Google's Sergey Brin Talks on Gmail's Future

de la mettrie writes "Sergey Brin of Google has been discussing the future of GMail in a recent eWeek article. He says that the ongoing beta test will likely take about six months, and that the implementation of mail forwarding, POP access, mail encryption and even RSS feeds is being considered."

Comments

For more answers

[SpanishInquisition]

you can always reach him at sergey_brin@hotmail.com

Re:For more answers

[slickwillie]

Or you can see him here

Re:For more answers

[jo42]

Some gay/transvestite bashing nit wit modded this to a troll - shame on you for being so cruel to that 10%...

Six months?

[Pranjal]

Six months is what they will take to test? I find it hard to digest. What are they building a space shuttle? Assuming that they have completed internal testing six months is a very very long period to do beta tests.

I have to wait six months to get an account :(

Re:Six months?

[grub]

What are they building a space shuttle?

No, they're building a massive, wide area distributed email system with vast amounts of storage. I doubt they'd want to tarnish their name, especially with an IPO pending, by going live with a buggy system. If you can shave a few months off that, I'm sure you could have a good career at Google.

Re:Six months?

[name773]

they'll be very sure it works. in the meantime, get broadband and set up your own mail server with qmail. i was able to do it with a 100mhz pentium, and my inbox is 5 gigs with no content snooping or other restrictions

Re:Six months?

[FrYGuY101]

Knowing Google, they're probably doing one or more of the following:

*Getting usibility information from the beta testers.
*Assessing their ad-placement algorithms.
*Trying to see how the email will work on their distributed systems.
*Hashing through privacy concerns, see if there are ways to alleviate them.

And I'm sure there's more that others could think of that they'd be testing...

Re:Six months?

[stefanlasiewski]

Google's backend is more complex then you think.

Google's beta tests for search, groups, Froogle all took closer to a year.

Assuming that they have completed internal testing six months is a very very long period to do beta tests.

The problem with internal testing is that you can never account for the wide variety of things that users will do to your site. Your QA team may come up with a great set of tests, but for every functional part of your site, your users will be able to make it break in a dozen different ways.

Re:Six months?

[arvindn]

They're playing for big stakes, and a lot of things have to go right. Since they're offering 1GB, and are doubtless counting on the user not being able to use up all of that immediately, their rate throttling measures had better be really good. If spammers/warez doodz find a way to exploit the system and automate the client interface, then google will probably have to retract their offer, which will be enormous bad publicity. And few people have realized it, but gmail is actually a whole desktop email app written in javascript. Several hundred KB of javascript. Or atleast a cross between webmail and a desktop app. Such attempts have never worked in the past. (I remember some horrors like html editors written in java on web hosting sites, before the dot.bust). But google thinks they're on to something here. Indeed, beta testers have reported that after a few days of using gmail they find it to be a whole new paradigm and don't want to go back to the folder based approach. So there's a lot of testing that google have to do, since they're breaking new ground. Google's known for not releasing stuff until they're really sure they've ironed out the wrinkles.

Re:Six months?

[Infonaut]

What are they building a space shuttle?

No, they're building a product that they hope will dislodge MSN Hotmail from its dominant position. Hotmail gets at least 145 million visitors per month, and Microsoft poured money into Hotmail for eight years before it became profitable.

Microsoft can afford to pour money down a hole until something becomes profitable. Google can't. So Google has to get it right the first time and make Gmail a much better product right out of the gate in order to combat Microsoft's built-in advantages as the owner of the OS and the browser that most people use.

Re:Six months?

[treerex]

Give me a break. Good software companies spend time to test their product: user testing, functionality testing. Google is very careful to test features before the roll out to the world. Given the size and breadth of the GMail product, this isn't that long.

It makes me think of The Simpsons episode where Moe turns his bar into a family restaurant, and he buys a surplus Navy deepfryer that he says can flash fry a buffalo in 40 seconds. Home responds, "Forty seconds? But I want it now."

I expect that if you want to use such a thing, it will be worth the wait.

Re:Six months?

[Anonymous Coward]

My god it these days we always bitch about programs being launched too early now we are bitching that one wont come fast enough.

LOL i can't wait eather but i would perfer a bullet proof program and not something that needs to get patched every week.

Re:Six months?

[gooru]

I have to wait six months to get an account :(

Nyah nyah! I have one! :-p It's actually not too tough to get an account. You just have to be acquainted with someone at Google. If you're on Orkut, it shouldn't be a problem to find someone who's less than a few degrees of separation from you who works at Google.

Also, six months is hardly a long time for a beta test. This is an absolutely enormous task they're undertaking. It's not like they're just installing IMP on a server or something. Gmail is also still very far from being ready for public consumption. I send bug reports and feature requests in constantly for things that are IMHO absolutely necessary for a full email experience.

Re:Six months?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just a plot to pump the stock price when google has it's IPO.

Once google has it's IPO the shareholders will control the company not it's founders so it will become just another money grubbing monopoly corporation.

At which point they will probably bring in banner ads, popups and make you pay for the better features because they will now have to worry about meeting wall street profit expectations instead of worrying about innovation.

Re:Six months?

[Dorothy 86]

ahh... being a beta tester... I do indeed feel sorry for you. I really enjoy the features that have been previously spoken of, and the "conversation" feature is especially nice. Just wait it out... it's definitely worth it!

Re:Six months?

[smr2x]

Warez? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I heard the attachment size is limited to 30MB...

Re:Six months?

[Dun Malg]

but gmail is actually a whole desktop email app written in javascript. Several hundred KB of javascript. Or atleast a cross between webmail and a desktop app. Such attempts have never worked in the past. (I remember some horrors like html editors written in java on web hosting sites, before the dot.bust).

Huh?
java != javascript

Re:Six months?

[the unbeliever]

I'm not on Orkut, but I'd like to be. :-P

Re:Six months?

[arvindn]

Of course they're not the same. What's your point? They're both client side web programming languages, and that's all that matters for my example.

Re:Six months?

[toasted_calamari]

theortically:

1) RAR file
2) Split into 29.9 MB segments
3) Write scripts that interface with Gmail
4) Register 15 accounts
5) Free Storage.

Also, they limit attachement size, but do they limit body size? would it be possible to UUencode the whole thing and stick it as the message text?

Re:Six months?

[dytin]

I'm a beta tester, the attachment size limit is actually only 10 megabytes. And they seem to limit the speed of uploads to about 30-40 KB/sec, which isn't that slow, but I bet they have some sort of system set up where the speed gets slower and slower for a certain account if that account starts either uploading or downloading too many MB of files.

Re:Six months?

[dytin]

By the way, the 10 MB limit isn't just for the attachment size, it is the limit for the entire email itself. I have tried sending 9.8MB files, and the system won't let me. So, I think that UUEncoding a giant file and putting it in the message body wouldn't work either.

Re:Six months?

[InfiniteWisdom]

Also, they limit attachement size, but do they limit body size? would it be possible to UUencode the whole thing and stick it as the message text?

"Attachments" are basically the same thing, except that most mail clients know how to parse MIME extensions and only show parts that are intended to be human-readable. If you looked at it with a very old pre-MIME MTA you'd basically see a message with Base-64 (or quoted) text that form the "attachments". A logical way for them to handle things would be to limit the size of the message, not of attachments.

Re:Six months?

[moonbender]

A whole desktop email app written in JavaScript? The front end is written in HTML, which also means there might be CSS and ECMA Script ("JavaScript") involved. All the work is done by the backend, which is probably coded in either a web scripting language like Perl, Python or PHP, or more likely for performance reasons in some "proper" (ie. compiled) programming language like C, C++ or what have you. The HTML is just for presentation and user input - just like Hotmail and thousands of similar projects have done for years.

