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Gmail Users Get A Storage Boost [updated]
Faies writes "As reported by ZDNet: Not to be outdone by Lycos, Google just upped its 1,000 megabyte accounts to 1,000,000 MB. I just recently checked my inbox, and the number at the bottom confirms this. "You are currently using 12 MB (0%) of your 1000000 MB." That's more than my hard drive...and plus, Google clearly wants to hold the title of being best, so who knows what will happen if someone else tries to compete with a terabyte." Now how much would you pay? Update: 05/19 13:34 GMT by T : Several comments to this thread indicate that the listed mailbox size limit has returned to the previous 1GB level, so this apparent change may be nothing more than the result of a misplaced decimal point.
Whats the largest size mail you can send/receive with GMail?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Honestly, what use does one have for such a large mailbox? I'm afraid to think what will happen if this would go live without too much restrictions. The warez guys would be all over this. Then it will be cut & cut until it's basically useless (look at what say geocities have had to do to curb piracy). Still, i'd like to get an account when it goes live (and any storage above say, 1G isn't useful to me.)
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
I hope that is a typo, delivering 1TB of Email is plain crazy. Counting all the spam i ever received, and all the legit mail i dont even think i come close to 1TB. Thats like - a Life time of Mail (TM)
:)
I think google has more servers than they tould us, or a very good compression algorithm
Sounds like employee's get 1 Tb and their might have been a mix up and regualr people where giving this much. Some that reported haveing 1 Tb are now reporting to be back down to 1 Gb. Fun while it lasted I guess :/
GeekLeak.com - Silly name, serious geeks
I recently got my entire hard drive wiped out when I messed up a Debian install. Some of my recent important documents were saved on my email account, but the old ones got lost.
This is great news from Google. If I had a terabyte of storage accessible from anywhere I'd hardly use my harddrive at all.
Has Google published APIs to GMail yet? I'd love to rewire OpenOffice's save function through Evolution so it stores it right on my GMail address.
Thank you for your support.
Attachments are limited to 100kb.
Kidding...
But they are obviously joking. They'll likely just assign a team to target the top 5 percent of users who use the most space. My whole mail file from the past year is under a gig because people simply can't send large attachments from most accounts.
Anyone know what the email attachment size limit is?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
gmail filesystem anyone?
/dev/gmailfs /home
dump 0f
That's one hell of a lot of spam storage!!
Seriously though, you do have to wonder how much spam google with end up storing.
Same s**t, different day
...that this is turning into a ridiculous 'my ____ is bigger than your ____' contest? I mean, good GOD: a TB of EMAIL space? What kind of gi-normous HDD farm do they have for all this to back it up? What kind of trick they have to do this, I wonder.
They can easily do this, because 99.9999999999% of their users will never have more than, say, 1 MB of mail anyway.
:)
Even if you are reading several mailinglists you don't easily get over 1 GB of mail. Even my 2-3 year Bugtraq archive is just ~130 MB in size.
But still, the "cool" factor is what counts, obviously
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
None to the average user but 10000megs allows Google to claim it has the largest free email storage space. guess they didn't like Lycos raining on their parade. :)
If a free service provides you with more storage space than your physical computer, your incentive to buy a large hard-drive will diminish (for a typical (non-porn hording) user). Maybe we will notice a drop in price/gb because of this?
Jon Bardin
Nobody really expects a terrabyte of storage do they?
I think they may run into problems with the storage when people start emailing themselves huge compressed files in order to store them online. I recall reading that gmail doesnt give you 1Gb or 1Tb of disk space, but compresses your data so it feels like you have that much disk space, and because text compresses rather well, you can stick 1Gb of text into a relitively tiny space. Now compressed files, on the other hand, cant be compressed farther, and will most likely fill up your quota really quickly. I can just hear people bitching and complaining when they send one 20 meg zip file and have gmail tell them they are out of storage space :P
...it's just the binary representation of the size of your inbox
This is just getting crazy. I've saved every e-mail since 11/02 on my harddrive and it only uses about 150megs.
Gmail, here I come!
