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Google's Gmail Goes Into Beta for Blogger Users
deadpixel writes "Gmail, the 1gb webmail service offered
by Google, has gone into beta. Blogger
(owned by google) users have first crack at the service. Besides the massive
storage, the free service boasts a sophisticated spam filter, no
pop-ups/banners, and gives you search results relevant to the emails you receive
automatically. Bring on those attachments!"
Don't get too excited and go run and create a blogger account to get in. It seems that it only works for those that are currently "active" blogger users already. (Though nobody really knows what defines active.)
You need to be an active blogger to get access to GMail. I have multiple Blogger accounts. But they gave me access only in those accounts where I have been active lately.
Yesterday I signed in to BlogSpot just to check for this, and when you log in to the main page, on the right hand side there is a GMail ad.
Click yes, answer yes to all of the questions that follow, and you have your very own GMail account.
I have had this for what, 24 hours now I guess, and GMail is the best webmail interface I've ever seen.
The one thing I don't like so far is that links, elinks, or links2 don't work with it. They do support javascript AFAIK which is what GMail is basically comprised of, but that's my only gripe.
Can't wait for POP or, preferably, IMAP access. Even more preferably, IMAP over SSL.
actually the correct term for 1,024 bytes is mebibyte, for 1,048,576 bytes is gibibyte. mega/giga are decimal prefixes, so 1 megabyte = 1000 bytes, and 1000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte. (google calculator is using the old convention)
login to the blogger account, and if you are amongst the selected - there will be a message to indicate an 'invite to try gmail' on the right side of the screen.
Not all blogger users have been invited. And people who are joining blogger now after the announcement are not getting accounts.
There's an image header - http://blogger.com/g-logo.gif
As an active Blogger user, we would like to invite you to be one of the first to try out Google's new email service, Gmail.
Would you like to give it a whirl? YES / NO
The YES link opens up this page
The NO links pops an alert box saying 'Okay, this notice will be here for a few more days, should you change your mind.' or similar.
True, it'd be nice if MiB and GiB became standard. For the record, this link explains the actual SI standards and binary multiples.
doesnt present any ads to you if the content of your email is a PGP encrypted message.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
As their announcement says:
As an active Blogger user, we would like to invite you to be one of the first to try out Google's new email service, Gmail.
Would you like to give it a whirl? YES / NO
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
This is a piece of distortion introduced by disk drive manufacturers. I think Connor (now expired) first introduced it, at the time that disk drives in the low number of gigabytes were appearing. They started sizing drives with a gigabyte counted as 1000 honest Megabytes. I think Connor needed to do it because with honest gigabytes, their drive (a rotten, unreliable one it turned out to be) would not make the 4 Gigabyte mark, though everybody elses's did. To their shame, the other drive nanufacturers followed. So for all disk drives, a Gigabyte now meant 10^3*2^20, not 2^30. A sad world, my masters.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
i got it a few days ago. It is a cool service, but is it the best thing since sliced bread? nope.
I don't see why people think gmail's spam filter is all that great - so far (and this may be due to beta issues, a lack of training etc) its allowed about 50% of spam to my account through. I've got a couple spam infested accounts forwarding to gmail to test this out.
as for the ads, on most messages they're not even there and when they are they're very small and placed to the side of the page like google's search engine text ads. I don't even notice them. So its not like they're inserted into your mail really. And at least google doesn't attach "get your hotmail address now!" to the bottom of every outgoing email.
So while it is cool (the best feature is the seamless conversations), it's not going to be for everyone, or cause a mass exodus from existing mail services.
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Be bold and be proud of your geekdom! Say "mebibytes" and "gibibytes" in public!!
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
You need to have an "active" Blogger account. When I logged in last week, I saw this invitation message. I hadn't used my account in a week or so, but Blogger considered me "active" enough to deserve an invite.
For more information, click here.
My impression thus far: very sweet.
I tried registering some short usernames, the username has to be 6 characters or longer.
So I have a leet 6-character name@gmail.com.
Transit time for sent and recived mail is near-instantaneous.
The interface is trademark google utilitarian. Two thumbs up.
I sent some test spam from my spam folder, they got into my inbox (and not to my 'spam'
folder on gmail). So they have some tweaking to do there.