Of course GMail might do it somewhat better, but it really not as revolutionary as you make it out to be. And, for the most part, it is certainly not written in JavaScript. At least, so I would hope.

Re:Six months?

[Dun Malg]

Of course they're not the same. What's your point? They're both client side web programming languages, and that's all that matters for my example.

OK, I'm with you. I misread the comment and thought you were making a direct comparison. My bad.

Re:Six months?

[danila]

So there's a lot of testing that google have to do, since they're breaking new ground.
I though Google fanboyism was already passe...

Could you tell me, what new ground exactly are they breaking here, besides writing a complex IE-only webmail application in Javascript? That's cool, but not as cool as a 5 kilobytes JS-based chess program or a first person shooter...

1Gb mailboxes - everybody offers huge (or even unlimited - my webmail provider does it now) mailboxes now. Kudos to Google for the idea, but it's not really something very difficult to do. Dynamic folders, filters and searches? Opera M2 was here first. Check out their latest 7.5 beta, it rocks! I have 250Mb of e-mail and it has instant searches and autofill for search terms. "Conversations"? I don't have a GMail account, but is it better than Active contacts and Active threads in Opera?

Not to mention the fact that many other webmail providers already have POP3/IMAP access, forwarding in both direction, encryption, WAP access and what not.

So what is so new about GMail? Except the fact that it's a webmail in javascript...

Re:Six months?

[SpaceCadetTrav]

Microsoft can afford to pour money down a hole until something becomes profitable. Google can't.

What do you think the IPO is for?

Re:Six months?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mozilla Suite comes with an irc client written entirely in javascript. (well, with xul for the UI instead of html) It works just fine.

Re:Six months?

[alphakappa]

"Also, they limit attachement size, but do they limit body size? would it be possible to UUencode the whole thing and stick it as the message text?"

Yes, they do. They limit the total size of an email to be 10 MB which includes the text and (if any) attachments.

Re:Six months?

[NewComputerdotCa]

Or have a blogger account. What is the big deal anyways.... it's only Gmail ;)

Re:Six months?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny that while MS makes a lot of noise about their google-killer 'coming soon', Google brings a revolutionary (hotmail-killer?) webmail service to Beta.
I just hope when they take over webmail like the search-engines, they won't abuse their monopoly like certain other corporations.

Re:Six months?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that's very nice and all, but the chances a random machine I walk up to will have Opera installed on it are, frankly, zero. Kinda invalidates the reason for webmail.

Re:Six months?

[billcopc]

The common inbred mortals that use Hotmail aren't going to bother switching over to Gmail. It's called laziness.

Heck, how long did it take for those inbreds to just start USING Google search ? WE THE NERDS had to change their start page to Google.com because they were still using the default MSN page. And then we had to teach them how to use a fricking SEARCH ENGINE.

Gmail is cool, but they won't steal many Hotmail users. They earn a whole bunch of new users though, as well as us geeks who typically run our own mail servers and/or pay a nominal fee for a true POP/IMAP account.

Re:Six months?

[gooogle]

There are quite a few concerns about free storage and a warez API on top of gmail, but personally, I don't think it is a big concern and doesn't pose any significant risk to the gmail service.

Using a visual challenge to ensure that the user on the other end is human, will prevent automated scripts. You better have a lot of time downloading a file spread across a lot of emails (and a lot of accounts). While uploading is not a problem, downloading them will require you to invest quite a bit of time.

Some file storage for backup purposes is inevitable but warez exchange can be stumped (unless you want to trust leechers with your gmailwarez@gmail.com password).

Well, actually I just had another thought to counter my own argument. You could just forward the files to the leecher's account. Maybe they could setup limits on how many megs you can forward in x amount of time. But even then, you could forward it to 2 other accounts, and those 2 other accounts could then forward to 4 other accounts and so on...

It should be an interesting face-off.

Re:Six months?

[RedX]

Orkut sounds cool, I'd like to know if it really is as cool as it sounds

Re:Six months?

[Donny Smith]

>theortically:

That's "theoretically"; I don't think it will be easy to do "4) Register 15 accounts" using a script.
Also consider the fact that they'll be able to search all attachments (accross diff mailboxes) and figure out relationships between segments (not to mention shared "2nd email address" and same mail sender for all segments...)

Practically that means you just put your xGB of warez to c:\Program Files\eMule\Incoming or whatever variant thereof.

HDD space is so cheap; unless you can steal several TB worth of reliable storage space, why would anyone bother?

Sometimes I'm surprised at the lenghts to which some (especially in the open source community) people go to "save" couple dollars, even though the time needed to do that is more expensive than the amount to be "saved" (using wage level of 3rd world countries).

Re:Six months?

[Anonymous Coward]

Orkut is not cool. I have an account, and I honestly don't know what to use it for.

Re:Six months?

[Doug Neal]

It sounds cool but bugger all happens there. There's a bunch of "communities" you can join for people with common interests, unfortunately all they seem to be used for is people sending group messages to them inviting everyone to join their community. Usually in Spanish.

Don thy Tinfoil Hat.

[grub]

already slashdotted, here's the text:


Steve Gillmor : Hi Sergey, thanks for taking the time to do this interview.
Sergey Brin : My pleasure, Steve.
Gillmor : So why gmail? It sounds like an expensive endeavor.
Brin : Yes, it really is. We have to weigh the curve of user data and disk space then constantly keep ahead of the users' requirements.
Gillmor : Can you give us a ballpark figure as to cost?
Brin : No, not really. It's being paid for by the NSA, actually.
Gillmor : The NSA? Why?
Brin : They've realized that they have to put on a "friendlier face" to the public. Being that Google already has a huge infrastructure, it only made sense that they use it. They approached us over a year ago with this idea.
Gillmor : The NSA wants to manage the email of literally hundreds of millions of net users? Don't the privacy implications concern you?
Brin : No. The NSA have told me, in fact our contact wrote it on a cocktail napkin, that they wouldn't snoop user mail. They are really nice people. Think about it, who would you rather trust with your personal email, Hotmail & Microsoft or Google & the NSA? I think the answer is obvious.
Gillmor : In all honesty, I don't think the answer is clear.
Brin : Sure it is, if Hotmail "fills up" you're out of luck, with gmail the NSA have gratiously offered to let us use some of their disk storage on their Cray and SGI SANs. Like I said, really nice people.
Gillmor : Can you give is the name of your contact?
Brin : [answers cell call, hangs up] This interview is over.

Re:Don thy Tinfoil Hat.

[shish]

who would you rather trust with your personal email, Hotmail & Microsoft or Google & the NSA?

So Microsoft aren't passing mails through the NSA filters? When did they stop?

google isn't evil

[quelrods]

They also mention various privacy concerns. The only thing they ever meant by not guaranteeing immediate deletion has to do with proper backups. I think the geek/media bridge failed yet again and something was blown out of proportion. I can't wait to see that you're using 99% of your available 1gb for email tho.

Re:google isn't evil

[kerb]

1Gb is ridiculous! 5Mb email space is enough for everybody

Pop access hmmm

[calle69]

pop access for millions of users will end on a monthly fee for sure

My name is Rusty Foster

[Anonymous Coward]

And I pronounce "tax evation" as tax-evaaaayyy-tion.

I personally feel that Gmail is a rude and innappropriate pun on all the G-style chrome-rapper-ghetto-music culture. That's just not right, especially for Google since they have an IPO coming up.

Here in Maine, most of us don't care for "Gs". Let's keep it that way.

Re:My name is Rusty Foster

[Anonymous Coward]

And I pronounce "tax evation" as tax-evaaaayyy-tion.