If you follow the links in the article to the blog pages who first reported it, you will see that everyone's limit has went back to 1GB.
b yte-1000-gb-of-gmail-storage
Remember its still in testing, i think this was a one off bug.
www.intelliot.com/blog/archives/2004/05/18/1-tera
For the price they want, I could still run my own server. It costs probably 100 a year for a server that can hold easily more than One Gigabyte in email\storage. There is no practical use for the account anyway that there isn't already a cheaper solution for.
With all the use of E-Mails in court cases, is it really wise to have this much E-Mail space? I mean, if you store everything out there and keep it. Won't it come back to haunt you. I mean the old saying goes "Everybody has at least one novel in them." But this is ridiculous.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
M.
--
Numismatica
While I haven't seen additional confirmation either way, Mike Masnick at Techdirt checked with a friend at Google who stated the the apparent increase to 1TB was a mistake, not a storage upgrade.
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
I don't think it would be too hard to write a script that compiles all of your files into 10MB RARs and sends them to your gmail account. You could keep remote backups of all of your documents, mail, etc.
999998000 MB
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
If I take all the data from all my computers, it's not even close to a TB. And of course if I only count the space used for email, it's only a tiny tiny tiny fraction of a TB. So I wonder, why would you need this (except for file-sharing/warez of course)?
If they ever get around to offering a googol of bytes for your mailbox, then maybe someone will have a reason to sue!
Not long after I submitted this article, my account (and those of 4 others I know) reverted back to 1,000 MB. Since the article does mention that Google had no official comment, it's quite possible that this was all a fluke. I had observed the changes earlier in the evening, but waited to see if there was official confirmation from a large new source (i.e. ZDnet) before thinking this was for reals. As it turns out, it may not have been so.
For reference, my friends and I noticed the size reductions around 1:45 AM PST. They did not occur all at once; mine was one of the last ones to get set to 1,000 MB. Another small detail is that not all gmail accounts I knew of got set to a terabyte- there was one user who was feeling quite left out in the gigabyte pool.
Even though everybody seems to be talking about Lycos offering 1GB, I've seen very few people mention that Lycos' offer is not free.
To get the 1GB account you will need to cough up 3.49GBP a month.
Still a good offer though, if you don't have the option of running your own server, but definately not as good as Google's free version.
In God We Trust, Others We Monitor
When I read the
Well, let's see. Assuming 1.544Mb T-1 is available for use 24/7 and it's dedicated to sending 1mb attachments at a time (and you can send 1,000,000 of those). Figure about 60 megabytes an hour (or 60 messages an hour) it would take 16,667 hours or 694 days.
Google has nothing to worry about by offering 1tb of storage. They have two years to get it online...
Just add {In Space!} to anything.
And that's all there's to it.
Besides, look at it as you'd look at overselling airplane seats, or dial-up capacity: It's pretty certain not will all be claimed at the same time, and you're pretty certain to get away with it. They could have added 3 more zeroes to that quota, and it wouldn'nt make the slightest difference.
I wonder now, if this wasn't the plan in the first place... To get people to buy stocks. First give them free Gig email, then give them a little piece of what they can really give little by little, so people will crave to buy...
They are not really in the email business (yet). Searching seems their main business as of now. And they pay that with advertising only? I know they have the brainpower of some of the brightiest geeks out there. But surely they must have a better skeem of somekind to give (freely) that much email space. I mean my last hardrive cost me 200$ US and I got 40 Gig...
I'm really starting to think that this much altruism is really gonna profite some few people.
Or they have found a hole in the thin layer of space and time, and manage to be able to give without any real return on investment (ROI).
Call me paranoid, call me non-believer, believe me I WANT to believe. But nothing on earth is free. People don't give unless, they get something in return. Unless they want to polish they're image. (Like Micro$oft with Hotmail. Theyre less evil, cause they give free emails)
But Google does'nt need a better image, they are the image. The best search engine ever in human history( for now ). I think they're in for the money.
It's funny how I make sense to others and not myself...
Nothing. Why would I want to pay for a poor answer to a sovled problem? I have storage for my email; it's called a hard drive. I can already search through my past emails; it's called grep, sometimes even find. I don't get why everyone's so excited over google's solution to something that people have had figured out for twenty years.
Not everything belongs on the web. Email is one of those things.
Do you check up with the news at all? Google has already announced their IPO. Funding isn't going to be an issue with google for a while...
