clear viewing of mail content)?
- Encrypted e-mail support? Open standards based e-mail encryption would be a major plus. If it was compatible with Mozilla/Thunderbird it would be extremely useful. Running a huge mail service that supported this could get enough momentum for average people to actually secure their e-mail. (The mail is then secured not only in transit, but also on the disk.)
- IMAPS / POPS support? I don't know if it will allow POP/IMAP support at all. But, if it does, SSL encrypted sessions are a must to avoid password and data sniffing.
Wonder how much I could sell a gmail account loaded with mp3s for on eBay?
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
I wonder, though, if they'll actually be able to offer 1GB per account for very long. And I also somewhat wonder if this won't become a filesharing tool as well? Just e-mail your movies or whole MP3 library to anyone who asks for it?
Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
With 1GB of space, an address not on your personal domain, threading, and searching, this seems like it would be nice to use for mailing lists and Usenet replies.
That sort of mail is generally public anyway, so the privacy issues would be negligible.
because google is often down?..... I trust them to be up more then my ISP.
I Love Alberta Beef
Don't forget that they're going to learn a lot about how to defeat various abusive strategies with their own record-keeping and creative ideas. They're going to have the world's best testbed for all kinds of new internet-related issues.
My guess is that they'll experiment with techniques to make sure it's a person, rather than a script. And they'll keep stats on how effective each technique was.
There will be so many interesting research opportunities for them. There are perks to being the world's largest provider of something (MS, Oracle, Google, etc).
One thing that makes me skeptical on Gmail is the huge amount of storage required to keep the system running.
F -8&q=200000000+*+1+Gb )
1) Let's make a simple calculation: let's pick up the number of Hotmail accounts (200,000,000 as I heard last time). Multiply this with 1 Gb and you get 24 Petabytes of data!
(See Google for more details http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UT
It would be interesting to know how much data does Google store today.
2) Now, let's compute how much power will this system consume? Assuming at least a RAID 1 configuration, you would need at least 48 Petabytes of storage since we all know that harddisks fail.
Let's assume that one harddisk stores around 250 Gb of data. Let's assum uncompressed data (since those 1 Gb can contain anything after all... This means that we need around 200,000,000 * 2 / 250 = 1,600,000 harddrives running all the time!
Now, let's pick up the power consumption to be around 10 W. We then get around 1,600,000 * 10 = 16 Gigawatts of power to be dissipated. Now THAT is a lot of power... Think of all the maintenance costs for running this for only one year.
Anyway, the engineering challenges are pretty strong here. I imagine that Google is taking a risky bet here and hopes to develop storage rack/ventiation technology "on the go".
In conclusion, I really think that either Gmail won't be free, or the 1 Gb limit is a marketing number.
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.
It should be possible to use public key encryption with inspected outgoing and incoming email gateways to ensure email content privacy.
-Incoming SMTP Email
| Incoming Gateway encrypts plaintext email with User's public Key
- Encrypted Email
| Gmail Web based email server
- Encrypted Email
| User's Web Brower with Javascript decrypt. User supplies/cut-pastes private Key
- Decrypted Email only at user browser side
| User Reads and enters reply into text window
| More Javascript encrypts outgoing content using outgoing gateway's public key
- Encrypted Email
| Outgoing Email gateway decrypts outgoing Email
- Decrypted Email
As long as the Incoming and Outgoing email servers remain seperate,subject to inspection and undergo regular auditing, then the email stored on Gmail will remain unreadable to Google.
Ok, so now it's not okay to make sarcastic slams on stupid trolls? Thanks a bunch for the offtopic -1. My reply was right on topic with the message I was replying to.
cos I plan to use my Gmail account to subscribe to discussion lists and not worry about saving messages I may need in the future in my "local folders".
I think they started doing it when they saw the demand after the early Apr google announcement and people thought it was an april fools joke.
Disk space is so cheap this isn't an amazing size -- I get 10GB (email+web hosting) for $10/month.
Unless I'm mistaken, using a web based e-mail system as your primary service is, more often than not, a bad idea. You won't be able to access your mail if the site goes down, and if their servers crash, your mail is quite possibly gone forever.
:)
If the server goes down and you can't access your Gmail email messages, you, yes you guessed it, google for them. See google.com
I just want to point out that searching email is not some brillant new idea Google had. If you have a Yahoo account, login to your mail, go to the inbox, and click "Search Mail." You have the option of it searching the full text of all messages. There's even an advanced search.
My point is simply that Google allowing you to search your mail is not some huge innovation.
HOWEVER the 1 gigabyte storage limit is awesome! (My Yahoo mail account has only 6mb)
I wonder if the people complaining about google processing email
to find related ads and we pages are also opposed to spam filters
examining message bodies? Bayesian spam filters even build
user profiles!
Doesn't this mean my spam will contain spam?
What makes people think that Hotmail, Yahoo, and other free-mail providers don't intentionally or accidentally archive, parse, or otherwise "invade" their users' privacy to some degree?
In any event, as long as people are sending clear text email across the net, it's all being read and stored by _somebody_.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
and you'll find that gmail's is quite good.
Ummm, you realize this is true for ANY email service? Any mail server is hosted on a server can can go down or crash. In fact, I would trust Google or Yahoo or MSN more. They usually have clusters of servers. If one goes down, it is unlikely that the other 99 aren't going to go down. And they keep regular backups and such.
