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

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: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.

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?

[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: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)

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: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: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.

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!

Re:Google's User Interface

[mytho]

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

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 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).

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.

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

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.