What can you do with that much email space. Loose every important message you ever get.
All those people who save forwars will use Gmail.
Evolution or ID?
they have those. It's called a shell account. ninjaskills.org has a good service like this, but I think you only get like 10 MB.
Help! I'm being repressed!
as Slashdot has said before, the LaCie BiggerDisk is a device with 1 TB of storage. You can buy it for $1100.
Hey, multiply that by the number of GMail accounts, and divide by the number of shares in Google... and you might get something close to Google's IPO price! Im a genius!
Cheap IDE drives and massive oversubscription. Backing up to tape is so last millenium, anyway. By the way, you can probably give each server quad 250GB IDE for the price of just the fibre channel controller. SAN has to be massively easier to administer (or massively faster, good luck with that) in order to make sense.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
This is just a wild guess, but maybe they don't allocate the whole 1TB of disk space to each user when they sign up, but only allocate on demand.
And as many posters have pointed out, most people are unlikely to use anywhere near 1GB let alone 1Tb. Especially with the 10MB attachment limit it will take 10^5 bloated e-mails to reach capacity.
On the other hand I like the idea of using an account as an offsite incremental backup. My daily incrementals are generally less than 10MB, it would be a very convenient method of storage. Until they claim that they have rights to any intellectual property stored on their servers. But they wouldn't do that because Google Are Nice People (TM).
That sounds a little like the Yahoo Briefcase, except in this case they can't grant access to the public. However, they wouldn't even have to do that. The 'distributors' can simply send the files to their GMail account, tell others to create new accounts and send files to them (which is basically a matter of copying files on local server, isn't it?).
Hmm... makes you wonder if they just cite the uncompressed plain text capability. Maybe they use heavy compression on the mail text and the clever bit is the fast search algorithms on the compressed mailboxes (mailboxen?).
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Everyone is wondering why in the hell any e-mail service would raise quotas to 1TB. The reason is this. Google, like many free webmail services, are looking to get (almost) as many users as they can. They know that G-mail will get a lot of attention from everyone (even people like me who rarely use webmail because IMAP & Exchange is so much better). Even if I don't use it, the fact that I'm paying attention to it means I'll probably recommend it to others (mostly people who don't use e-mail a whole lot and don't know what IMAP or Exchange is). And these are the kind of people who are going to have mailboxes that are less than 5MB.
Eventually I think G-mail will have many users that have been using webmail forever, and few powerusers. I've got a 250MB quota and never came close (well, except for the mail bomb). It's definitely not worth it for me to switch to a new interface, unless it proves to be better.
I'm sure you could make Gmail appear as NFS by creating a local RPC service to act as an intermediary. The filesystem could be split into 10Mb blocks, inode numbers, permissions etc could be stored in the message body. Gmail's message search functionality could quickly identify which message contains what inodes and retrieve the correct attachment as appropriate. Sounds like a fun OSS project to me. :)
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Everyone is talking about how to use Gmail for file storage. Here are the facts:
10MB ATTACHMENT file storage limit.
First off -- nothing is said about not having multiple attachments per email. This is a "Good Thing"(tm)
As far as I'm concerned, that fact alone makes it very viable to be used for quite a few purposes:
1. The gmail filesystem
Have a system setup where a UNIQUE Identifier as the Subject maps to a Directory Value map (stored on your local system) -- now all you need is this small file, and you have access to a terabyte of storage. Each email can then store the Files for that directory (also as unique ID #'d file attachments) -- each file could be stored as a 10MB split volume size compressed/ENCRYPTED rar
-- the encrypted now eliminates privacy concerns
1a. Now that you have a filesystem on a remote machine here are your limitations/advantages:
* Any file you access over 10MB will be slower, because it will have to reconstruct from multiple rars
* Any file modification, and initial uploading of files will be painful -- most of us have asyncronous internet connections.
* Imagine how fast you can now send people ANYTHING -- just FORWARD the email thats sitting around -- most likely won't even cause google to use more storage
2. -- this last point also brings us back to what someone said about warez kiddies.
If anyone remembers the warez kiddy days back in AOL -- they used huge pools of forwarded emails to send warez around -- AOL only had a few MB limit, and no multiple attachments per email IIRC.