Now I can archive years of spam and show my grandkids just how easy it used to be to get
a) Viagra
b) Vicodin
c) A degree
d) A loan
e) Laid
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
The idea of multiple labels is good, but I wonder if they could automate the process using bayesian filters for labels and not only to detect spam.
Now _THAT_ will be nice.
^_^
... to target ads or other information without your consent."
I, for one, welcome our new Google AI overlords.
Warning: this joke expires in about 25 years when machines *do* take over.
Since Google announced GMail I decided it was about time I took a stab at offering e-mail services seriously. Even if it was just April 1st and Google was just joking.
So I whipped up some scripts to work on top of Mercury Mail and added OpenSSL to the server. Currently the web-mail portion is text only. This allows you to report spam before it gets into your POP3 client without notifying the spammers if they have externally linking images or whatnot.
When you delete a message, it's gone. I was going to go with Google AdSense to try to support the cost but Google's systems obviously can't read your e-mail so the ads weren't working out. So it's just free and no ads. In the future I may find a way to get Google AdSense to mesh with it.
The cool feature though is the full text search. It uses a modified version of DGS Search which by default is too anal about how it creates the links to the files it finds to be usable. So I fixed it.
15,000KB max file attachments, no storage limits (just don't use it for file storage).
So if you're interested in how the features of GMail are going to work for you, give Indie-Mail a try. Just create an account, forward some e-mails to it and try it out.
I'll be working on spiffying up the look of it over time. My goal was to just get it functional and secured.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
The search functions are not that special, I already use Powermail which allows me to search in every way mentioned, and gives a nice easy to see bar of the messages relevance. All of my e-mail resides on my computer, not some mystery server, so I can search it when not linked to the net. Also, I have currently 4 e-mail addresses, should I be thinking of forwarding all these to Google, so they can organize my searches?
Nahhh.
I know I am not their intended audience, but I am trying to figure out what it may be able to do for me that a full featured e-mail app couldn't.
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
I trust google to not read my email... and I really don't have a problems with ads being displayed to me...
Look at Hotmail... in hotmail, If your mother or your wife is using hotmail, despite the content of the email, or her profile, she is bombarded with ads for singles sites, personals sites, and the occasional porn site... and that's being shown to your 16 year old kid too.
These ads are made to look like polls and chat boxes or survey forms to specifically increase click through....
but google, though it may parse your email, will display a relevant ad based upon the content of the email. This means your mother will be shown recipe sites... your daughter will be pointed to the Gap, and when you wife mentions Valentines or Mothers day to you, you will be able to instantly click through to redenvelope.com...
Possibly, it could be a life saver.
and honestly, if I never had to sort or search for an email again, Id be happy.
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
I'm just wondering if anyone knows how they can pay the necessary space to host the service... Obviously not everyone will use 1 gig right away, but those things are gonna grow fast as people won't bother erasing their crap email... Is text ads enough to generate the necessary funds?
Relax, they've already covered this w/ per file size limits. ;)
i'd bet there'll be a few more tricks they'll have to watch for this. Buy another tape; it won't kill you.
... but there is no way i'd store my mail on their servers, not the important stuff anyway.
;)
Though if i can make a 1gb attachment to myself then that'll be a handy way to store stuff
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Bobb has every email he's been sent since 1996. It might be thousands of messages, maybe hundreds of thousands by now. His Eudora mailbox has been transplanted to two different computers and that's only in the time I've been here. He hates having to reboot his machine because it takes 20 minutes for Eudora rebuild the index. And worst of all, it's mostly useless, out-of-date crap!!! Every old, unimportant thing you could imagine--network monitoring alarms from the late '90's, 'see you in five minutes' type stuff, bounces, and spam, spam, spam... maybe 1% of this stuff has enough content to bother with. The rest? A distraction if not a hinderance.
please don't end up like bobb. prune that mailbox regularly! don't forget to wash behind your home directory, either.
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/04/12/dream
and here:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/04/10/gmail
My favorite quotes:
That said, I have a gmail account and I think it looks great. Still, that's an awesome flame from Mark Pilgrim.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
There's a reasonable likelihood that yourname@Gmail.com will still be working 5 or 10 years from now, when you'll really need the 1 gig for the accumulated emails. I'd put the probability of "these guys" being around 10 years from now at approximately zero.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
hitest
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I had an Email Packrat once. What I really wanted was a hamster.
:^/
Never tried to make it 'fit' me though
I have my browser configured to allow only SSLv3, and I cannot connect to the gmail site unless I enable SSLv2.
I haven't R'd TFA yet, but I actually have a gmail account.
My verdict: it's FAST, most everything seems to be done in javascript, much like Orkut. It's like night and day compared to yahoo, and no obtrusive slow-loading ads.
As for the privacy stuff, Brin is right- it's pretty much gone anyway, complaining about AdSense is just rearranging the deck chairs.. Especially when you sign up for a free email service- how do you expect to have privacy with a free email service? Run your own mail server if you want privacy.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Yahoo and Hotmail offer 4 MB of storage, and crapmail.com offers 6. But, if you don't want a crapmail address and you want to be something at yahoo, and you want an extra two megs, sign up for email at yahoo in some language you know besides english, where they offer 6 mb of storage. I know yahoo.de (germany) is, so if you signed up there, you could get an extra 2 mb. you can change language once you've signed up.