You should learn to spell it first.

Encryption support...

[dmayle]

I really hope they implement support for GnuPG in an easy manner. As it is, having a public key doesn't mean much for email, since people sending you email need to do the work for you to receive encrypted email, and you can't send encrypted email unless the other person has a key. GMail could go a long way towards making GnuPG prolific...

Re:Encryption support...

[Kent Recal]

So you'd trust them to store your private key?

I'd rather like to see some sort of browser plugin (right click on textarea, "encrypt for...").

Re:Encryption support...

[UnanimousCoward]

So, maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how they can support encryption when their whole email business model is predicated on searching through the contents of a message. How can they do that if it is encrypted?

Re:Encryption support...

[Sajma]

To decrypt incoming mail or sign outgoing mail, GMail would need access to your private key, which is bad for your security. Even if you trust GMail with your key, it's hard to keep sensitive data private in a large distributed system: a single compromised node could reveal the private keys it stores (keys stored on disk are encrypted with passphrases, but an attacker can copy these keys and try and break their encryption offline; also, keys of users with active sessions may be decrypted in unprotected memory).

Instead, you could run an agent on your local machine that manages your private key. GMail could request decryption and signing from your agent over a secure network connection; the agent in turn could confirm with you before using your private key (so that you don't sign anything you don't mean to). You must still trust GMail to protect your decrypted messages, e.g., to scrub them from its memory when your session expires.

The problem with the agent approach is you can only use GPG from machines that hold your private key. What might be best is a combined approach: keep two private keys, one offline, and another on GMail. Your offline key is the one people trust. Use your offline key to authorize your GMail key for some limited period of time (say, one year). Then, if your GMail key is lost or compromised, you can just create a new one.

Regarding searching encrypted mail, you might allow GMail to index a message when it is first decrypted, but not to store the decrypted message itself. Then, you can still search for that message by the words it contains. An attacker who gains access to your account can use the search determine whether an encrypted message contains a specific word or phrase, but this is probably an acceptable risk for most people (this assumes access to your account does not imply access to your private key, though!). An attacker might be able to reconstruct your message if they gain access to Google's entire index for that message, but this seems unlikely.

Re:Encryption support...

[sgross]

The message only needs to be encrypted for transmission over an insecure channel (SMTP). Google could store all your messages in plaintext for searching purposes, and only encrypt and decrypt when sending or receiving a message.

Re:Encryption support...

[gad_zuki!]

I dunno, its seems to me that only x amount of traffic is encrypted. I don't encrypt everything mainly because of the technophobes who don't even have keys or certs. Google is just assuming (and wisely so) that most mail will be unencrypted. The worst-case scenario is that they ask for your private key and just decrypt things on fly, but something tells me this would be fatal to the Gmail project.

Secondly, its good to see an industry leader take on encryption. MS, hotmail, yahoo, etc have all largely ignored encryption. Google could make encryption or at least encryption awareness a goal and a selling point. Hopefully it wont be a proprietary gmail to gmail system, but something based on open standards so everyone can use it. Gmail could issue free personal certificates and perhaps implement a simple "get someones public cert here" webpage.

Re:Encryption support...

[qbwiz]

Do you trust Google that much?

Re:Encryption support...

[ctr2sprt]

Couple ways. As other posters have already noted, Google could store your email unencrypted and only encrypt it for sending. As a slightly better alternative, it could save your private key protected by your GMail login password. That would allow GMail to decrypt your mail to search it, but only once you login. But either way it doesn't really matter, as the main goal of email encryption is protecting it from interception (and, with digital signing, alteration). You already trust Google not to abuse your email if you're using GMail.

Now that said, PGP/GPG could actually help out GMail's searching/filtering abilities. After all, if you get a message signed by someone whose key is in your GMail ring, then you know it isn't spam. This has been covered ad nauseam on Slashdot, so suffice it to say that the tradeoffs here might add up to a net gain.

Think about how great it would be if GMail automatically gave every user of its service a PGP/GPG key and automatically signed all outgoing messages. GMail would of course have access to all its users' public keys, so it could transparently verify signatures and decrypt messages from all its users. Talk about pushing email encryption into the limelight. It probably won't happen, but it's Google, so you never know.

Re:Encryption support...

[xandroid]

That's a good idea.

To get around the sticky problem of storing people's private keys, I think it'd be handy if Gmail just took care of the encrypting side of things, and let people decrypt things themselves. (Especially if they allow POP access, as some mail clients have GPG plugins and such.) If Gmail just stored public keys and organized them in a keyring for you, when you sent something to a user whose public key they have, they could encrypt it before sending it on its merry way.

As for not being able to stick ads in the way with encrypted email -- well, I'd bet the amount of encrypted email Gmail gets will be vastly overshadowed by plaintext mail, and it wouldn't really cut into profits. Or perhaps the software that analyzes mail and matches up ads could be tailored to recognize GPG-encrypted messages, and display ads for security programs?

Six months?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a media cooldown period more than a beta testing period.

POP?

[jhoude]

Having a 1GB mailbox is useless if you use POP to get your mail... They should provide IMAP access.

OK, after reading the article, I see that they are also planning to offer imap, but still, pop makes no sense to me for a webmail.

Re:POP?

[BorisZ]

It doesn't have to be pure webmail. You can get your Hotmail email with Outlook Express (not that you should...), and I would very much like to have a large popbox that I can use with my email client from home and with a good web based client from everywhere else.

Re:POP?

[xoran99]

You can set up your email client to leave the messages on the server and only fetch the headers. That makes it plenty useful for me, although IMAP would be swell.

Re:POP?

[LostCluster]

I think that they're thinking about POP in the opposite direction... allowing you to give Google your username and password to a POP server you have an account on so that you can read your mail in Google's interface and store it at Google rather than your HD.

Re:POP?

[wmspringer]

OK, after reading the article, I see that they are also planning to offer imap, but still, pop makes no sense to me for a webmail.

Why not?

I use Mozilla for my email, but when I download it I leave it on the server until it's deleted. That way I have it on my home computer, but I can still get to it through the web interface if I'm not at home.

Of course, I tend to have to go and clear out old emails every so often..

Re:POP?

[KD5YPT]

Um... what you said is IMAP, not POP.

Re:POP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't there some setting in Mozilla that says "delete the message from the server when I delete it locally"? If there isn't, somebody needs to file it in BugZilla...

Re:POP?

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't bother with Mozilla mail until it supports imap... POP should be outlawed.

Re:POP?

[wmspringer]

Yes, but I tend to save a lot of my email, so I have to either delete it from my inbox locally or delete it from the server, or my server account fills up :-)

Deleting messages?

[erick99]

I don't quite understand how they are going to do that - it seems like a massive undertaking. Are they going to go through a tape library and only delete messages that the user deleted or are they going to delete archived messages periodically anyway. It seems like a massive task to selectively delete messages (from possibly billions?) from a massive tape library. Anyway, I think their intent is to make sure that messages are not saved forever:

Is it possible to delete messages, or does everything continue to reside in AllMail?

Oh, no, no, that was just poor wording on our part. It's just that we make a variety of backups, and we can't guarantee instantaneous deletion. Stuff that's on tapes, and those are offline--we eventually delete it, but we can't guarantee an instantaneous deletion.

The question would be whether or not somebody could feel confident that if they wanted to delete something that it would eventually be deleted.

Yes, eventually it will be deleted.

Happy Trails!

Erick

Re:Deleting messages?

[DarthTaco]

"I don't quite understand how they are going to do that - it seems like a massive undertaking. Are they going to go through a tape library and only delete messages that the user deleted or are they going to delete archived messages periodically anyway."

