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."
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!
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.
"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
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
or... sign up anyway and waste their precious storage space.
-knowles
Of course, Google knows content management so maybe they are fully prepared to handle the flood of subpoenas and the likes.
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.
Filtering email based on encryption type could also be a trust base. Like you're brother uses stronger encryption and therefore you can trust that it is him and open the email without thinking about what's attached.
The question is, if you make it easier for applications to encrypt data then won't the worms just grab an API and encrypt those emails and the result is the same as before encryption and the loss of millions of cpu cycles?Just a question, I've thought about setting up my entire family with PGP, then I setup my own mail server and they all just connect to it. Its a lot easier and its still encrypted since these days you can only send smtp through a vpn tunnel.
and you'll find that gmail's is quite good.
well, can't i just upload one huge file full of gibberish and leave it there to rot? and, then if i were to repeat the process, i would eventually take up at least two or three gigs, factoring in my laziness, of course. another point here to consider is how are they going to allocate 1g / user to the whole damn earth? there would have to be a room full of racks and racks of hard drives. now what would happen if such a valuable resource should succumb to terrorists? my emails!!!
-knowles
Perhaps they plan to compress the data. Text or HTML emails should compress very well...
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
Do you seriously think that every user who signs up will use the full gigabyte? I've got e-mail archives reaching back almost six years for my personal account, and it's only a couple hundred MB.
What's going to happen is that they'll allocate a few hundred KB or so for each user who signs up, then add disk space as needed.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Good idea. I trust mail from my brother, and the executable that's attached to it, because it's strongly encrypted, and there was a PASSWORD that my brother used, when he encrypted it.
Yup!
Uh... he DID use a password with his private key, didn't he? There couldn't be some kinda worm on his machine that sends out mal-mail, encrypted with HIS private key, could there?
Oops.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
the Spymac e-mail addresses are quite nice. they had a bit of a lag on activation e-mails for the first couple days, but that seems to have been cleared up.
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
Its funny because I mentioed that concern already. Mechanisms could be put in place to ensure the digital signature wasn't compromised, plus you don't need a password in the traditional sense. A challenge response type of authentication is far superior.
I dont know about hotmail specifically, but MSN communities doesnt seem to delete stuff after they delete your account. In my case, I received a bunch of warnings that my community had become inactive and would be deleted if I didnt take action. Surely enough, after some time, they did delete it. Then, a few months later, I created a new community with the exact same name. Imagine my surprize when I found my old folders & files in this newly created community! I dont think we can take any of these services for granted when it comes to archiving our data.
well, can't i just upload one huge file full of gibberish and leave it there to rot?
How about by deleting inactive accounts? if you don't access it for say 3 months, kill the account.
But more to the point, why waste their space? If you don't like ads based on your mail, just don't use their service. They are offering you a deal - 1gig of space, paid for by advertisers. If you are worried about the impact on your privacy, don't take the deal.
Wasting their space to make a point about privacy is like spamming a mailing list becasue you don't like the admin's rules - trying to force your viewpoint on a community that has agreed to live by a set of rules that you don't agree with.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
And spam.
Think about it; with spammers bending over backwards to avoid filters, spam messages are much less likely to cause false hits in content searches than they used to be.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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?
No. But you are mistaken. It's an excellent option for almost all email purposes.
I can't imagine why anyone who can afford the price of an Internet account wouldn't prefer Pegasus, Eudora, or even Outlook.
I don't want to license, upgrade, debug, etc. someone's proprietary email clients and/or servers, maintain servers and storage including backups, expose my network providing SMTP or POP/IMAP holes in my firewall, etc. etc. There are many reasons one can easily imagine. Try harder.
Beyond that, I want my e-mail archives on my computer, not on some random server that I don't control.
Why? So it's isolated from you if you can't communicate with your computer? I can hit my Yahoo stuff from literally anything, including my cell phone. Besides, any worthy web mail system will allow you to pull the mail via POP or IMAP, should you feel the need.
I want to know that I'm the only person who is accessing my files,
Nix email then. You do know unencrypted email travels through the Internet unencrypted, right?
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.
A Yahoo (and, eventually, Google) email account has vastly more storage redundancy than anything you can cook up. Costs less, too. Won't break when you upgrade whatever manages the storage, since you don't manage or upgrade it, either. Doesn't force me to provide SMTP so I can just not worry about whatever silly hole is found in whatever 20 year old code base provides it. Won't infect my machines should I preview the wrong message due to incessant client bugs...
Relying on a webmail system for your primary communications just seems foolish.
Puttering around with local attached storage and obsolete email systems seems foolish. These web mail systems provide excellent spam control, scalability, low cost and high reliability. Frankly email service is a commodity now; just a value-add for some other service. Google will get web mail right, finally, and I'm done nursing email servers. 3 years from now PHB's are going to be asking why the hell they're paying for Exchange licenses, and wasting time with their IT monkeys misconfiguring the servers.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I haven't R'd TFA yet, but I actually have a gmail account.
Believe me, you're not missing much. I'd much rather hear the input of a savvy geek than the that of a pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing, Rolls Royce-driving... you get the point.
most everything seems to be done in javascript
Fuck. Does this mean I'm not going to be able to open messages in new tabs? Hotmail's recent "facelift" (which was more of a "hackjob", if you ask me) has irritated me to no end. I use my Uni's IMAP server for most of my email, but it's convenient for me to also maintain a free web-based account. I'm looking forward to using GMail (privacy concerns? I routinely drop my pants in public... I don't think I'm allowed) but I'm curious to read a review by someone more tech-oriented than the staff of Forbes.
--
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
No I'm not flaming you.
- Companies can be bought out or change hands
So, as well-intentioned as Google may be today, you cannot assume that this never-deleted, fully-archived index will always be used to your benefit.No US court has so far enforced a privacy policy made by a primary entity against the actions of a successor
The Bankruptcy Court has the authority to terminate just about any contractual agreement, including a privacy policy
The Patriot Act requires that entities whose data is subpoeaned by federal authorities NOT inform the owners of the data
sPh
I can just imagine it now, finally having enough space on my email account to never delete messages again, and even keep project files i move around in their own directory so I can access them anywhere.
I wonder if filling up that storage space with photos rather than text-based email will affect their key-word advertising ability. I assume that part of the reason for offering a whole gig of storage space is so that users will store a whole gig of potential key-words on Google's system, allowing Google to sell more targeted advertising. But it's not like they can search the content of photos and sell advertising based on what the picture is about. Of course, there probably won't be many people with such a high image:text content ratio in their email, but I still wonder...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
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
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
From the screenshots I've seen, apparently you can choose to compress messages that you don't mind taking longer to search for, supposing you'd have to search for them.
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.