Now, people could email you Office 2003, 3GB in 10 sec. -- could get a little hairy
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
GFS: How about a GMail Files System? I am not a programmer and don't geek down to that level, but it sounds plausible. Break your file system into say 256KB (encrypted) binary attachments with distinct subject lines for locating the the right message when you need it. You now have a huge store of email acting as the allocation units for a file system.
GFS RAID: Google is not the only one offering huge email stores. Get more than one of the huge accounts from Google or SpyMac and you have the equivelent of multiple HDDs. If you call each of those allocation emails a "stripe" and spread them across two or three different stores, you have a GMail RAID-1 or RAID-5 set.
This sounds like it would be easy to simulate and run on a local mail server, then simply point to your GMail/SpyMac/Whatever accounts bring online. High latency and low bandwidth, yes, but very distributed. Maybe good for remote backups.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
And I'm still at 1,000 MB.
I'm not sure that this is an appropriate marketing response to Lycos and others. Past a certain point, the numbers become effectively meaningless for users, meaning nothing other than "a whole lot of storage space". I would concentrate on searchability and that patented, slick Google interface.
And I would add the other things that Yahoo has, like a complete address book (currently it only accepts email addresses). Calendaring would be nice, too.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
How will Google deal with the massive amount of bandwidth that they must need for this? I bet they'll be deleting all of the unused accounts, just so those unused accounts dont suck up bandwitdh.
...*MY* GMail has a billion kagillion MB's! At that size, who really cares?
The real reason for this much email space is for the next version of Office - so that users can attach a Word document.
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
A few people have made the comment that Google can do this because 99% of the people will only use a few MBs of storage anyway. Reasonable theory, but here's another idea -- it doesn't matter if everyone uses a massive amount of storage.
First, figure out how many people there are in the world that might potentially use Gmail. Then figure out what is the potential maximum amount of unique data each of those people could generate on a daily basis. Then determine the size of the redundant information that could pass through the Gmail servers.
Note that a huge percentage of emails and attachments are sent to multiple recipients. For each piece of email or attachment compute and store a unique hash. Each account consists of only a list of hashes and some header metadata. This redundant information will significantly reduce the total storage space.
A quick seach finds this Berkeley study that suggests that there were about 400 PB of email (unique) generated last year. Assuming that you can save 1 GB of data for the fully-loaded cost of $1 (US), storing all of the internet's annual email traffic costs $500M annually in the worst case.
The best case is significantly better than that, as you can:
a) compress text by up to 80%
b) store every mail only once
c) store every large binary only once
d) add storage as needed, not up-front
e) reduce the cost of storage over time
This is off-the-cuff, but Google is looking at maybe a $50M annual investment in storage to store all the email on the internet, even if everyone uses it. They don't even need a storage limit. Period.
Who's going to use a terabyte of hard drive space? It's a simple matter for them to over-book their available space.
Although I certainly can think of a couple ways to do it. Subscribe to hundreds of informational mailing lists and Google for the data you want, for one.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
This is something I like to call the bubble gum principle:
When I was in middle school, chewing gum in class or at school was against the rules, but yet everyone tried to get away withit, we practically had a bubble gum mafia.
But when I got to high school, they changed the rules that you could chew gum. All of a sudden, there were a lot less people chewing gum.
I know that this principle works in regards to quotas because on suso.org, I have absolutely no quotas, and don't have a problem with users getting out of hand with their disk space. Sure there are a few that use several GBs, but most of them don't and like the fact that it's unlimited.
it would take me almost a year of receiving email (24x7) or 2.5 year of sending email to reach 1 Tb.
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
For anyone interested in trying out Gmail for themselves:
Gmail Swap
Basically you post up what you're willing to trade for an account and if someone's interested you're set. Current notable items include a monkey, an iPod, cigars and many other much weirder things.
------
Objects in Mirror are Losing!
Whether it be 1GB or 1TB, I think either way this is going to go the way of "unlimited internet access". A great idea to lure in customers, but eventually reality sets in, capacity problems arise, and the fine print is tweaked to the point where "1GB" doesn't really mean 1GB anymore.
Users, given the option to be lazy, will be lazy. The system can only sustain people never deleting email (plus the inevitable abuse) for so long.