This is just speculation, but I would say that they aren't going to go through tapes to try to delete a specific file. Do tape backup systems even allow for this?

I'm guessing they only keep tape backups for so many days before recycling or destroying the tapes. So if you delete an email from the server, eventually all the tapes that had that message as a backup are recycled and hence your message has been deleted from the tapes.

Re:Deleting messages?

[segfaultcoredump]

We have a similar issue where I work (a small governmental agency). We want to be able to restore the email system in the event of a disaster or recent user error, but we dont want to have to dig through years of tapes in the event of some request by some reporter for information going way back.

The solution? It simple, just configure the backup system to always put the email system on the same set of tapes and to overwrite those tapes after 1 week.

This way, if somebody deletes a message, they have 1 week to ask for it to be restored. After that, it is gone forever since the backup tapes were overwritten. Likewise, if somebody deletes something, they they can be assured that it will be totally gone in 1 week.

Re:Deleting messages?

[LostCluster]

Mostly likely they'll never delete individual items from the tapes, just either reuse or destroy the tape after it is no longer "hot" as part of the disaster recovery plan.

Which means, a message saved on any part of the tape cycle won't be fully deleted until the entire tape cycle is completed. Since they're not going to release how often they're going to do a full backup tape, they also can't release how long it takes for tapes to get flushed out of their cycle...

Re:Deleting messages?

[Anonymous Coward]

The easiest way to "delete" backed up emails is to encrypt everything on disk. The backups will backup the encrypted data. Then, "deleting" emails is a matter of preiodically changing the encryption key and deleting the older keys. Old backups become unusable.

As a matter of fact there is a company that already does this.

Re:Deleting messages?

[jovlinger]

just like sectors on old ms-dos disks. You can undelete a file until it's sectors have been overwritten.

Best thing since 1998 Hotmail

[brainkiller]

I am lucky enough to have an early account at Gmail. Before I had it, I was the screenshots and I was not impressed, but once I tried it out... it is amazing. This will be one of the biggest things to hit the internet. It simply works, it doesn't have any flashy ads to bother you, and it's FAST! Not to mention the "conversation" style e-mailing, and everything being so dynamic. Now if they only make a Google Messenger, we're all set!

Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail

[hkfczrqj]

Now if they only make a Google Messenger, we're all set!

This is Slashdot. We are all set if and only if that IM is Jabber based and the client can run on *IX, GNU/Linux, *BSD...

:)

Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail

[brainkiller]

Google plays nice with *nix... this is taken from the google website for gmail:

Microsoft IE 5.5 and newer (download: Windows)
Netscape 7.1 and newer (download: Windows Macintosh Linux )
Mozilla 1.4 and newer (download: Windows Macintosh Linux )
Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and newer (download: Windows Macintosh Linux )

Too bad you can't access Gmail with a text browser... It would've been nice if the place you work for blocks every webmail service possible... If a non-dynamic text-browser accessible version was available, you could ssh home and read Gmail through lynx :)

If they do make a Gmessenger (not likely) it will work on every platform :)

Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it's fast given the number of users that have access to it... It's easy to make a system that scales to the number of beta testers they have. The test of speed will come once they've got a couple of million users.

Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail

[bhtooefr]

How 'bout Opera?

BTW, why SSH home and use Lynx when you can CGIProxy over SSL home and use (insert browser that you can use at work), or VNC over SSH and use (insert favorite browser)?

Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail

[nfsilkey]

Before I had it, I was the screenshots and I was not impressed

In Russia, the screenshots were you!

Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail

[omicronish]

It simply works, it doesn't have any flashy ads to bother you, and it's FAST!

I'm also lucky enough to have an account, and one interesting thing is their heavy usage of Javascript to generate the pages. Your inbox is basically an HTML page linking to a Javascript file and containing one block of Javascript code used to generate all the elements on the screen, and assuming the Javascript file is cached, checking your email should be blazing fast. It works perfectly fine with Firefox too!

Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail

[Anonymous Coward]

lame joke.

Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail

[Doug Neal]

Well actually if google made a google-branded jabber client for windows and run an IM service they could quite possibly break the MSN messenger near-monopoly, and those in the know could use whatever jabber client they felt like. They could even put MSN support in there too to make a switch easier.

Google's User Interface

[richard_za]

I have seen several reviews of Google's user interface (here, here, and here), as well as google's screenshots of the inbox and conversation view. and it seems that a lot of them are really unique, especially in a web application. Apparently it "autocompletes" from your address book. It looks like Google will be raising the bar of the standard for web applications. I sure hope they open up an API for accesing it. (as well as POP / IMAP access).

Re:Google's User Interface

[brainkiller]

POP e-mail would not work too good with Gmail since you might have 1GB of archived messages. IMAP access would be a dream come true. Either way, in a few months when Gmail goes LIVE, @hotmail.com accounts are going to die off and we're going to see @gmail.com everywhere. In about a year I suspect we're going to see a GMessenger driven off the gmail username database. That too will kill MSN, Yahoo and AOL messenger. I guess we're just gonna have to wait and see.

By the way... I don't think there are going to be many who will not like Gmail. It's so Sexy it makes you wanna use it. I have an early account and I can't stop using it. I never liked WebMail before.

Re:Google's User Interface

[richard_za]

Well the're definitely planning it (I agree IMAP is definitely better in this application).

From the article:
Steve Gillmor: It also compares favorably to my corporate e-mail.

Sergey Brin: Well, thank you. There are some things that it is currently missing as compared to corporate e-mail--for example, disconnected operation--though we do plan to provide things like POP3 and IMAP support, which should help that.

If they implement IM I hope they go the Jabber route.

Re:Google's User Interface

[hobbsbutcher]

I've got seven gmail screenshots on my blog as of today [jhbutcher.com]

Re:Google's User Interface

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a gmail account too and you do realize the damn thing works in less browsers than grandmas website?

This is definately not the google i know and love.

Re:Google's User Interface

[mytho]

I posted some remarks last night about my first impressions on GMail. You can read it here

Re:Google's User Interface

[richard_za]

Thanks for the blogger.com tip - I too have a gmail account now.

Re:Google's User Interface

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks cool, but too bad it's got some problems with accessibility.

Re:Google's User Interface

[cyberhill]

It does autocomplete in a javascripted drop down box. One good way to fill your address book is to um spam an email to all your contacts and since it autosaves them they will all be in your address book =]

Re:Google's User Interface

[The Cydonian]

Forgot where I read that, but there were some concerns in the Googler blog world that the UI is not accessibility-friendly and uses a lot of JavaScript tricks that might not work on all browsers.

Just to take an opposite view.

Re:Rush!

[stefanlasiewski]

Well, Gmail requires that your username be a minimum of 6 characters, so that actually rules out a number of common first names.

How did they pick beta testers?

[FsG]

I've read beta testers' weblogs and seen all the cool screenshots, but there's one thing I still can't figure out: how did Google pick the beta testers? Were they just friends of certain Google employees, or was there some place that you could apply to be a considered for beta testing?

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[brainkiller]

It can be a friend of a friend of a friend of a google employee :) They're really nice about giving frinds beta accounts... I guess they want a lot of feedback to solve the bugs.....

but there is no place where you can "apply" for beta testing...

btw... the usernames for @gmail.com have to be minimum 6 characters ... I was about to cry when I found out I can't get mike@gmail.com :(

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[wahgnube]

I know a bunch of people who use blogger regularly to maintain their web logs who got invited into the service.

Is it wrong to be jealous of people maintaining web logs there. Hmm.