Inbox
Example message w/ text ads present
The only thing different is the "@gmail.com" e-mail addy at the top...I cut mine out just to avoid any potential issues...sorry.
"This food is problematic."
1 GB e-mail account, 350 MB combined storage, personal blog, forum, gallery, auctions and more
Of course, They are primarily mac-oriented, but I can deal with it.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
they don't do that. At least not now, i suppose its possible once gmail goes open to the public it could though.
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Well, Gmail works with Mozilla, but it is very Javascript-heavy. Just like Hotmail and Yahoo, actually. If you open Hotmail with IE, you get an (ActiveX, DHTML?) formatting toolbar so that your email can have "cute" stuff like colours and emoticons, this toolbar isn't there with non-IE browsers --typical Microsoft Monopoly.
Actually, the latest versions of browsers can do DHTML quite nicely with similar results. I've been making a small tool using DHTML and the only problem so far has been with IE which always complain "There is a problem loading the page" despite the fact that it loads it successfully.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Based upon some initial testing, outgoing attachments are capped somewhere between 5.5 and 7.5 megs. Which is making capacity testing a PIA.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
SpyMac is an embarassment of flim flam artistry. It is one of the greatest rabbit tricks ever pulled out of a Mac hat.
People think there's concerns with Gmail and privacy - yet YOU would trust your email to a site that HAS NEVER backed away from the iWalk PDA being a fake, that consistently breaks MUG rules (they claim to be a MUG, yet moderators post rumors - a no no).
THERE IS NO WAY I WOULD TRUST SPYMAC with any password, email address, home address or any other information
SpyMac is just the shiniest car in the parking lot. Be careful though, there may be flood damage under the hood.
The other thing that bothers me about SpyMac is that their moderators troll the web and forums looking for ANYONE that says something bad about the site.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I've had a blogger account for almost 2 years now, so I got selected for the Gmail beta. I just signed up about 10 minutes ago. First problem I had was that your username has to be at least 6 characters long. As you can see from my username here, it is less than 6 characters. Not that big of a deal I guess. Besides that it looks awesome, I haven't done much with it beside set up the account and send a few test emails but the display looks really clean, reminds me a little of YahooMail. The textads on the side aren't intrusive at all, especially compared to every other free webmail I've ever seen. Load times are impressive, could just be that they have a huge amount of bandwidth and server-power allocated at the moment, but it's faster than any other webmail. I'll have to see how it responds once I have a bunch of messages in it to load. So my first impression is that it is better than any other webmail - if their UI innovation (i.e. emails organized as conversations, searching, etc.) actually works (or isn't annoying) I would definitely switch to using it as my primary webmail account. 1gig of storage space is definitely awesome, I lost a bunch of relatively important email from my stupid hotmail account (I signed up long before MS bought them and ruined everything) when I was out of country and couldn't access it - I came back to an account overflowing with spam and all my old emails auto-deleted. Yeah, I should of kept them somewhere else - but the account wasn't near full and until then I was only getting a a few spam emails per day. Regardless, it's not likely to happen when you have a gig of space to play with.
I've been using Gmail for a few hours now, and I'm very impressed with it. This is really the best use of Javascript I've seen. It isn't there to add a bunch of cool effects, but to actually increase functionality and usability. So far it has been very, very fast and fairly bug-free considering its beta status.
:)
The only complain I have so far is that by default, it didn't catch any of the spam I received. However, I've reported all of it as spam, so it will be interesting to see if it improves based upon that. So far though, its spam filter doesn't seem quite in line with filters such as the one in Apple's Mail client. Speaking of Apple, it does appear to work pretty well in Safari. There are a few quirks compared to loading it in Firefox, but nothing show-stopping.
If they can work out the spam filter and polish everything up, which I'm sure they can, they've got a true winner here. I'm copying over all of my regular POP3 e-mail to my new Gmail account so that I can access it anywhere and perform more in-depth searching on it. After all, if there's one thing Gmail tops all web and application-based Mail clients on, it is definitely searching.
I urge you to check out these screenshots for a better look at Gmail than the two or three screenshots others have posted by clicking here.
Gmail is as good as the hype suggested
Thanks,
David Gorman
http://gorman.modblog.com