How much time will it take for you to accumulate 1GB of valid email(No spam)? In that time what will have happened to the price of large HD's? I don't think there is any moore's law for HD's but they do get bigger really quick. 1 TB HD's in 3 years anyone?
Ok, so now it's not okay to make sarcastic slams on stupid trolls? Thanks a bunch for the offtopic -1. My reply was right on topic with the message I was replying to.
But it was offtopic to the overall discussion of GMail.
Mod parent UP!
There will be no "big warez ftp server" on GMail. Attachments will be limited to 10MB. That's an MP3 or two, and if you need to send anything more there is nothing to stop you sending multiple emails with the file split into pieces.
.exes, which would have the happy bonus fun measure of removing some email virii).
Quit bitching. If it happens, there will likely be ways of stopping it (i.e disallowing
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
I feel that Google know what they're doing, and they're not the ones we have to worry about when it comes to privacy breaches.
The problem is having a majority of your web activity and private email stored in one central location. How are we not to know that some screwed up law will be passed in the tradition of the Patriot Acts and allow whatever/whoever access to a large personal database. When you sign up for Gmail you agree that your messages will remain on their server forever.
Even so at the moment, if you're suspected of being a 'terrorist' there's nothing to stop your data being handed over to the appropriate authorities. This might sound paranoid - but overall it's not. Think of the type of profiling you could do on someone with that amount of data at your fingertips.
Another search using the last name of the moderator of a certain mailing list we subscribe to was equally fast and comprehensive.
/., I can trust that the readers are technical enough to make up their own minds. I don't care if I disagree with the spin 100% of the time. But the IP list goes to all these relatively non-technical people, parroting to even less technical people...
<giggle giggle> Apparently the first thing this Forbes writer did with gmail is search for "Farber."
It's really annoying how popular the IP list is with tech journalists. Dave Farber is a very smart guy, but I take issue with the spin he puts on 95% of his news items. And I hate his pretentious BS. ("Interesting People"?!? WTF is wrong with him?)
At least on
(Also, keep in mind that Forbes is the magazine that specifically told its reporters that if they can relate a story to Linux, then they should do so.)
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I've read all your email and you've got nothing to hide.
paintball
What's to stop someone writing a client for GMail that encrypts and decrypts email, thereby bypassing privacy concerns (and Google's revenue model) ?
(Sure, you could always PGP and then paste but that's a pain. A better system would be a web client that uses the Gmail backend).
Rip. Mix. Burn.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Privacy fears aren't "overblown"; just look at all the information they try to collect when you fill in the forms for Orkut, by far the most extensive and penetrating data-collection i have seen on the web. They sure are trying to build a massive database of comprehensive personal information about their users. Now add to that your emails and your search/surfing habits and the picture is complete.
I have been banging my head against the 100 MB limit for quite some time. Additionally, with that amount of data in my mailbox, searches through even just the headers are cumbersome (read: Take multiple minutes.)
Downloading the mail to my computer is not an option, as it ruins the one reason I use yahoo in the first place - the ability to have access to all of my email wherever there is a web browser and an internet connection.
paintball
"But I can't say I agree with the writer's opinion that privacy fears"
Well someone reading my email then sending me ads according to what I discuss with my friends is a bad as my local grocer wanting to sniff my underwear then send me coupons according to what he thinks I've been eating.
Google's idea, like dirty underwear, stinks..
Any word on pop3 access or on premium add-ons? How about a spam filter or integration with Blogger?
Well, no shit. You've got exclusive use of a system probably designed for 50 million users. If it's not fast...
More of TFUCKINGA:
Holy shit! They've invented meta-data. Expect this to be like the way Microsoft's meta-world should be in Longhorn. Now to manage your inbox you have to type the same word (or letter with AutoFill) 100 times to organize shit. I don't care if they're really not, but make labels invisibly similar to folders somehow!! For the love of gods...
Even MORE of theFUCKINGArticle: Buggy already??
TfuckingA:
Well, yeah. That'd be a spammers DREAM.
tFUCKINGa:
A glowing review followed by Yahoo! is better. Holy shit batman, make up your fucking mind.
Webmaster Wanted - Entropic Reactions
I wonder if G-Unit is going to sue Gmail...
I'm surprised at how many slashdotters are so non-chalant towards Google's complete lack of respect for privacy. And let's get it straight: it is a lack of respect for privacy. Whether you're looking in someone's closet to find a skeleton or merely inventory the contents, you're still looking in someone's closet. Slashdot's general response to Gmail has been, "Well, they're being up front about it." We might be giving Google in the present permission to look in our closets now and be ok with it. But you're not only giving Present-Google permission, you're giving Future-Google permission with every email you send, and no one - even Present-Google - knows what kind of character Future-Google will have. You're not just giving one guy permission to look in your closet, you're giving him and all his descendents permission.
If this were Microsoft's brilliant idea, say Mmail, you'd be all over it like flies at a honey maker convention. So where are the flies?
I've yet to be able to use my Spymac account in any real manner, due to the constant "maintenance outages" and general sluggishness. Maybe that's how they keep from getting raped on the 1GB offer, just make the service so useless it won't get used!
