Slashdot Mirror
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!"
This is being blown so far out of proportion. Seriously. As countless others have said, our email is scanned all the time by third parties for spam and viruses.
If you have concerns about Google scanning your email to place unobstrusive, sometimes-actually-useful text advertisements next to your email, then there is a solution. DON'T FLIPPING USE IT! That's all there is too it!
The thing that I'M concerned about is if they pull a similar move that Apple did with mac.com accounts. "Oh yah they'll be free forever", then two years later, once everyone is hooked on free @mac.com email addresses, they turn around and say they're going to charge $99 dollars per year. Excuse me? I dont think so. My mac.com email was my main email for nearly two years and as soon as they pulled that shit, I cancelled my account, bought my own domain, and now have free email for life. Apple was hoping that users would pay because they had been using that email address as their main email and wouldnt want to switch. Well it didnt work on me and yo should have read the mac message boards when this happened. People were pissed!
I do think Gmail is a cool idea. Being able to store a gig of email so you (as an average user anyways) never have to delete email and have the best search engine in the world to search through old emails is awesome. But what if their idea is to get you hooked so you wont ever want to give it up, then start charging a fee for it? Even though it is worth probably $100/year, I would tell them to shove their bill up their ass and move on. This is why I won't use Gmail.
1 gigabyte = 1 024 megabytes
:) I suppose its how you ask the question :)
Bang on and correct
Cheers,
rob.
The "evil empire" Microsoft has kept hotmail running for free for ages. Yahoo, I'm sure it's some sort of evil empire, has kept their free mail running for ages too. I could also list many other sites that give out free email addresses such as myownemail.com. I doubt Google would go and charge for gmail, although they might turn that 1gb file storage way down you'll probably still have your gmail address if you want it - just with more like 50mb space or what have you.
I should hope that no one implementing an IMAP system in this WiFi-enabled world would forget to use SSL. :)
I think it would be a good idea if they worked with one of the up and coming alternative OS's to do a tie-in with their e-mail client. That would be a good way to give competition to MS Outlook offering the user to sign up for an MSN account.
Because:
"When Google has its IPO it officially becomes evil. Very few corporations adhere to their founding values when they must answer to shareholders. Google should just remain private."
Ranting about how money is evil is troll-like.
And I'm sure more than a few moderators are offended by the viewpoint that no one should ever make money, and everyone should give everything away for free. That's not how the world works.
evil adrian
So what if moderators are offended by my viewpoint? Disagreement = invalid? It's an abuse of the moderation system to mod people down simply because you disagree.
In language, what is correct is a matter of widespread adoption, not what someone says is 'correct'. While it's technically 'incorrect' to use punctuation like ;) in the middle of a sentence, everyone does it, and I would guess that very few people would consider it incorrect these days. Same goes for the widespread (and one might say 'incorrect') use of 'was' instead of 'were' as the English subjunctive, particularly in the US -- eg. If I was a little less fervent about 24 bytes, I wouldn't be posting to slashdot.
Personally, I haven't seen any indication that anyone has adopted 'gibi' and 'mebi' as anything but ridiculous and pedantic terms, but best of luck on your crusade. I agree that it would be nice to see some kind of distiction, but 24 bytes here and there when you're measuring in megs or gigs... not a problem!
The problem with those prefixes is they are the absolute GAYEST names that could ever be conceived. If I heard anyone use those terms in public I would be forced to verbally (and physically) assault them.
Everyone uses "mega" and "giga" and they sound fine. There's no need for new terms that only make people look ridiculous. Anyone who thinks those terms are correct needs to take note that no one uses those terms and they will only result in confusion.
I'll say "1024K" before I ever say that word which I dare not utter.
True story.
In essence, they have an ideal test base - testers who will give great feedback, and testers who will plug GMail to those who read their blogs. Great word of mouth advertising...