Looks like just one more reason to get top dollar when I auction my account ;)
Slashdot I hate you!!!!!
Everytime slashdot runs the freakin' gmail story it DRIVES UP the price.
Just when things begin to cool off, THERE IS another slashdot story!!
Either stop it, or I start posting Soviet Russia jokes again -- YOUR CHOICE!
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I could use it. For one thing, I'm an email packrat, and only delete my yahoo mail when I'm out of space. But a 1TB account would be useful for so much more than email. I think of it as free web-based storage. If I could get my hands on a free-for-life 1TB gmail account, I would whip up some code to encrypt and store arbitrary information as gmail messages. With the privacy concerns regarding gmail, encryption would be a necessity for using gmail in this fashion. A proper interface would allow gmail to look like an encrypted, web-based file system.
Also, it appears that there is a 10MB limit per message. No problem, just treat gmail as a harddrive with variable block sizes, up to 10MB. Storing larger files would simply mean splitting the file across multiple messages.
Exactly. You aren't the average user. And what the average user doesn't use in their accounts, you'll use in yours.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Even if you assume they just added the HDD's to Google's extensive server farm (which as of yet is using RAM as a primary storage medium) There are quite a few costs you are missing. Such as...
Additional Bandwidth,
Additional electricity,
Additional server technicians,
An army of customer support personnel,
Additional Lawyers,
Additional Salespeople,
Additional physical storage for spare HDD's,
I would guess that these costs will far outstrip the $1 per GB cost of a Hard Drive.
Furthermore, data exapands to fill all available space... not through some trick of programming but because of how people use applications when limits are removed. Expect to see people's habits change when they realize their friends also have a 10 MB per-message transfer limit. Want that MP3? Sure, why not.
Finally, there will be the applications / abuses that hook into Gmail's storage space, which they will have to swat down. I could easily see groups of friendly music lovers automatically synchronizing their collections through Gmail, for example.
In other words, give Google some credit here. They are trying something original that could potentially blow up in their face, however jaded we may have become.
The ______ Agenda
They could cap upload streams at 64Kb/s and it would take four years to fill (if someone wanted to keep at it day and night) - heck in four years 1TB hard drives will be commonplace and cheap.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
If someone's going to start flinging around unsolicited multi-megabyte email messages, a lot of people are going to be pissed. Many of the people still on dial-up are only their because it's enough for what they want to do. I.e. email and looking for quilting patterns.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
GMail offering 1GB for free is nice, and with ignorable ads, I'm tempted to switch to them, obviously. Right now I'm a paying Yahoo Mail customer, and I look at the prices they charge even now.. 100MB for $59.99.. So Yahoo claims they'll offer 100MB for free and "virtually unlimited" for paying customers. Well, a big reason I went for Yahoo is because I have a highly configured personalized Yahoo homepage and wanted to integrate my mail smoothly into it. However, if anyone's tried putting the "Yahoo Mail Preview" into their Yahoo home page, they'll be dismayed to learn that it usually does not display correctly, and "times out" or whatever.
So I ended up removing it from my homepage, and now Yahoo's on equal footing again. Paying for ad free email is worth it, and the address guard service is nice (disposable email addresses), but Yahoo will sure look bad offering only one tenth the storage of what the competition offers. Yahoo claims they're not going to take it sitting down though, so I'm looking forward to seeing capitalism give me a nice deal from one of them.
I'm there also. You are currently using 4 MB (0%) of your 1000000 MB. at 10:10 AM EST
--------- Steve Martin once said, "Sex is the most natural, most beautiful, most wonderful thing that money can buy."
So, I've had a gmail account for a while now and decided to try to get people to fill it up by posting it all over my website and in the comments here at /. and a few other places. So far, only 180MBs have been filled, most of it by people responding to my request to spam me and the rest from actual spam bots who grabbed the info from where I posted the email, like here: cksampleiii@gmail.com. Please feel free to send as many attachments as you can handle to this address and let's see if we can get my original experiment to its original projected limit 1GB, even though it is now listing as 1TB. My other gmail account (which I haven't publicized at all) is still only at 1GB.