The only way a demon will appear is to utter it's name. And even then, it will only appear to you if you have something it needs or wants. It's up to you to be able to control the demon.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Anyone who relies on a free or cheap e-mail system to deal with secure information is out of his or her mind, but if you're on a number of binary mailing lists and don't mind people seeing the traffic from it, why not? Just be careful of what you do with the Gmail address.
NB: YMMV. IANAL. Take the above with a grain of salt.
I almost have 1GB of email in my maildir and mutt has ZERO problems handling it. I can slice/dice and search in it. I love MUTT!
Anyway, how many corporates are going to abandon Outlook and go in through a webmail interface instead? For that matter, how many non-corporates are going to abandon Eudora ?
Webmail interfaces are fine for remote accessing your email, but nobody in their right mind uses them for infrastructural purposes. If you want decent search in your existing email client, then use ISYS email and keep using the mail client you want to.
it's too bad the poster had to link to Forbes' article on Gmail--they've been consistently pro-SCO, and anti-FOSS, applying lots of FUD in favor of the 'party line' of commercial software--these guys have very little insight into the technology world, unless you belong to their core audience of gray-haired Masters of the Universe, who are trying to grok this new-fangled 'Information Superhighway' thing...
The gigabyte of storage sounds like a big deal, but really it's not. 100MB and a decent spam blocker would also equate to a "lifetime" of e-mails for anyone whose e-mail is sufficiently unimportant that they use a free-as-in-beer service.
The searchability and management of the thing is the key.
I know lots of people who use free e-mail, and a lot of my friends have "free" e-mail on one of my servers. Not one of them is geeky enough to even use folders.
If Google can leverage the search technology and come up with a better UI than their Orkult Dating Service, they're home free. I've not yet checked out Gmail personally, but it seems obvious they will need a different search concept than they use in Google.com - and I wouldn't be surprised if it was based on what they do for their corporate intranet customers.
I think they've probably gotten the message about creepy AdWords, so I don't expect you will see Viagra ads when you're reading your love mails. And as for seeing travel agency ads when you're discussing your next trip, I think people will get used to that very quickly.
Of course this will bring forth a whole new breed of spam: messages designed to show up in your Gmail searches. But hey, no free lunch...
Anyway that's my four Forints. Off to RTFA now...
This Like That - fun with words!
No, I'm New Here
At http://zoe.nu you can check out an Email client-server that does what Gmail does, but right on your own computer where you have many GB of disk space free. That includes serving your Email up over the web (if you have a static IP address, of course). It may not have the Google search engine, but the one it has seems pretty powerful and quick.
Now doesn't that make more sense than Gmail, and especially for anyone who is sensitive about storing Email on a commercial server? It's only for Mac OS X right now, but perhaps there are similar products that run on other systems?
ThosEM
If you don't want your e-mail to be read by others, don't use PLAINTEXT!!!
Instead use PGP or some open variant.
Sending ANY e-mail via plaintext is almost like using "family-channel" walkie talkies. Anybody (within an area/network) could be listening.
Get a job you lazy slob!
WTF?! From the Yahoo! article: The groups charged, among other things, that scanning e-mail for ad placement poses unnecessary risks of misuse and that the system sets "potentially dangerous precedents and establishes reduced expectations of privacy" in e-mails. "reduced expectation of privacy" ? I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks email is private is a fscking dumbass. If you want privacy, don't use unencrypted email (of course you could use GPG etc., but then what's the point of being able to search through 1GB of encryped messages?).
Senator.Figueroa@sen.ca.gov
Idiots piss me off.
It means that you get double spam, since the ad parsers will think you're interested in viagra and Nigerian despots. Wonderful! I have an account now, but my initial thinking is to use it only for certain spamproofed addresses, like newsletters, and not for personal mail. I'll get lots of ads for thinkpads, SANs, virus software and such :)
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
When ever you send plain text over an untrusted network have no expectation of privacy.
Targeted ads work, the people at google are merely capitalizing on the fact that most people are too lazy to ensure they're own privacy. The gouvernement isn't there to protect you, you have to protect yourself.
Support cryptography.
more of the same
This is a PERFECT example of how so many people complain and protest about too much stuff. Hey retards, if you don't like it, don't sign up. Its free! I will be getting an address as soon as they let people sign up for it. I could care less if some computer somewhere is reading my email. Wish I lived in CA so I could tell this senator how much of a freaking moron he is. Doesn't he have something better to do?
This is being blown so far out of proportion. Seriously. As countless others have said, our email is scanned all the time by third parties for spam and viruses.
If you have concerns about Google scanning your email to place unobstrusive, sometimes-actually-useful text advertisements next to your email, then there is a solution. DON'T FLIPPING USE IT! That's all there is too it!
The thing that I'M concerned about is if they pull a similar move that Apple did with mac.com accounts. "Oh yah they'll be free forever", then two years later, once everyone is hooked on free @mac.com email addresses, they turn around and say they're going to charge $99 dollars per year. Excuse me? I dont think so. My mac.com email was my main email for nearly two years and as soon as they pulled that shit, I cancelled my account, bought my own domain, and now have free email for life. Apple was hoping that users would pay because they had been using that email address as their main email and wouldnt want to switch. Well it didnt work on me and yo should have read the mac message boards when this happened. People were pissed!
