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!
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?...
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
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Still and all" - what does that mean? It means the submitter is a moron.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
Who's going to care? If you want to store that stuff, good for you. You seem to think people really worry about kiddies like you that want to start a warez dump from your e-mail account. This isn't AOL, you must be lost.
/. that seem to think this is the 'the next warez haven'. No serious groups are going to be uploading warez to e-mail accounts. This is about as great for warez as (1) CD-RW, sharing with a friend.
1 gig isn't crap. Then what, make multiple accounts to store files? Yeah, that is really fucking practical when broadband and hard drives are cheap as hell.
Further more, what about asshats like you causing file size restrictions? 10mb attachments aren't going to be very fun for warez if the scene typically follows 15mb files. Even then, why waste time using Googles space where they can monitor transfering of files and restrict you?
There are about 100 of you people on
How will this stop warez distribution? I'm sure it would be hardly any extra effort to split a 130MB CD rip to 13 10 Meg Rars and send them out as 13 emails....
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
I've read all your email and you've got nothing to hide.
paintball
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'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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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'
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.
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 - $30 a month or less while you try to maintain as much of the site as possible and rebuild from there until you can afford your own server again. In my case, worst case I'd go back to DSL with a flat rate and hardware restricted transfer per month. But I can't forsee any reason why I'd be in that position where I couldn't afford colocation.
So yeah, unless Spymac falls into the "we'd rather go into debt and die than charge users" category, the odds of them being around in 10 years is pretty high.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
If you have a huge disk quota and webmail, emailing files to yourself is the most accessible way of moving files around, especially to/from kiosk computers that may not have anything useful installed besides a webbrowser. I do it myself even with my relatively small space quota.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Of course 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...
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.