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!"

Comments

Privacy is not my main concern with Gmail

[Notorious B.I.G Bird]

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.

Re:Privacy is not my main concern with Gmail

[fleener]

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?

Duh. 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. After you have 5 to 10 or 20 megs of e-mail stored on Google servers, are you just going to get up and walk away if/when they decide to bill you?

Re:Privacy is not my main concern with Gmail

[jdreed1024]

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!

Seriously. A friend of mine went into a rant about this the other day, and I pointed out that he has a hotmail account. It boggles the mind that people would trust Microsoft, which is KNOWN to have questionable (if any) ethics and morals, and yet be suspicious of Google, which is known to have good ethics and morals (ie: refusing to accept payment for search result ranking, and penalizing folks who purposely try to manipulate the results for personal gain).

Re:Privacy is not my main concern with Gmail

[x4A6D74]

Y'know, it's not like it's horribly difficult to block those ads anyway. I use Firefox with the AdBlock extension, and generally speaking those google ads show up in their own iframe ... which AdBlock is smart enough to block. So my systems all have "advertisements.google.com" (or whatever it is -- haven't had to look at it in a long time) in their blacklist. Thus, if I had gmail, my mail would still be scanned, but I wouldn't have to deal with the ads. So while the privacy concerns may still exist, at least the second half of the problem is gone.

And honestly, as my dad was quick to admonish me in my younger days, "email is like a postcard." There's nothing to stop a bazillion people from reading it somewhere between the initial and final servers. So if you don't want your email to be read, you should already be enciphering it. It's that simple. Anything I have to send to someone that I seriously do not want anyone else to read, I encrypt -- and if they don't have PGP, I make 'em get it (generally, the people I truly need security with understand the desire for security and are willing to cooperate).

So am I surprised that Gmail can/will scan your email? No. Does it bother me? No -- because they won't be able to scan my private messages anyway.

--0x4A6D74

Other way round from google

[RobertTaylor]

1 gigabyte = 1 024 megabytes

Bang on and correct :) I suppose its how you ask the question :)

Cheers,
rob.

Re:Anti-IPO is trolling now?

[fleener]

Reread my post. I said "IPO" not "money." Being a public company means you answer to shareholders and give up a good measure of your independence. Reread that last sentence. I didn't use the word "money." This is not a new concept, and is a belief held by many people.

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.

Re:1gig?

[MochaMan]

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!

Smart approach by Google

[Skim123]

By choosing bloggers to help beta test GMail, Google gets:

1. Users who are interested in new technology/new features/computers/etc.
2. Users who are influencers: those who share their opinions with others.

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...