I do think Gmail is a cool idea. Being able to store a gig of email so you (as an average user anyways) never have to delete email and have the best search engine in the world to search through old emails is awesome. But what if their idea is to get you hooked so you wont ever want to give it up, then start charging a fee for it? Even though it is worth probably $100/year, I would tell them to shove their bill up their ass and move on. This is why I won't use Gmail.
Joseph?
They're based on probabiistic models that score the mail's likelihood of being actual spam, but that's as far as it goes.
Someone might come up with a model to find out whether a e-mail contains a future terrorist plan or a financial scandal in the making, but unless a specific model is make to keep track of that, it will go unnoticed. Just as webserver logs.
Guess who besides Forbes sat down with Google last week? The Electronic Frontier Foundation. "EFF strongly recommends that Gmail users delete the Google cookie often." I wonder why this link wasn't considered by Slashdot?
All spam filters "read" your email. AOL, Hotmail, anything with SpamAssasin, any service with spam protection needs to "read" messages to analyze them.
Oh, and about this:
..."residual copies of email may remain on our systems for some time"...
They use computers with hard drives! They can't guarantee that data is completely shredded. I'm sure they're not performing a secure wipe of every sector containing portions of an email once it's deleted.
If you started looking, most of the privacy "concerns" with Google's service apply to almost any email service. It's a huge fuss over nothing.
-- If you can read this, you are too close to my signature.
This get-out-of-jail card /. grants to Google is ridiculous. In a year it will be gone and the mob will turn on Google and we can look back on this collective idiocy.
Truly this is a forum of morons.
MS sits on immense mountain of cash. Google does not. Which will likely gut your privacy concerns to make a buck? Maybe both, but Google's revenue stream is much more closely tied to BigBrother than MS's.
If you don't want your mail "scanned" don't friggen use gMail...
Is this so hard?
But it's perfectly alright for the government to monitor everything we do, without our permission, for the purpose of ...whatever... instead of the relatively benign intent of delivering targeted ads, with our permission?
Further, Microsoft can stuff the EXACT SAME THING in a tiny micro-print EULA, while Google is upfront about it.
Hmmm... When he hands in the draft of the legislation, let's check the Word doc metadata to see who really wrote it.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Looks like the Republicans are going to be safe for 2004.
Come now. You have no proof these other email services are reading your mail and frankly to claim as much in ignorance is a disingenous tactic even this mob of GED-dropouts must grasp.
So what happens when I send a thousand keywords for gay sex in a spam to you? YOU'VE GOT MALE! Get used to "interesting" ads in the rest of your reading this month.
Is your personal information grist for an adword engine? If so, sign up. In a few months when ad words from an unfortunate email won't get out of your face, you will never forget that you are part of the machine whether you like it or not...all for $5 worth of disk space.
Why on earth would you want a common username@ portion of an email address? I had to specifically move away from those types of addresses just based on the sheer volume of spam due to dictionary attacks on SMTP servers.
My email address is still easy to remember, though: j240f89234jf2-0934jf234f@mydomain.com.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Is Google spreading itself thin in an attempt to provide everything about information?
Taking on email is going to be a monster.
No doubt they have the cream of the crop to sort it out, however, its still going to be a challange.
For example, spammers will forge emails with a google domain name even if they don't have an account there.
Its going to be interesting to watch and possibly entertaining.
All the power to them.
BUT if the current services faulter, they should give it up.
Just thought people should know. I mean we flame HDD manufacturers for it so lets all stick to same double standard. I mean cmon dammit, we can damn well use our base 10 number system when its convenient for us so lets be consistent.
Borrowing from someones sig: There are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
hint hint
Meanwhile, I have free news, email, etc. [above and beyond what I pay my ISP for].
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
If you wish to contact the good Senator Figueroa about her proposed bill, you may E-mail her here: Senator.Figueroa@SEN.CA.GOV
"It takes a very long time to count to 2 in binary." ~'Fourlegged'
Pre searching and building an index on you email's keywords has to be done anyway - it's not google's style to just grep your shit on demand. So an index of everything will be already done.
Storing only unique compressed binary data would of course blow that and cost Google more.
Regarding ads, I hope they don't let 3rd parties deliver the ads or ad servers will be able to at least track to what IP address a type of ad is sent to. If its a major ad server who's tracking you anyway, they'll have even more on you.
I run my own mail server. I have roughly 330 GB of drive space on my web/file/e-mail server. I trust myself to store it pretty much 100%. My only problem is sporadic reliability (which a UPS and backup MX record will soon fix), and crackers/script kiddies breaking into it and wreaking senseless damage on it.
That's who I think is more trustworthy than Google.
>You're making a bad assumption that everyone else has the same email habits as you do.
... email and not as FTP or WebDAV or file server.
You're making a bad assumption that everyone else has the same email habits as you do.
Most people use email as
Email is a terrible medium for exchanging files - it's slow, it requires network copy (bad by itself) from sender to SMTP server1 to SMTP server2 rcpt, and since most servers don't support mail sharing, permissions aren't supported, etc.
Consider emailing an attachment as opposed to a URL with a link to secure WebDAV or FTP repository.
Is there going to be a mad rush for unique and interesting user names like stephee21857?