Things that I've learned so far: the spam filter in Gmail is sporadic. Of course, this is probably b/c I haven't bothered to train it at all, but nevertheless, it seems to only catch the most widely known spam, while at other times it will suddenly start reporting messages from a source that have gotten through before as spam, which is odd, and as far as I can tell, via no discernible methodology. Some people have sent me over 100 emails with pron porn xxx in the subject and body with no blocking whatsoever, whereas other people have been sending me very innocent messages with large attachments and the first 10 get through and the rest get blocked (although this doesn't happen across the board / consistently).
Also, Gmail says it supports 10MB attachments, but it would seem to mean that the email itself + attachment has to register at under 10MB as I've had a few 9.7MB files that have failed to send.
Otherwise pretty good webmail implementation.
http://www.sampletheweb.com
I'm currently working on a linux file system driver that uses google email boxes. Performance isn't that great, but I'm working on that. I can already tell that fsck.google is gonna be a bitch.
At work we've got 3 terabytes of data on (archiveable) CDRs in boxes...
Username taken, please choose another one.
has it occured to anyone else that gmail might save space by not storing individual copies of spam, chain letters, mailing list items, etc? just md5 every message (then check content if theres a match, just in case) and store pointers in people's mailboxes. 50000 people get the same spam, gmail uses 50000*n+1*N space instead of 50000*N (n is a small pointer, N is a big message) space.
I think they're in for the money.
Long term, I'd say yes.
give them a little piece of what they can really give little by little, so people will crave to buy...
They are not really in the email business (yet). Searching seems their main business as of now. And they pay that with advertising only?
I'd guess that the advertising revenues are chump change.
I have 340+ meg email plus several hundred megs archived. Finding something I know "has to be there" is a PITA. And I'm not really a heavy email user.
There has to be an eager market for something that can handle intelligent searches of all email.
This must be a mistake. They can't give away 1TB of free disk space at today's prices. Disks still cost about $1/GB. Even if they could get half price with bulk discounts, and another ten times better by reclaiming empty space from one account to give to another, no company can afford to give away $50 of disk space for free to anyone who signs up.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I love the effect this is having on the industry...
.mac account than I've gotten. My main reason for renewing it he first year was to support Apple. Even the iBlog product which was really cute at first got old real fast when I realized I'd have no control over the blog when I was away from the Apple computer. I've never shared the .Mac e-mail address with friends, so all I get there is announcements from Apple, a $99 donation would make more sense. Out of curiosity I tried the Spymac website (which the ZDNet article mentions is also overing a free Gig) and the page never finishes loading. One thing I don't think the PHBs have figured out yet is that you have to do MORE than offer a Gig to everyone, you have to actually have the infrastructure to support it. I wonder how many others will make that mistake and offer more than their server can handle. The 1-terabyte limit last night on GMail was pretty obviously an error. Google EMPLOYEES are said to have that much space, and they seem to have gotten the user lists co-mingled for a few hours (not everyone saw the 1-T limit, and experiments showed that it was acting as a 1-T limit, not just a typo) but it wouldn't surprise me if Google had the capacity NOW to up the ante to 10G should anyone actually respond with a similar offer. Nobody really has though...
I was happy to get a Gmail account finally and have been busy redirecting news service subscriptions and the like from some of my other "lesser" services. How pathetic it seems that I'm being asked to renew my $99/year mac.com account when the primary service provided by them is e-mail. I expected a lot more from the
I'm a VERY original user of Yahoo. I have an 8M Inbox there instead of the standard 4 as a result (I guess). I get tons of spam there and so far their efforts have done little to stop it. At one point the spam they filtered out automatically and into the "Bulk mail" folder was charged against the 8M limit. That meant I was almost always over my limit unless I checked it constantly. I noticed that now the Bulk Mail no longer counts. Good (overdue) move. I also PAY for a domain through Yahoo Domains. Their e-mail started out unlimited, years ago. Later they sent out a notice that there WAS a limit (in the 20-30M range I think) but I can't find that documented anywhere now. I saw the news articles on Yahoo expanding the free limits to 100M and the payed e-mail limits to 1G to "match" Google. Um... $35 a year for something doesn't "match" that same thing for free. I'm sure the Yahoo board of directors will figure that out soon.