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[dokebi]

I have a friend with a Gmail account. He got one through an acquantance working at Google. It seems like Google employees get accounts, and they could give out "passes" to a number of people. (not sure how many, though--definately more than 2)

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[richard_za]

I'd really appreciate one of those passes.

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[hobbsbutcher]

This is true. I signed into Blogger one day and there was a little box asking if I would like to give Gmail a try. There wasn't a "You bet your ass" button, so I just clicked yes. Now I am a Gmail user.

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[Anonymous Coward]

i got mine from a friend that works at google.
He got 5 "invitations" that he could send to friends to sign up for a google account.

I have also seen that active Blogger users have got the offer to sign up for gmail.

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[richard_za]

I'm not kidding, but a few minutes after posting this, I discovered how to get a gmail test account. Needless to say a will be posting a review on my blog soon.

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[richard_za]

I can vouch for this, I just got an account on gmail.com cos' I have blogger.com account

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[kgayer]

I'm an active Blogger user and they asked me if I would like to beta test.

Gmail is fantastic so far, nothing to complain about!

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[bhtooefr]

I just checked, and they didn't give me the link. Of course, I signed up for the account, left, and never updated it again (I have a /. journal if I want to blog...)

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[atto]

Wow, that was pretty slick on their part; Giving beta accounts to bloggers. They get a bunch of web-savvy types to test out their service, and get free grass-roots publicity to boot. And I'm guessing blogger users in general are more inclined to give positive reviews, since it is google, after all.

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[Pranjal]

and how do you get an account? :p

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[atto]

Yeah, a friend of mine works at google. He had 15 invitations to give away initially, but after finding tons of people who were interested he managed to get a lot more, around 50 I think. I got the impression that they are going to 'scale up' - keep handing out invites throughout the beta process.

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[xmpcray]

If you are a regular blogger at google's blogger.com, you get an account too.

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a friend with a Gmail account. He got one through an acquantance working at Google. It seems like Google employees get accounts, and they could give out "passes" to a number of people. (not sure how many, though--definately more than 2)

That's how I got my account. A student in the CS department at my school graduated and worked for Google, and offered GMail accounts to current CS majors. I guess he's still trying to bribe us for good TA evaluation scores ;) He was an absolutely horrible teacher for a course I took, and I think he realized that because he brought in donuts after a particularly bad midterm and on TA evaluation day. Still a kickass guy, though. Just couldn't teach.

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[Adrian De Leon]

I got mine through Blogger (Google owns Blogger).

Some active blogger.com users got an invitation through the main page. But don't try to open a Blogger account just to get a Gmail account, it will not work that way.

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[UnknownQ]

It can be a friend of a friend of a friend of a google employee

Can I be your friend?

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[RedX]

Heck, I'd appreciate one too. As a very active Blogger user, I was pretty bummed when many other Bloggers got beta Gmail offers but not me.

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just this morning, I logged into my Blogger account and found an offer to sign up for Gmail since I was considered an "active Blogger user".

Re:How did they pick beta testers?

[richard_za]

They were offering them on blogger.com (owned by google) to existing users.

Google Messenger?

[osewa77]

Dear Mr. Brin, now that we're providing webmail services, don't you feel that a Google Messenger should be in order?

Re:Google Messenger?

[Anonymous Coward]

Essentially, it IS a google messenger. It autorefreshes emails from other gmail senders instantly, and keeps all emails in a conversation type window. Totally blurs the email/IM line.

Re:Google Messenger?

[osewa77]

Hmmm ... guess I wouldn't know that without being a beta tester. Real-time conversations to mimic verbal communication are a bit different from what's possible with e-mail, though.

Re:Google Messenger?

[omicronish]

Dear Mr. Brin, now that we're providing webmail services, don't you feel that a Google Messenger should be in order?

What would be neat is if they integrated Google Messenger service with Gmail. Messages sent to you when you're offline can be transformed into emails, and perhaps maybe even messages in an individual messenger session can be logged to a Gmail folder.

Could Google Kill Spam?

[pipingguy]

Given the bright minds over there, I have to wonder. Unfortunately for me, I don't think I'd qualify for even a junior janitor trainee position at their offices (I think he's doing particle physics research in his spare time).

Re:Could Google Kill Spam?

[sketerpot]

With Gmail, Google can collect massive amounts of social networking info---Fred has Betty in his address book, or has once replied to Betty, or something, so Betty gets whiter-listed. Google can gather a massive amount of training for adaptive spam filters. Really, I think they stand a chance of killing spam for people with Gmail accounts. I want one.

Re:Could Google Kill Spam?

[Kent Recal]

Well, just in case there is a junior janitor trainee position. Could anyone please point me to the application form?

Re:Could Google Kill Spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they did manage it, it wouldn't likely benefit the rest of us.

The reason being that Google give back to the community very little about the research they undertake.

Obviously they can't just hand out their highly-developed algorithms, but despite all those PhDs working there, they publish comparatively far too little of their research.

Free Lunch?

[psychokid]

People want something free (a GB of free mailbox space in this case) at someone else's expense and then criticises about the possible tradeoffs involved? If you want content privacy, you shouldn't be using a free web account to begin with.

I love google but

[jacquesm]

I'm beginning to feel uncomfortable with the amount of clout they have and their new 'commercial' outlook on things.

If - as someone remarked - google goes public that is not the same as google being owned by th e public. It simply means that there will be that much more pressure on them to make cash. Buying stock in an IPO is not to be equated with supporting that company, it simply gives them cash to pursue their business in return for a small piece of the pie.

It would be nice if there was a public - not for profit - alternative to google.

Re:I love google but

[JohnCub]

Dmoz.org is about as close to a not for profit alternative to google.

The truth is though, all that bandwidth costs money. Programmers typically want paid. Hardware breaks and electricity is most often not free. I know a non-profit organization still makes money to cover these costs but I don't see the need for anything more than dmoz if that's what you want.

Re:I love google but

[DarthTaco]

"It would be nice if there was a public - not for profit - alternative to google."

Perhaps this is your calling. It would have to be started by someone who felt passionately about the idea, and it sounds like you might.

Re:I love google but

[KD5YPT]

I seems to remember there is a type of stock that basically give the stockholder no control over the company but still share the profit. Maybe if Google should ever go into IPO they should use that.

Re:I love google but

[hswerdfe]

Alternative to Gmail
mightbe freeshell.org

non-profit company provides email (pop, webmail, pine) access.

all it cost is $1 for 20MB....they also give webspace, and general ssh and telnet access.

amazing shit...

but your right non-profit indexing of the web is needed

Re:I love google but

[mpk]

Commercial doesn't necessarily equal evil. If commercial means "having the money to implement things we think are cool in interesting ways without having to scrape around", that's a good thing. If, for instance, Google were having to go to venture capitalists to raise the funding to develop Gmail, development would be primarily driven by commercial concerns and interfered with by investors wanting to maximise return rather than the way it's being done, which seems to be to be more or less a drive to Do The Right Thing. If investors were clamouring for a return on their investment, you can bet Gmail would be being rushed into full service right now rather than going through a good long testing and shakedown period for making sure everything works the way it should.

However, in the long term Google ain't a charity and all of the staff and system resources needed to provide the search engine, Google News and Gmail have to be paid for somehow. If the least obnoxious way of doing that is via Google's fairly unobnoxious and much-less-evil-than-many-others approach to inline advertising, that's fine with me.

If Google do go public then they'll have to be very careful to make sure they keep the freedom they have at the moment - but it seems to work so well right now that any shareholder demanding changes for the sake of changes would be a fool.

Re:I love google but

[bhtooefr]

Pay $36, and get 100MB e-mail, 100MB web, and 100MB shell instead of 20MB each, and get SMTP access. BTW, they also have IMAP access.