My mail has accumulated to 1.8GB just in the two years since I switched to
Gnus (circa April 2002); everything from before that is still stored in
Pegasus Mail on my Windows partition, except for the stuff from when I was
in college, which is stored as plain text (but with full headers) on my old
FAT16 data partition.
Okay, so most of that is mailing lists and spam, but still... one mere
gigabyte is nowhere near enough for a whole lifetime. If they were promising
to double the storage limit every eighteen months, then it might be closer to
enough (especially if you delete all the spam, instead of keeping it around
for statistical analysis like I do).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
We all can love Google's technology, but allowing Google
to monitor email communications is a bad precedent.
I am sure if Google gets away with this, Microsoft will be not far behind. Microsoft is already going to have a indexed file system in Longhorn. Then with hotmail/msn they will
provide a backup space and then target ads based on this information. So Microsoft will have everyone personal computer's indexed.
becasue, "We think it's an absolute invasion of privacy. It's like having a massive billboard in the middle of your home."
:P
Funny, I thought that was my television.
It even has the temerity to customize the ads it delivers based on the shows I watch!
how many rods are in a mile? 320.
A number of people have successfully signed up so it's not a consistent problem. I ran into the problem once myself and then it magically went away. I created an account with a non secured connection and then creating accounts with the secured connection worked fine without changing anything.
If you're having trouble signing up with the OpenSSL secured version use
The non secured version
The site fully functions both with http and https since not all browsers support certificates and I havn't figured out what makes it choak with https on an inconsistant basis.
BTW, "missing entries" means that one of the form entries wasn't set. The only ones it checks for that error are the username, two password entries and the challengeid.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
this is NOT like having a massive billboard in your house unless you requested said billboard to be in your house. If I want to put up an ugly billboard in my own house that's very much my own business.
In fact, I think Mrs. Senator with too much time on her hands will be horrified that most teenages post many billboards on their walls. They're called "posters."
This senator should get to work right away drafting a bill to make it illegal for me to sign up for anything that invades my privacy. It should be illegal for me to choose to fill out surveys.
There goes Gator (nothing ever has all bad side effects). There goes every credit card company. In fact, there goes every targeted ad company that uses private information to send you junk.
Arnold had it right when he said the California government should be part time so they don't have time to waste drafting up silly laws.
When he said it no one was sure what silly legislation he was talking about.
Well, now we have an example.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
>Sez Google: No human reads your mail to target ads or other information without your consent.
Screw them... I'd add "because it's too expensive, even if we outsourced it to India"
Compare bandwidth of a human reader with one of a machine... And average Joe will have 100MB of email in their mailbox.
Get the idea?
Since they don't care about nuances (it's more like keyword or term search), it's stupid to use humans for such job.
And it's ridiculous too - I'm NOT afraid my mail will be read by some bored sysadmin who will tell noone. I'm actually concerned I could be data-mined by bots all my life.
Secondly, I'm sure they'll search images, MP3s and everything else, for which human reads are useless anyway.
Never send a human to do machine's job...
Imagine, for example, this: they figure what music you like and based on song analysis (there's this Spanish company that has such software already) they recommend you new music titles. Useful? Perhaps.
But no thanks. Screw them.
IcarusIndie.com started in January of 2001. I've been "in business" for over 3 years already. It started as a hobby and I actually didn't get the business license and go that route for 8 months after. I've been building web-sites for about 8 years now.
In three years the site has evolved immensly and I've been through a number of crunches which resulted in adapting or dying. Obviously I've adapted. Currently Google AdSense and some restructuring has replaced the need for being a full pay site.
Whether or not a site lives or dies depends entirely on whether the owners are either idiots (go bankrupt or in debt rather than find ways to make money to cover costs) or just don't like paying the money and move on to something new.
Icarus Independent will never run me into the ground from costs because I have the ability to make it a pay site at the drop of a hat. I drop the htaccess file in the directories and suddenly nobody can access them without paying for an All Access Pass. Bandwidth usage drops to an acceptible level and money shows up in my account. There really is no excuse for a web-site to push the owners into debt. There are always ways to cut costs.
Sites that go bankrupt and die are run by people who's conviction to not charge the visitor overides common sense.
If bandwidth is too much you can kill off content or start charging for content while you find a better way to recoup costs. And there's no rule that says you can't switch between being a pay and free site during the course of a month.
Worst case you move into a virtual hosting package and pay $20 - $30 a month or less while you try to maintain as much of the site as possible and rebuild from there until you can afford your own server again. In my case, worst case I'd go back to DSL with a flat rate and hardware restricted transfer per month. But I can't forsee any reason why I'd be in that position where I couldn't afford colocation.
So yeah, unless Spymac falls into the "we'd rather go into debt and die than charge users" category, the odds of them being around in 10 years is pretty high.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Just encrypt all of your e-mail using one of the many encryption programs free and commercial. Pop the text into the programs paste box and out comes encrypted text to paste into your mails. True its not fun to encrypt/decrypt on both sides and enter all those passwords etc but it works for the privacy concerns. Maybe someone will come up with an easy interface to this service that you can run, such as a java applet to encrypt/decrypt etc.
1G of storage for free and accessible anywhere on the web is going to get abused from everyone inside and outside of google as well as the government. I can only imagine the size of the e-mail sniffers that they will have to put on google, they will probably store them right next to the search sniffer racks.
