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!"
Is Google contacting Blogger users, or are all Blogger users eligible to be beta testers? I have a Blogger account and I can't log in to GMail..
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
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.
"1 000 megabytes = 0.9765625 gigabytes"
says google.
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.
So Google is going to show me penis enlargement and nude cheerleader search links every time I receive spam?
1 gigabyte = 1 024 megabytes
:) I suppose its how you ask the question :)
Bang on and correct
Cheers,
rob.
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.
Gmail really hits the Gspot. All you virgins can just look confused and mod me down.
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.
So far the only perk I've heard is 1GB storage. My computer has that, and when my broadband goes down, I can still access my stored mail. I'm getting by fine with the <1GB storage my existing free web mail account offers.
What other perks? Ads inserted into e-mails? No thanks. I don't need that intrusion.
Can a beta tester please tell if the sending of very large attachments from one Gmail account to another is reasonably fast? Also, what is the maximum attachment size?
I don't think anyone knows yet what Google does with a new account that holds a single mail with a very large, PGP-encrypted attachment that curiously is accessed and downloaded from a wide range of different IPs, but if so, please tell.
blow your mind already
How to get them?
I've got a gmail account (thanks to Blogger), and also have a Google AdWords account.
I've been sending mail to my gmail account from another account, and including things that I thought *should* trigger a Google text ad - one of mine, no less and keywords that certainly do trigger a text ad from the main Google search page - dont. I haven't seen one yet.
During the Beta are they inhibiting the textads?
Anyone see an ad in the wild yet?
A message from our sponsor
I set up one Gig accounts on both Gmail and SpyMac that I've had people sending attachments and emails to to see how they hadnle reaching a GIG. so far, Gmail is only up to 127MB and SpyMac is only at 27MB (but their servers would seem to be a day behind on listing my new email). So far, I have discovered that Gmail's spam filter has caught one actual spam message, and suddenly blocked 5 of 15 messages from one person with no clear reason why. Also, the ad bots only scan the body text of the emails, as all attachment only emails have been ad free. cksampleiii@gmail.com and cksample3@spymac.com if you are interested in contributing to the experiment.
http://www.sampletheweb.com
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.
And while it states that they will can your account for sending and using your address to receive illicit information in one form or another, I'm tempted to push the envelope (since I dont need the account, I've got an edu account which is better for me).
/. is the wrong place to ask. ;-p) The reason is, whats stopping people from using this for legal functions, but not the intended storage purpose as originally "intended".
As much as P2P has been demonized, there is one content that I can think of that is legal, and distrabution is encouraged, and thats concert recordings of bands that allow taping (see etree.org for more info). Each show typically runs between 700MB-> 1.5GB since its done in a lossless compressiong scheme.
So whats stopping me from having people get GMail accounts and then doing a CC to everyone who wants a show and doing a mass mailing (even if its broken into chunks).
I'm not looking for a technical answer, I'm curious about a legal one. (and thus,
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
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.
doesnt present any ads to you if the content of your email is a PGP encrypted message.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
but not on every message. Interestingly, messages that once have had ads usually always will so its not like they come and go. But other messages don't trigger them.
Using the text of an entire message for ads requires a bit more computing than just a search query, so maybe they're trying to keep those down while in beta.
They're about as good as the ones for the regular search engine. I'm looking at a conversation i'd been having about jobs and internships and the ads it displayed were related to those.
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Interesting, GMail currently does not support Safari. https://gmail.google.com/gmail/browser_requirement s.html
You get a message on the sign in box saying that you can log in anyway, but your browser is not supported.
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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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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Hook us up Google!
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.
the first gmail account goes up for auction on eBay. I searched eBay a little earlier, but couldn't find any.
See my blog at Who's Who
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?
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!
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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Well, to all those people that don't see why it's so great to rush out and get an account immedietely, I have this to say:
username choice!
For the first time in my life, I don't need to get some goony name like "g733p42" because ALL the possible permutations of normal words are already taken.
Yaay blogger!
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
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 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.
...that's the problem, someone else has figured out how to write to our standard. Time to embrace and extend, not to mention upgrade our webdesigner tools ;) On a more serious note, DHTML support is a good thing. There's only this much you can do with static HTML.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You don't specifically mention Mozilla, but assuming you are using it, you can install Tab Browser Extensions to enable/disable features for individual tabs.
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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What privacy advocates have objected to about Gmail is that, by scanning mail and displaying an ad next to it, the service reduces the "expectation of privacy".
"Reasonable expectation of privacy" is a legal term which, among other things, influences what the courts allow the government to do when snooping on people without a warrent.
For examples of this, look for instance at the case law surrounding trash.
The courts have ruled that it's perfectly OK for law enforcement agencies to pick through your trash because people do not have an "expectation of privacy" when they throw things away.
The danger with Gmail is that it starts to erode the generally-held idea that it is wrong for anyone to read someone else's email. Sure, it's just software and sure, no one is actually reading it. But the contextual ads may give the impression that the mail is read, therefore allowing the courts to rule later that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in email, and allowing the government to snoop through your mail at will.
This isn't coming tomorrow, but it's one of the main objections privacy advocates have to Gmail. Similar sentiments from other privacy advocacy groups are expressed in this article
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.
If you want an authority for this you don't need to look very hard, just hit the Jargon File.
quantifiers
In techspeak and jargon, the standard metric prefixes used in the SI (Système International) conventions for scientific measurement have dual uses. With units of time or things that come in powers of 10, such as money, they retain their usual meanings of multiplication by powers of 1000 = 10^3. But when used with bytes or other things that naturally come in powers of 2, they usually denote multiplication by powers of 1024 = 2^10.
Here are the SI magnifying prefixes, along with the corresponding binary interpretations in common use:
prefix decimal binary
kilo- 1000^1 1024^1 = 2^10 = 1,024
mega- 1000^2 1024^2 = 2^20 = 1,048,576
giga- 1000^3 1024^3 = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824
tera- 1000^4 1024^4 = 2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776
peta- 1000^5 1024^5 = 2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624
exa- 1000^6 1024^6 = 2^60 = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976
zetta- 1000^7 1024^7 = 2^70 = 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424
yotta- 1000^8 1024^8 = 2^80 = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Thanks. It's rare to see someone actually follow through on a statement like that here on slashdot.
The problem the committees tried to solve with their new terminology is a real one, and I don't want to minimise that. Most people using computers these days don't even know what binary means, and as the powers go higher, the difference between the binary and the decimal interpretation increases. The potential for confusion is great. And if their terminology had been used from the start it would make sense. But the fact is it hasn't, we've got over 30 years of tradition using the binary terms, and for some committee to think they can simply redefine them by fiat is irritating to say the least. Given that the the usage is already well supported and entrenched, not to mention that the binary values are the natural groupings of bytes which make sense in the areas where they are used, I would propose instead of trying to redefine kilobyte as 1,000 bytes and make up a new term (kilo-binary-byte aka kibibyte) for what we already call a kilobyte, they should make up new terms for the less useful values instead (perhaps decimal-kilo-byte aka dekilobyte for 1,000 bytes.) As it is, their proposal is being mostly ignored, causing even more confusion than existed before they tried to remedy the situation, and about the only folks that seem to get anything good from it as far as I can see are the hard drive manufacturers, who get a handy excuse to continue inflating their drive capacity numbers.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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!
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
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...