As for non-profit indexing of the web, look to the Nutch project, and Directory Mozilla (aka the Open Directory, which is used as Google Directory).

spam?

[circletimessquare]

you realize that if google wrings spam's neck in their implementation successfully (somehow), then they will:

1. have every single user on the internet signing up

2. singlehandedly save email itself from progressively encroaching social irrelevancy

Warning - Do Not Click Link

[lordDallan]

The parent's link points to VERY disturbing pictures. It does NOT have anything to do with Gmail.

Why always Hotmail?

[koi88]

Just because they were first?
I mean,

• no pop3
• ridiculously little space
• no imap
• reminds you to use Internet Explorer each time you use it with Mozilla
• belongs to MS ;-)

My email provider offers pop3, imap, 12 mb storage (well, that's not much, if you pay, you get more), email forwarding etc. (some stuff I don't use, like sms when you get email). Of course, all for free and quite reliable for 3 years now.
So why always Hotmail?

Re:Why always Hotmail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who hosts your email? A link would be appreciated.

Re:Why always Hotmail?

[jhoude]

I don't know why so many people choose hotmail, but I'm currently searching for a good webmail (for my mother).
Is there a free email service that offers a webmail, imap access and a decent storage space ?

Re:Why always Hotmail?

[incom]

Integration to MSN messenger, and being accesible by the default start page on IE, seem to be the most common reasons I hear.

Re:Why always Hotmail?

[jesser]

reminds you to use Internet Explorer each time you use it with Mozilla

I use Hotmail with Firefox and it hasn't told me to use IE.

Re:Why always Hotmail?

[koi88]

When my girlfriend accesses her Hotmail account from my Mac with Mozilla (same with Firefox, I think), after logout theres always a screen telling her to use Internet Explorer (for Macintosh).
Maybe your browser "disguises" as Internet Explorer? Or they're especially proud of their IE, Mac Version (which is stuck at version 5.2)...

Re:Why always Hotmail?

[jesser]

I usually don't log out of Hotmail, but I tried it just now, and it just took me to www.msn.com. I'm using Windows.

Re:Why always Hotmail?

[CaptainTux]

Yes. Check out www.mailworks.org. It offer 30 MB of storage, IMAP service, huge amount of bandwidth, etc.

Re:Why always Hotmail?

[/dev/trash]

reminds you to use Internet Explorer each time you use it with Mozilla

It does? I access HoTMaiL all the time and it never tells me to switch.

Re:Why always Hotmail?

[Chris Pimlott]

Never seen that either, been using Mozilla and most recently FireFox for at least a year now.

Re:Why always Hotmail?

[koi88]

This is very strange.
You're not the first person to point that out.
When my girlfriend accesses her Hotmail acount from my Macintosh with Mozilla (same with Firefoc, I think); after logging out a page comes that tells her to use Internet Explorer for Macinosh.
It seems there is no such message on Windows. Or even Linux? (Heck, it doesn't tell you that a "free" operating system isn't safe or soemthing?)

Yet more testing notes

[mpk]

I've written a few thoughts on my initial impressions of Gmail. Not much that hasn't been said before, but hey, it's another data point.

In summary - WHOA, keyboard shortcuts!

Well...

[DAldredge]

Way to be accountable to the public! Also, depending on what country you are in you may be violating open records/data retention laws.

Re:Well...

[segfaultcoredump]

the policy was dicated by our legal department, not IT or the user community.

as a general rule with reguards to email, as long as you have an established policy that states what is kept and for how long, one is safe from anybody who asks for stuff that is older than the retention policy. (but if you are caught changing that policy as a reaction to a request, one is in deep trouble).

There are exceptions, mostly in the financial industry (all written communications must be kept for 3 years, that includes email, im, etc, etc). Those rules do not apply to us (we have our own list of things that we must keep, but none of them are in email).

Re:Well...

[DAldredge]

What country is our org based in?

Re:Well...

[KD5YPT]

Read the previous post! It says BACKUPS! That means if a user wants to delete it, it will just mean that the user deleted his own stuffs, and Google merely wiped the backup they held for internal purposes (message failed to arrive, yaddy yaddy yada). The retention law applies to the people why uses the e-mail, meaning they have to back it up themselves if needed.

Re:Well...

[DAldredge]

And some goverment agencies are required by law to keep copies of all emails, even if they are deleted.

We are not talking about private corps, we are talking about goverment orgs that may be held to different laws.

Check it out first

[Sv-Manowar]

If you have an active blog with blogger/blogspot you get an invitation to beta test it. Very experimental ideas in there for a mail client (the threading, loading), I can see why they need a lot of time for the testing.

Hey!

[No. 24601]

Getting back to the privacy issue, Groove uses an encrypted XML store. One of the ways you could provide some clarity about the privacy issue would be to push this data through an encrypted store. You could keep the indexes unencrypted, but keep the rest of the data encrypted.

Nope that's not Sergey, that's the interviewer! Is this guy interviewing him or working for him?

Re:Hey!

[Bert690]

One of the ways you could provide some clarity about the privacy issue would be to push this data through an encrypted store. You could keep the indexes unencrypted, but keep the rest of the data encrypted.

What a pointless idea. The index contains almost all the data contained in the store (excepting maybe stop words). and besides, the store needs to be decrypted to render the messages as HTML. So how would this brain-dead idea provide *any* privacy whatsoever? OK, so it might protect against an evil system administrator who might happen to run off with one of the store's disks, but not the index, and not manage to get ahold of a decryption key (which which must reside on *every* machine that does rendering of store-derived information). Even using segmented store encryption would offer little privacy.

Which one is Sergey?

[No. 24601]

1. Yes, and in the same way you can print a conversation, you could also print to RSS.
2. Yeah, that's a very interesting idea.

.gnorw era uoy ,eno dekcip uoy fI

Re:Which one is Sergey?

[KD5YPT]

Sergey is 2. Apparently it looks like Sergey is getting feedbacks instead of being interviewed.

i dont understand

[iammaxus]

how does Google do everything so well, or at least better than any other company by far. Is it just led by some smart people who can higher some more smarter people? I know, its probably cause they use lots of linux everywhere. Yeah, that must be it. :P

Re:i dont understand

[KD5YPT]

That and they haven't become overly profit driven.
They aim for good products, the profits come as a side effect.
Others aim for high profit, bad products come as a side effect.

Re:i dont understand

[iammaxus]

ok stop the damn bull shit, what is Google, along with Linux, and all of the OSS world some sort of god sent thing to make people happy. Its a damn for-profit company like any other, it does what it takes to make money, it just does it better than any others.

Re:i dont understand

[CaptainTux]

how does Google do everything so well, or at least better than any other company by far

Because Google is run by people who, not only love technology, but actually understand technology. These guys are technologists first and businesspeople second. They've created a geek playground, set their geeks free, and watched them play. The result of that play is what we love about Google.

That might all change once they go public. I hope that it doesn't but pouring buckets of money at people tends to oftentimes have a negative effect. I suppose we shall wait and see.

The privacy concerns are overrated.

[endersdouble]

In my opinion, the privacy concerns people have about GMail are vastly overrated. Don't get me wrong, I'm just as privacy/rights obsessed as the next Slashdotter...but there isn't very much wrong with GMail. Go to Google, will you? Type something into the search box, let's say "books." No reason why, just a random word. On the right side of the screen, what do you see? Under the heading "sponsored links", you see adds for Amazon and the like. Things which paid to get in on the "books" search. Do people complain about this? No! But, I hear you cry, GMail is looking into my personal words! They can context-ad my searches, but not my email! And why not? From everything I've seen, it's been said that no person will EVER read what you've written/been sent. If that's true, then how is your privacy invaded? It's not! Pure code scanning your email and showing ads is not an invasion of privacy. But, I hear you cry, if they start with that, they may end up reading our email by hand/searching it for use other than anonymous advertising/whatever? So? So could Hotmail. So could Yahoo. We trust them not to actually read our mail. We have to trust Google too; we all know the lesson of Ken Thompson's "Reflection on Trusting Trust"...we have to trust any mail service at some point. My point? I'll trust them not to actually read them. Anonymous ad fetching? That's OK.

