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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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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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.
True, it'd be nice if MiB and GiB became standard. For the record, this link explains the actual SI standards and binary multiples.
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
So how many jibibytes I need to fire up the Delorean and go back to 1985?
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.
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.
-
Be bold and be proud of your geekdom! Say "mebibytes" and "gibibytes" in public!!
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
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."
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.
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
Alas, as this poor guy has discovered....
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