Microsoft plans to steal some Google thunder by bundling a search engine with Windows. Apple did this too with OS X in the form of a program called Sherlock (nice name anyway). I tried it a few times. It was slow. Very. And the results were no better than Google. I wonder how many people use Sherlock just because it's there? Google works with any browser, on any operating system and isn't dependent on Internet circuits to Redmond being in good shape. The real worry for MS I suspect is the rumor that Google might offer other Windows-like services in the future. The technology is there. I signed up for Think-Free Office for a year at $50 and got storage (not a lot as I recall) and a Java based program that would read and write Word, Excell, PowerPoint and some other MS formatted files. It worked pretty well (I tested it on Windows, Linux, and OS X). I didn't renew the account, but the software still works locally. Essentially the $49 was for the disk space, but also included the software and (had I renewed) updates to the software. Were it not for OpenOffice, and the fact that I use Linux almost all the time, I would probably still keep an account. What if, in order to remain competitive in the home-user space, Microsoft is forced to give away Office, or at least bundle it free with all new computers (by whatever arm-twisting means they use to bundle Windows now)? It would b
If not, I guess you could write something to send/retrieve your mail through lynx...this way, all could be encoded with something like PGP.
But, it would be easier if you didn't have to go through the web interface...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Humm,
If you brand spanking new email service is in beta, and you have a limited number of testers who are all connected enough to have received a gMail invite, what better way to test how well the system handles a massive load over a given period of time then by upping the storage limit on a few key accounts to 1TB?
As the news hits the field, I am sure everyone with a gMail acount logged on ASAP to see if the reports were true (I know I did).
Gmail Team to me
More options 10:02am (31 minutes ago)
Hello,
Thank you for your message and bug report regarding the incorrect quota
amount listed in your Gmail account.
As always, each Gmail user is offered 1,000 megabytes (MB) of storage.
We apologize for any confusion this issue may have caused. We are aware of
this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution.
In the meantime, sending and receiving email in your Gmail account will
reset your storage limit counter to 1,000 MB. We appreciate your patience
during our limited test period, and we thank you for taking the time to
send us your feedback and concerns.
We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
I would say "sure" but GMail doesn't display or store email in the same way that other web based providers do.
Perhaps if you do not find enough value in .Mac, it's because you view the e-mail account as the most important feature.
.Mac account was created when iTools first came out, as a free service to promote OS 9. I just grabbed it for the cool e-mail account. Since mail was the only feature I made any real use of (other than a little bit of HomePage) I wasn't willing to pay $99 to keep it going when the .Mac changeover came. Last time I ever use someone else's domain for my primary e-mail address. Good lesson to learn. Anyway...now I have .Mac again, and I use it for the other stuff far more than I use the mail.
.Mac are: .Mac (which is $69 with a new Mac.) .Mac mail and Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail: .Mac mail is real mail. You can use both IMAP/POP/SMTP and a nice webmail interface. This is still key for many of us. I refuse to ever use webmail at home. It's only for use on someone else's computer.
.Mac, but that's not why I posted. Just wanted to share my personal experience.)
Granted, my first
In my opinion, the best features of
- seamless iDisk integration in the Finder (especially in 10.3)
- Share your public folder (example - not mine)on the web. The fastest way to get a file to someone else across the Internet.
- One-click photo album publishing from within iPhoto. Creates thumbnails and screen-size versions and lets you choose from many templates. Your visitors can view the photos in a slideshow viewer and click the photos within that to see the full resolution. View an example (not mine).
- Put a movie in your Movies folder, create a HomePage for it, and let Apple bother with embedding it properly, streaming it, etc. Again, templates are provided.
- Free Virex. Tends to cost $69 anyway, so when buying a new Mac you'd be silly not to get
- Backup utility. Pretty cool automatic backup utility.
- Here's a glaring difference between
- Auto-sync Bookmarks, Address Book, and iCal appointments/To Do items across all your Macs.
If you use it as just an e-mail service, I can understand why you would be disappointed at the pricing.
(Full disclosure: I work at a large computer retailer that sells
Michael Bolton: Shit! I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.
Slagheap
First against the wall when the revolution comes
I wonder if I can send my hard drive as an attachment.
Um...I believe you have my terabyte?
I can just imagine Hotmail and Yahoo executives having a heart attack on that little mistake. :)