Re:The privacy concerns are overrated.

[Bert690]

we have to trust any mail service at some point. My point? I'll trust them not to actually read them. Anonymous ad fetching? That's OK.

OK, maybe Google isn't evil now, but what if Microsoft were to buy them out? And whose to say going public won't pressure them to derive as much $$$ out of their data as possible? Anonymous ad fetching could only be the beginning. Yes you have to trust your mail provider, but the sheer scale of Google's service is what scares people. That is, it's not just your mail they may be able to access, but your mail and that of (almost) all your friends, family, and co-workers! That's a hugely valuable asset and there will be pressures for Google to exploit it in all kinds of (possibly nasty) ways.

Kudos though to Sergey who does seem to be seriously thinking about privacy issues (though the interviewer's suggestions about using an encrypted store are laughably naive).

Re:The privacy concerns are overrated.

[CaptainTux]

When it comes down to it, you are in more danger of your local ISP invading your privacy by reading your email than you are Google. A local ISP has, at most, a few thousand customers. GMail, once publicly released, will have millions of members. Couple that with the fact that your local ISP staff generally has more time to do snoopy stuff and which do YOU think has the most potential to invade your privacy?

Privacy invasion is a lot like being attacked by a hacker: yes the potential is out there. But what are the realistic chances that any one person will be the target of such an an attack? What makes YOU so special that a service with say 30 million members would focus on YOUR email and hand read it? We have to balance chance with statistics and reality.

Everything and a bag of chips

[KalvinB]

I'm working on my own web-mail (link in sig) with anything I can think of applied to it. It's very much functional and easy to use.

Google looks to be doing the same thing. They're not just emulating what's already out there but going way above and beyond. They've already got all the basic features that people expect implemented and a few toys. 6 Months gives them plenty of time to go further to give people that last push they needed to move over to GMail vs whatever they're currently using.

One can expect that MS is already at work figuring out a battle plan to counter this. Or maybe they're just expecting GMail to fail financially because they think they're overselling themselves into debt.

MS knows how much it costs to run their service which offers significantly less and has a number of caps in place. Not just storage but also the number of e-mails you can send per day. Hotmail is also ad supported.

I can imagine that MS has something cooking but they're not going to do anything until they see what happens to Google. If Google becomes too popular they may be forced to sell premium accounts that have the extra bells and whistles.

Ben

The right size.

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1 Gigabyte mailbox is good enough for any spammer.
Isn't this a good chance for (world's) email to implement those anti-spam ideas? like the .mail Top domain...
I am telling you, the next day Gmail opens, a bunch of companies will go for the (near) 1 Gig mail box.
Wait a minute, why am I saying this? Microsoft is always spying these posts.
MS always find the way to twist anything to please their monopoly.

This been said, now I am going to read the article...

Excuse me.

LG+

Sergey Brin = worse than Saddam?

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't just the happy grin he exhibits in every picture, though that is annoying. No, I consider Sergey evil because:

a) he has my dream job
b) he defined what my dream job would be
c) he thought of cool stuff before me
d) he has more stuff than me

I don't mind Bill Gates much despite his money because his company and his ideas are mundane and never very exciting. Oh sure, I'd like to have a mountain fortress with helipads and scuba tunnels, and I guess it would have been OK if I'd come up with the Windows oses, but really I could take or leave it.

Ditto Linus Torvalds. He has the opposite problem. He has neat ideas, but, no offense Linus (I know he is reading this), not exactly a dream job. I am only mildly envious of him. Larry Ellison I am also slightly envious of because of his crazy samurai stuff but due to his crazy samurai brain I don't think I'd want to be him.

No, as far as being others goes, I'll take Sergey Brin and his unique name and mysterious heritage and brilliant smile and rugged good looks and cool job and money.

That bastard.

I switched over to using Gmail exclusively

[MarkWatson]

Yes, I know that it is a beta system, but for really crucial business email, I keep a flat file where I copy and paste emails for local backup (but, I almost never bother to do this).

Setting up Gmail was trivial - just forwarded email from my domain name. It is a little strange using a web based email system but because it uses a Mozilla plugin it is really more like a fat client. I find that the convenience of getting my email from any computer I am using outweighs any hassles of a web interface.

Oddly enough, I don't use the search capability very often, but it does work well. I like the way threads are organized in "conversations" and a new email to a "conversation" moves the entire conversation to the top of the Inbox.

-Mark

Re:I switched over to using Gmail exclusively

[Anonymous Coward]

I too am a Gmail beta tester (I got my invite through blogger.com). I just received a new email on it and found that it has this cool feature: In the upper right corner of the screen it tells me when the email was sent and approximately how many minutes or hours ago that was. My latest email says received 1 1/2 hours ago. Little things like this really add up to make the experience great.

Scott

Re:I switched over to using Gmail exclusively

[rowanxmas]

It seems like there should be a Mozilla extension that use the entire GMail API to present the same UI to the Desktop client...

How will Microsoft Respond?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft will announce some big new upgrade, or release, of some (similar) product the day that Google publicly "releases" their mail service. This will detract media atttention from Google.

This is what they seem to have done with Apple for years--particulary major software releases.

The popular media are stupid and enticed by Biil Gates' riches (power). So it works.

Here's the link

[koi88]

As so many people have asked about my email provider... Unfortunately the provider is German, and I'm afraid you need a basic knowledge of German (or somebody to help you) to register...
The name is web.de, the address http://www.web.de. That's where you can also register.
If you have done that but can't find the server's addresses: the IMAP server's is: imap.web.de, the SMTP server has address smtp.web.de.
SSL is supported.

Good luck!
I merely gave my email provider as an example, I didn't think so many people would be interested...

Re:Here's the link

[Jadrano]

Indeed, I think web.de is one of the best free services. Most other free e-mail services I use (gmx.net, yandex.ru, orangemail.ch, ...) don't offer IMAP, but they're still much better than Hotmail (they offer POP access, more storage, some of them forwarding, SMS notifications).

It's really strange that in discussions about GMail, it is mentioned, at all, that it will be better than Hotmail. Hotmail is one of the worst big free e-mail services. It doesn't mean much if an e-mail service is significantly better than Hotmail, there are plenty of better services already - who uses Hotmail obviously doesn't care or know about the alternatives. What is, indeed, significant is that GMail will probably be significantly better than web.de, GMX and the likes - in some respects (storage, but perhaps not only), it will beats the paid premium versions of these services, as well (probably, some of them will offer more with GMail as a competitor).

RSS feeds?

[joeljkp]

Why don't they offer RSS feeds for news.google.com too? Or do they?

Blogger is one way.

[Anonymous Coward]

I got mine by using my blogger.com blog semi-actively and for a longish term of time. It's a little box on the blogger website if you meet their conditions once you log in.

IE Only! Are you smoking Crack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, its a complex app, but its definetly not IE only. The current list of supported browsers includes IE, of course, as well as Mozilla and Firefox (on Windows/Mac/Firefox), and Netscape too. The only browser support that is strangely absent is Safari, but they are working on it.

