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Gmail Commentary and Responses
Phil Windley writes "In his inimitable style, Tim O'Reilly tells us why GMail matters. The piece is entitled, 'The Fuss About GMail' but that doesn't begin to properly identify the real meat of what Tim's saying. Tim does discuss some of the privacy concerns on GMail and why he's not concerned, but he also breaks new ground on why GMail is not just another free email system. For example, Tim talks about how GMail might herald an era of large centralized computing and calls for APIs to allow GMail content to be move back and forth between it and other systems." Reader chris mansley writes "Google is quietly responding all the flak being given to their new email service. They have added a statement to quell the growing list of concerns. No more keeping email forever is at the top of the list. The reviews have been sparse on details and screenshots, but now Google is providing a sneak peek here and here." The only thing I didn't like about Gmail was their apparent intention to keep your mail forever, regardless of your wishes. Since they've now clarified that they don't plan to do that, it doesn't seem like there's much of a problem any more. Yahoo and MSN already link your searches on their respective engines with your account profiles on their respective free email services, and no one seems to care (maybe because no one uses MSN or Yahoo as a search engine these days, but still).
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
A good review can be found at http://jogin.com/weblog/archives/2004/04/15/juice
The big thing with GMail apart from its space, is google's name behind the search feature. A proper search function really appears to be lacking in pretty much every major email client out there, once you get into large volumes of mail (which if you are reading this, you probably are) searching the mail takes serious amounts of time.
One existing, non-web, alternative is Bloomba which has a *great* search function, even on high volumes. My email client is already indexing well in excess of 10K messages (folders cap out at displaying >5K, I have two of those) so I dont have a real count), and searches all take less than a second.
paul reinheimer
Google's script could analyze the content of the email and then analyze the google cache of the page.
Because slashdot.org has nothing to do with viagra, it wouldn't nerf the pagerank of some spammer who cleverly inserted slashdot at the bottom of his viagra spam.
If someone did put slashdot in a spam email with lots of things about news for nerds, the spam filter wouldn't pick it up - because most people wouldn't have things like that labeled as spam.
Plus, with all the data google will be collecting, google will be able to link the sender-address of the mail to other recent spams and disqualify the message based on inconsitency (the message content is radically different from other messages sent by the same company).
All but one...
You are assuming that google is so stupid they would be unable to determine what is a joe job and what is a legitimate link.
You assume that Google has psychics working for them. A Joe Job and true spam are indistinguishable from one another. A Joe Job consists of spam that is sent out just like all other spam, the only difference is the target of the links.
For example, Bill has a website www.BuyBillsWidgets.com and he's doing fairly well.
Jack has a website that sells a similar widget www.BuyJacksWidgets.com and he isn't doing quite as well as Bill.
Jack enlists a spammer to send out 500k emails that link to www.BuyBillsWidgets.com. Google has no way of knowing who commissioned the sending of the spam. With your system Bill will be punished by the downranking of his page because Jack Joe Jobbed him.
Not even Google has the ability to determine the purpose of spam.
I guess maybe you need to learn what a Joe Job is.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Unless you manually clean them (Or have your browser set to automatically clean them), the cookie actually expires on Jan. 17, 2038.
There's a tin-foil type site called Google Watch with a bunch of information about Google.
As I said in the grand-parent, I'm a larger-than-average fan of Google, so I believe most of the claims on the site are a bunch of paranoid rantings, but they do raise legitimate points about possibilities.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
just because a company has to answer to stockholders does not mean they will start murdering nuns and burning orphanges in the name of profit.
they have to look out for that goal of profit, but a company can still remain wholesome, good and moral.
why do they want an IPO?
because they dream of grander things.
they are the visionaries.
i hope they can make it happen.
Also see Google watch watch .
Basically the google watch guy is just pissed off that google didn't give him the page rank he thought he deserved. I've read google-watch and most of it is FUD
.sig
This is a web site that claims the cookie expires in 2038 because of pending 'brain implants.'
Surely it couldn't be because they're using a large number of 32-bit UNIX-like systems, and that there's the UNIX epoch in all UNIX-like OSes on 32-bit systems is 2038.
I mean, that'd just be kha-raaaaaaazie!1! It's obvious that they set the cookie to 2036 so they could steal our Precious Bodily Fluids. Where's the tin foil? Where?
Err. Yah. Yah, at that point I think it's safe to say anything on the site can be honestly diregarded as bunk. Or at best poorly writen SciFi. Either way, it's relationship with reality is on the rocks, and reality is already calling it's mother and a divorce laywer.
I trust Google as it stands today, but after the IPO I will trust them as far as I can throw a server farm. Any public company has a fudicial responsibility to their investors
Everything I've read says that Google is not selling anything close to 50% of the company. They would still be privately controlled by the same people who have been running it all this time.
Gmail doesn't block attachments other than executables (like the 30 .pif viruses you get every day).
Non-executables (zip, jpg, doc, html, gif, pdf, etc.) are accepted just fine, and the per-message limit is 10 megs.
Kevin Fox
Of course they have a cookie - it would be hard to save preferences otherwise. That doesn't mean that they're logging searches using it, though.
What is YahooPOPs! ?
Yahoo! Mail disabled free access to its POP3 service in April 2002. This resulted in many people (including myself) to look for alternative free POP3 services. But this exercise can be very difficult because of the fact that your Yahoo! Mail address could be with several people and informing all of them about your new email address could prove to be a nightmare.
And then one day, I stumbled across a Perl script called FetchYahoo, which almost did what I wanted! It downloaded emails from Yahoo's website and presented them in a format such that email clients like Netscape and Pine could read them. But, the format in which it saved the emails is not supported by all email clients, including the one that I use. Also, making a layman install Perl and to get a Perl script to work could be a nightmare.
So, YahooPOPs! was born. YahooPOPs! is an open-source initiative to provide free POP3 and SMTP access to your Yahoo! Mail account. YahooPOPs! is available on the Windows and Unix platforms.
YahooPOPs! emulates a POP3/SMTP server and enables popular email clients like Outlook, Netscape, Eudora, Mozilla, IncrediMail, Calypso, etc., to download and send emails from Yahoo! accounts.
How do we do it you ask? Well, this application is more like a gateway. It provides a POP3/SMTP server interface at one end to talk to email clients and an HTTP client (browser) interface at the other which allows it to talk to Yahoo!
If you are not convinced that YahooPOPs! works, just download it right away and give it a try. You will not be disappointed.
GmailPOPS anyone?
Storing a unique user ID is not an indispensable part of "nature of cookies"! It's a common approach for maintaining user sessions, but that does NOT mean that any use of cookies must somehow involve assigning unique ids to users.
Specifically, user id is absolutely not needed to store location/language information.
Using unique id to track user's sequential searches is a pretty obvious application (e.g., to know which ads would interest her), that's why some people are getting paranoid about it. It's something like library keeping a record of all the books you've read. Surely, usually, most people wouldn't care, but the privacy issues here definitely exist.
the whole point of (most) spam is not clog servers and carry out vendettas
I see you don't know too many spammers. Keep in mind the constant DDOS attempts on Spamhaus, the DDOS that took monkeys.com offline for good (Thanks for all your hard work, Ron! We appreciate it!), the SPEWS DDOS, constant "Joe-Jobs" against people who report spammers (usually those spammers on blackhat ISPs who pass complaints on to the spammers), Above.net, who will start advertising your route so that your network can't be reached, Valuenet, who's owner will sign you up for hundreds of mailing lists if you report spam....
Nope, Spammy has no use for vendettas... Nope, nuh uh, not at all.