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
It is widely known that when a company goes public it gives up independence. The fact that shareholders expect profit is a side issue you're using for distraction. The issue is a company giving up control. When I say "evil," substitute the word "stupid." Anyone who has worked at a sinking company that is doing stupid things to gain shareholders knows what I'm talking about.
If, per your example, Google only sells 1% of its company, yeah, I suppose you're right. Let's see that happen. Are you a betting man, or have you just never purchased stock before?
The only people I think who care about the ad thing is the paranoid (and frankly, ignorant) few on slashdot and the media FUDmongers who court them.
How do you think a spam filter works? It 'reads' every single word in your e-mail. Any e-mail service employing one is 'reading' your mail.
If the other players are going to take anything from this, its that they'll start targetting ads to your email content as well.
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you have to agree with someone to find their thoughts Insightful or even Interesting.
There should be a -1 Disagree mod, which can be easily ignored. This type of mod abuse is censorship of dissenting views, in an environment where dissent should be encouraged. Don't like linux, -1 troll. See useful, unmatched features in Windows, -1 offtopic. Its predictable and stupid. I'm tired of my posts being modded offtopic when they are on topic but unpopular. I have been forced to go the AC route to give valid views just to save my karma from mods who think they are too 1337 for their own good.
They scan each and every word in each and every message, assigning a score based on the probability of those words matching spam probabilities.
The only difference between that and what gmail does is at the same time gmail runs the word through an inverted index of advertisers, picking one out every now and then to be displayed - on the side, in a tiny text ad that most people wont notice.
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That's hardly arguing semantics. If someone says, "Killing is a bad thing," to which you reply, "Not all violence is bad," you have misunderstood and twisted his argument. When he corrects you by saying, "I said 'killing' -- not 'all violence'," he is hardly arguing semantics. He's correcting you.
If, on the other hand, you replied, "Not all murder is bad, e.g. murdering someone to keep them from murdering your whole family," and he said, "I said 'killing' -- not 'murder'," now he's arguing semantics.
Money, however, is not even remotely synonymous with IPO. That doing an IPO involves money doesn't make them the same thing at all.
Of course, in that corner case you don't have to answer to them. But seriously, how many companies IPO with only 1% of their stock? Using the 0.00001% case as the cornerstone of your argument is pointless.
True, but use some good judgment. If your whole objection to the OP's post is a single word, and you feel offended, you need to chill out and not take things so personally. Troll is for posts that are clearly trying to offend without providing any other value.
Exactly. From the Moderator Guidelines:
It doesn't get much clearer than that.
I totally disagree. I've found many arguments to be insightful and interesting and yet still disagreed with their conclusion. Moderating is a responsibility that requires some thought. It's not a free hand to promote your beliefs. Use it wisely, please.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
There are a variety of people around the world, some of them happen to like to be able to access their "own" e-mail from a variety of locations as well. Some of these people put a firewall in front of their home system to reduce the likelyhood of problems on their internal network, and really are not interested in punching a hole in that firewall to grab their e-mail from work, or school, or the coffee shop they stop in at when out of town.
Now I will grant you that there are a lot of advantages to keeping all of your e-mail on your local hard drive. There are a couple of distinct disadvantages as well. Those noted above being some. Others include potential for theft if that HD happens to be part of your laptop. Non-immediate access to e-mail addresses you don't happen to keep on your PDA (usually those from most recent e-mail aquaintences you haven't made contacts for). Giving business associates and "personal friends" multiple e-mail addresses to try to keep up with you.
While web-mail is not a perfect solution, on it's own anyway, it does allow users to access their e-mail from a lot of locations that will not allow access to imap or pop3 services. There have been a lot of corporations who have started blocking imap and pop3 traffic into their network for the very simple reason that users have introduced viri into the corproate network using just that method. This has also been common for web-mail access as well, so I suspect that within days or weeks of gmail.com going live, the login page for it will be blocked by those businesses that already block Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.
Then again, I could be entirely wrong, and you aren't just trolling for a response.
-Rusty
You never know...