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.
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).
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.
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
I'm somewhat skeptical on your figure of 200,000,000 (two hundred million) Hotmail accounts ... but, assuming that's a worldwide total and assuming that some small fraction of Hotmail users are abusing the service by using dozens or hundreds of mailboxes for whatever nefarious activities, I suppose it's a halfway plausible figure.
So let's assume, for the moment, that Google really plans to support on the order of one hundred million users. Your numbers clearly indicate that 1GB of devoted disk space per user would be unfeasible -- or at the very least, *very* costly to maintain. Happily, I don't think Google plan to go that route.
I would consider myself an average-volume email user, but after subtracting out the ~300 spams I receive daily, I probably get fewer than three dozen pieces of ham (valid emails) on a given weekday. Those messages have a very small average size (about 3kB) but we'll be charitable and assume that the average ham is 10kB in size.
So, the typical user (i.e. me) can expect to receive 360kB of mail in a day. At this rate one would expect that his 1GB of storage would be exhausted within a year. But emails are plain ASCII or Unicode text, which is very compressible. Google are of course very good at storing text in compressed-but-searchable form -- one might even say it's their core competency, alongside the PageRank algorithm. Given that emails consist of a large amount of redundant information such as headers, and that many list threads endlessly quote earlier messages, a user's entire mail corpus might be compressible by 300%. So we've raised our time to hit quota from one year to three years.
If Google are *really* smart, they'll identify mailing list messages and amortize the storage cost for a list message among all Gmail subscribers subscribe to the list. Since lists are typically the noisiest source of mail in my inbox (most messages and largest size), I would expect quite a bit of savings from this technique.
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.