The difference between GMail and an application is that you can check it anywhere. I've used Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, and they both pale in comparison. I now have a GMail account, and its fantastic. Its well designed, very intuitive, and it works great.

Daniel

About the "ad" concern

[alphakappa]

The text ads are a big concern for many - like the million flashing ads on hotmail/yahoo are better (sorry couldn't resist it).

So I've been using gmail now and guess what.. I've not seen the text ads on most of my emails (I'm being completely honest here). In fact, none of my personal emails have any ads on the side.

Guess where the ads are? I bought a couple of things on buy.com and ebags.com and when I got the confirmation emails from them, I saw related ads on the side. Did I notice them? no, I saw them only when I was going through all the emails to see where the ads are. Did I mind them? Heck no - they are really unobtrusive.

That said, there are still things I'd like to see implemented in Gmail, and I send in bug reports/suggestions constantly - The amazing thing is that this is probably the first email service in the world that's being designed by the users. I can't remember any other service that had beta testers like this (and beta testers who were eager to do the testing), so I'm confident that at the end of 6 months, they'll give us a really usable email service. I'm glad this is happening.

Re:About the "ad" concern

[CaptainTux]

So I've been using gmail now and guess what.. I've not seen the text ads on most of my emails (I'm being completely honest here). In fact, none of my personal emails have any ads on the side.

I signed up for my GMail account on yesterday and there certainly are VERY unobtrusive text ads (similar to the ones used on Google Search) on the right hand side of the page. Perhaps older GMail accounts don't have this though. Either way, they are extremely unobtrusive and don't effect the experience at all. I wish all of the email providers (like they'll be there long once GMail launches) would do this with their ads.

For anyone interested, I've posted a brief review of the GMail service in my blog. I'll be honest, this is a mindblowing service. Absolutely world-class all the way.

Search functions

[Alcoholic Coward]

so if gmail offers advanced search functionality, can one do, say, an image search, a search within ZIP files, or PDFs?

- a.c.

What I want is IMAP

[koi88]

I'm not sure how good Gmail is going to be... better than Hotmail, yes, for sure.
But what I want is IMAP, and it doesn't sound like they're willing to provide that. It's so nice to be able to read the same emails at work and at home without some sending to self or fiddling with the mail program or whatever.

No de Icaza lawsuit?

[gmhowell]

I'm still amazed the miguel hasn't sued Google for appropriating the Gnome naming scheme: take program 'ackbar' and prepend the letter 'g', resulting in 'gackbar'. Or, option b, take program 'outlook' and replace first letter with 'g', resulting in 'gutlook'.

Miguel, at the very least, a frivolous lawsuit will get you more slashdot stories than Gnome and mono combined. Compare SCO stories pre and post lawsuit for verification.

Re:No de Icaza lawsuit?

[TeknoHog]

I'm still amazed the miguel hasn't sued Google for appropriating the Gnome naming scheme: take program 'ackbar' and prepend the letter 'g', resulting in 'gackbar'. Or, option b, take program 'outlook' and replace first letter with 'g', resulting in 'gutlook'.

This applies to GNU software more generally, not just GNOME. In any case it has nothing to do with Google, which is probably derived from the large number Googol or Googolplex, that had the initial G to begin with.

If only it was IMAP, you wouldn't need ......

[ron_ivi]

If only it used IMAP instead of POP, you wouldn't need Gmail's search features.

Since 1990 IMAP had a "search unseen" feature (See http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1176.html which enabled clients to easily broaden and narrow searches easily (see Pine for a good implementation).

I currently have about 1GB across a few IMAP folders at my ISP; and can search the hole think quickly and efficiently using '90's technology.

I don't see the big deal.

Orkut invite code.

[Photar]

Orkut looks cool. Can you give me an invite code?

Re:POP? -- Mod parent up

[michaelhood]

The other people who replied to this didn't understand what the parent meant. It wasn't phrased very legibly, imo. I'll bite:

He is suggesting that you would provide Google with your username and password to a third party POP account (such as one provided by your ISP), and Google would download that mail INTO the Gmail interface. This would eliminate the need for email client software on the PC. I much like this idea. If they could shift a significant portion of the general email populous away from Outlook and Outlook Express, think of the reduction in worm/virii propagation.

You are currently using 27 MB (3%) of your 1000 MB

[KrackHouse]

I got an account through Blogger because I'm an active poster. http://crackhouse.blogspot.com. Here are some quick first impressions of Gmail. It really is a gig, I uploaded some MP3s without any problems, no pop access right now, it's very limited in the settings department compared to yahoo but it's still in beta so that's to be expected. I tried to send a 90MB file to myself as an attachment but it says that I'm limited to 10MB attachments :( They have a system where you can flag messages as important with a star icon. It copies the message to the star folder for easy access to important messages. The default name format looks like this firstname.lastname@gmail.com

on gmail and spam filtering

[rebelcool]

I have a gmail account. I set some other email accounts of mine to forward to it, a couple of which are heavy spam attractors (200 a day or so).

At the moment, gmail's spam filter isn't all that great allowing maybe 50% through. I figure this is probably because their filter hasn't had enough training yet, not enough users etc. And they make it easy to report the spam by just checking off the messages and clicking "Report As Spam".

So I'm not too bummed, but don't get your hopes up on gmail saving the world from spammers.

Holy crap that's nasty!

[oldosadmin]

I'm one of the poor saps who goes "how bad can it be" and clicks on it.

Damn slashdot trolls.

After Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be great after Gmail would be a decent universal signon system- kind of like Passport but without the evil company and actually useful, instead of being used to monitor what you listen to.

Re:Rush!

[Donny Smith]

>Well, Gmail requires that your username be a minimum of 6 characters, so that actually rules out a number of common first names

How about making that minimum 32 alphanumeric characters to further reduce the gold rush effect?

Actually I just thought of something - since they already do Web hosting (blogs, which is a form of it) - they should allow people to receive their email at @gmail.com.
I wouldn't even bother to register a "real" account name, blog name should do just fine.

(Yes, I know, blogspot.com allows you to change blogspot name if it's available)

One option I would love to see...

[burns210]

I thin Gmail should have 'smart playlist' type folders such as itunes... have a 'work' 'recent' 'most replied to' 'from parents' 'from kids'... All these folders auto sort information via rules you predefine, and mail can be in multiple smart folder entries... it is like a database query, auto updating.

Re:One option I would love to see...

[sjkmac]

Yep, but I'd much prefer calling them something like message groups, conversation collections, smart labels, or anything other than folders.

Using the folder analogy inherited from the physical object is bogus when a unique message appears within multiple groups, like one iTunes library track appearing in different playlists. In real-world folders you'd be reproducing multiple physical copies (clones) but each can be individually modified and become distinct from the original.

If nothing more, I see Gmail as opening a door for the "mainstream" webmail user to view/search/organize/store e-mail messages using abstractions beyond the ever increasing limitations of traditional folders. Folders become simply a subset and arbitraryconvenience within these more powerful methods, which will extend into more applications/services in the future (like we've tasted with [smart] playlists/albums in iTunes/iPhoto). That's what makes Gmail exciting (and important) for me.

I've been curious to try Bloomba but there's no Mac OS X client for it (yet).

If (Email), then (...)

[BobGregg]

What I find hard to believe is that nobody seems to be pointing out the blindingly obvious. If Google can give each user 1GB of space, and provide, say, POP access to it... then clearly, they could provide HTTP access to that *same* space... at which point, they just put most independent ISPs out of business.

Once Gmail hits, with very few tweaks, Google could become the largest ISP. That's what this infrastructure allows them to do. Think about it - their core technology is indexing the web. How much easier and more powerful would that be if a significant chunk of the web was being served off THEIR OWN SERVERS?