If you have a huge disk quota and webmail, emailing files to yourself is the most accessible way of moving files around, especially to/from kiosk computers that may not have anything useful installed besides a webbrowser. I do it myself even with my relatively small space quota.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Of course yahoo has this story
A ton of people use AOL for this: There are dozens of chatrooms with automated bots that list warez and mp3s and whatnot and will auto-forward you emails with them attached. This is very efficient for the warez distributors because forwarding an email takes no bandwidth on their part, since it's already on the server end, so they can serve dozens of people off a dial-up modem once the files have been uploaded once.
AOL doesn't seem to care all that much. If anything it's another sort of clandestine plus of AOL: easy warez! Sort of how they were "anti-porn" in the early days, but everyone knew porn-trading was a big part of their userbase.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's a pretty nice interface, and very fast since its all in javascript. I think its good that they at least are open with what they are doing with your details, they said they will not correlate any data that identifies a user uniquely - that's enough for me. cyberhill@gmail.com
from article:
"Organizing messages from your inbox is also different with Gmail. Gmail's approach is to use labels, instead of folders, which allows messages to have overlapping types."
This sounds very similar to the VFolder feature present in Evolution.
Of course the recipient would need a lot of space too :)
Ggigantic corporations need the masses to be asses to succeed.
You've GOT to be kidding me.Please drop Liz Figueroa a message and tell her to be sure to include Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo and a handful of other web and software-based e-mail services that already advertise to you whether your searching within your email or not...
Oh, and while she's at it, she should include legislation that abolishes the advertising on the cable tv that I'M PAYING FOR and the telemarketers that keep calling on the phone line that I'M PAYING FOR, because those sure are...
This isn't exactly what you asked for, but I have a suggestion.
r y"
You can download a copy of messages to Outlook, leave it online, and have it automatically be deleted from both places when deleted from deleted items in Outlook.
I'm using this with Yahoo mail right now ($19.99/year right now - No affiliation but being a user.) This allows you to mainly use Outlook, but keep a copy available on the internet. You just need to remember to delete only from Outlook.
->"Tools"
->"Accounts"
(choose account)
->"Properties"
->"Advanced"
->"Delive
--->check "Leave a copy of message on server"
--->check "Remove from server when deleted from 'Deleted Items'"
Hope this helps you.
That tool doesn't seem to support anything besides Outlook variants, according to this page:
http://www.isysemail.com/faqs/#usageq2
I don't use outlook, and a lot of others here don't use Outlook, so I would have to say that this tool doesn't allow me to search my mail and keep the client I want to at all. I would probably be more inclined to say it would enable me to search my mail using a client I can't stand, which does me no good.
That article mentioned that Hotmail bothers users lately. What exactly is wrong now? The only thing I've noticed is that their spam blocking actually works now...
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss
Yandex is the leading Russian search engine, a technological, social and commercial innovator on par with Google. Yandex had a webmail service for years now. And in regards to usability, unobtrusiveness and usefullness their webmail is lightyears ahead of GMail.
In the settings you can turn off all advertisments on webmail pages and turn off the obligatory text signature promoting the mail service (like all other webmailers have). Why did they do that? The user survey showed that users don't want ads while they are reading their e-mail and find it annoying and obtrusive.
Personally, I don't use their service, purely because I want a good e-mail address and nothing beats name.surname@mail.ru, which I luckily have.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I am a little bit confuse why people is so worry about this G-mail stuff... Don't they have something else more important to do ?
Google give away free 1GB email, it's their money.. so it's their rule... as long as everythings are mentioned during sign-up process, that's it...
You don't agree, you don't sign up... as simple as that..
If they sell away user details or any other funny stuff, then, only then, you can charge them...
Considering the amount/quality of spam i receive on my free web based accounts, i can assure to see V_I_A_GR+A, Increase Size, MASSIVE ads allover my bot personalized GMail account.
Read the terms [google.com]:
As consideration for using the Service, you agree and understand that Google will display ads and other information adjacent to and related to the content of your email. Gmail serves relevant ads using a completely automated process that enables Google to effectively target dynamically changing content, such as email. No human will read the content of your email in order to target such advertisements or other information without your consent, and no email content or other personally identifiable information will be provided to advertisers as part of the Service.
Well obviously google would have thought of all that. I am sure many programmers at Google would have done the exact same thing with iDrive, myfreespace.com etc that flourished during the dot com boom.
To test this out, i tried logging on to GMail using various username/password combinations. Google displays an error message like yahoo in these cases.
The interesting thing is that if you give an existing username and a blank password, then google goes to the next step AND tells me that my password is blank. In the next step, they ask for the content in a dynamically generated image, that is obfuscated enough not to allow image processing. I took a guess that there would ben account named a@gmail.com and struck gold.
Go on, try it out.
GMail
Username:a
Leave the password field blank.
Yes spam filters scan my email, but spam filters do not extract content about my personal life to collate them into a profile of my interests to be turned over to analysis for targeted advertising
I barely use the space available on my yahoo account.
A few gigs of email space is not enough to convince me to whore the content of my and my friend's email.
Yes, Google has been upfront about it, thats good, but that doesn't forgive it.
A lot of people feel as I do so I hope Google drop's this or Google will have a very bad image associated with it.
