World's First 1GB Web Mail May Not Be From Google

xPertCodert writes "According to this article, the world's first 1GB web mail is not going to be Google, but from the largest Israeli web portal. With 30Mb per attachment, it seems to be quite useful as well. Looks like an idea of extra-large e-mail storage is becoming really hot these days."

Comments

Is this a joke submission?

[Liselle]

First 1GB email service? First of all, what is Spymac, chopped liver? They already have a free email service with 1GB of storage.

I'm going to issue a press release... I will be the first person to send data over phone lines. Maybe it will be hardware you install in your computer! Buy my stock!

Re:Is this a joke submission?

[bfg9000]

Well, I was just there - sort of. They're in the process of being Slashdotted...

Re:Is this a joke submission?

[dr.badass]

First of all, what is Spymac, chopped liver?

Yes, actually. Spymac is pretty awful in my experience. The mail service is no exception.

First, they ask you for about six pages of information vs. Gmail's two fields. Next, their 'activation' mailing takes two weeks Then you find out that you have a 10MB attachment limit on your 1GB mail account. Then you find out that the advertized POP3 access doesn't, you know...work. (It doesn't at this very moment on my account.)

The end result is a pretty run-of-the-mill webmail service. It made me realize that the promising thing about Gmail isn't the 1GB, it's the features.

Re:Is this a joke submission?

[dr.badass]

The unofficial official word (that is, comments by Spymac employees in the forums) has been :

-New accounts take 2 weeks to activate.
-We were "Shocked, shocked!" at all the new users since
we announced the 1GB email service.
-WebDAV doesn't work.
-POP3 doesn't work.
-FTP works this week, maybe.
-"Don't you want to buy hosting services from us?"

Of course, none of this is on the main page, in the
support pages, or mentioned during the too-long signup
process. I've never felt so ripped-off by a free service.

spymac

[morcheeba]

Spymac already offers 1Gig Email for free. Gmail's conversations sound like the most useful feature of their service. beta review

Did EVERYBODY miss the train on this?

[CrystalFalcon]

Now, listen. Google's email service is not about the one-gigabyte limit.

Ok, so it's a huge number, and so everybody seems to have stared themselves blind at it, and missed the print underneath.

Google's email service is about having your email searchable. About retrieving old email by searching for a part of it. About eliminating the need for folders, dates, keywords to remember your mail. About a all-in-one-bucket, always-available mail store, that's accessed by searching rather than sorting and browsing.

Forget about the one-gigabyte limit. That's just tweaking parameters that others already have. It's nothing really innovative.

What's really new is their entire approach.

Re:Spymac is the joke

[mtnharo]

Their service is real and works fine. I have an account: greengeek AT spymac DOT com. However, the problem with their service is due to the fact that they were once a very small mac-users forum/service. When Google made their announcement, spymac gained notoriety for having a 1 gig email service up and running already. Their subscriber base jumped from They got /.ed and farked, as well as having articles in several mac sites and I think zdnet or cnet too. Also, most of the services of the site are still very new, some are still in "beta" and are lacking features. They are deserving of pity for the raping of their bandwidth and servers, but they probably should have expected it too.

1GB = $2 if you fill it. Advertising pays

[billstewart]

Sergei or Larry said that 1GB costs them $2, and that sounds about right - the cost of disk drives is approaching $0.50 / GB, and you need some duplication for reliability and some computers to drive the disks, and amortize some operations cost, so you could probably do $2 in quantity. That's not $2/month, it's just $2.

And that's if you fill the space - while some people can do that overnight (:-), it'll take a while before their average user receives enough email to get close to that much, and the cost of disk capacity is still on a deep dive, so by the time the average user fills their 1GB, it'll cost $1 or $0.50 instead of $2.

Re:benefits of subscribing

[Tumbleweed]

Yes you can, but then you're hurting Slashdot financially when you do that. Why would you want to hurt Slashdot? You're naughty.