The world does not need another free email service.
Google should find an ethical way to make money based on their talents
Steve
If Google pushes ahead it could be a costly blunder for them.
Help prevent this and tell Google how you feel:
http://groups.google.com/contact/index.html
Steve
Where is my consent?
Steve
How about if you dont like the idea, you dont have to use it... Why ban it completely? They shouldnt ban it for those (like myself) who were looking foward to using it.
You say that GMail will run spymac out of business. Unless Google agrees to go along with EU data privacy guidelines, GMail won't be allowed to operate in Europe. Spymac, on the other hand, doesn't infringe on their users' data privacy, and they offer hosting packages at very low prices. On top of that, they target the mac community. Sorta like mac.com. The difference: their URLs, etc. are more friendly than mac.com.
I have a friend who is migrateing there from mac.com because they offer much better service. They have a vibrant community (check out their "longest thread"), and though they don't host that many ads, they have the oportunity of making quite a bit on ads. Especially as they have a particular segment of internet users and ask for certain internally used private information.
Compare their privacy policy with that of Google and you'll see why they're a better choice. And if Google doesn't change, they'll be shut out of Europe.
And if Spymac gets into financial trouble (they do allow you to pay a fee for ad-free browsing), they can alway sell out. They've at least got enough users to make it valuable.
Hiya!
I've just tried this search on www.google.com:
site:gmail.google.com a
(yes, I searched gmail.google.com for "a").
I get 1..7 of 11 (4 similar) results... 1st, and last two results are.. interesting?
Buanzo Consulting - 15 Years of GNU/Linux experience, for you.
Lots of people that eat a lot of space of their e-mail storage, just store those forwarded messages and attachments, with jokes and chain letters. They could detect it and store each duplicated file or message only once. Why not?
A good rule of thumb: Never, ever slander the names of Google or Apple on Slashdot. They are Righteous companies, and such blaspheming will only see your posts descend to the nether reaches of -1dom.
===---===
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Good point! This is what happens when one posts to Slashdot before coffee.
... what? I have no idea, but let's be extremely pessimistic and say that 10% of a user's mail is received by other users on the service, which adds another year of service life to the inbox.
So, uncompressed and unindexed, it would take 7-8 years for a user to fill his 1GB inbox, we'll say 7 years for maximum pessimism.
Add modest 200% compression and the user has 14-16 years of storage available. Add global optimizations (aggregating identical messages and attachments) and that number increases to
So. 15-17 years. Sounds like the makings of a business plan to me!
There are 2 very important parts of this GMail that people either don't know or aren't getting.
1. It stores and scans incoming mail from NON-Gmail users who did NOT sign up to participate i this service.
2. It stores COPIES of ALL incoming and outgoing mail even AFTER you delete your mail AND after you close your account!
If the people who want their mail treated this way volunteer for it, that's one thing. But it's not fair to do the same to unwilling participants who simply happen to be a friend or acquaintance of the account-holder.
Wow, that will store almost a MONTH of my incoming spam, sweet!
Is this how far the Google love-fest goes? They claim to invade your privacy and your best response is "so what, so is everyone else".
Truly this is a forum of morons.
Alright, alright--I can't take this shit any longer. So seriously, let's look at some facts here.
First of all, this ad system is automated and autonomous. To dumb that down for all of these people like you, that means that no humans read it! It would be utterly impossible for google to do this by hand; they'd need hundreds of thousands of people to read through all of these emails. There's too much involved. This ties into my second point.
Secondly, why in the hell would google have people reading your email, except so that conspiracy theorists such as yourself can keep making shit like this up? What do they have to gain? Is google really in a position to steal your credit card numbers, give a flying fuck that your girlfriend lost her virginity on a tire swing in 5th grade, or that that burning sensation when you urinate isn't just a uti? They don't care! And if you retort with it's so they can get addresses and phone numbers, then that's bullshit as well, because I'd be willing to wager that google, along with most other big email companies, ask for those things when you sign up. There's no need! They have no reason to peruse your email other than with a script/applet to display appropriate advertisements for the text that's in your add. And aren't targeted advertisments a helluva lot better than seeing the same dating banner displayed everytime you open hotmail? Or the same "fuck the monkey in the ass and win a year's supply of free balloons" ads on yahoo? Christ, you people need to take a chill pill.
Thirdly--you're friggin' retarded if you use plain email for speaking about things you hold confident anyway! Like seriously--obviously you hold yourself to be at least slightly intelligent if you endowed yourself with the right to refer to everyone on this forum as morons. So lemme ask you something: do you use email? And if you do, what do you send on it? Out of what you send, how much of that do you care if people read? Let's say you don't want people reading any of it; you're the true privacy zealot. Unless you're sending encrypted, anyone can see it. No matter your mail service. It's not just like your email goes directly from your mail server to another across the internet via a ridiculously long piece of cat5 or oc, my friend. It hops, skips and jumps across many servers, 99% of which at least log, let alone cache those packets. And if you don't care if people read it, then why is there a problem with google in the first place?
Stop being reactionary assholes, and just chill out and stop speculating about google being the next Caldera/Microsoft/SCO/whatever.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
I was glad to see that you can throw emails into the trash, but then I started wondering if they ever get destroyed.
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If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest