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Gmail in the News
roadies writes "Despite all the negativity and privacy concerns that surround Gmail, it has still gained cult-like status where net-d0rks feel self validated by having a gmail address and will do anything to get one. Services like the Gmail Machine, a randomized Gmail lotto that has people hitting refresh until they get carpel-tunnel in the index finger, reports over 7 million pageviews (though, definitely not uniques) in 3 days and 55 invites given away. They just added 222 more through donators who have given up invites in exchange for a text link on the high-traffic site. GmailSwap (covered recently on /.) has given away everything from cameras to good vibes. Good news for hardpressed geeks: The invites are becoming more and more available and mainstream. Ebay once had gmail invites going for a couple hundred dollars. Now, nobody is bidding on them anymore, so you can purchase one the old-fashioned eBay way for a dollar or two." Reader marklyon writes "Third party developers have stepped in with utilities that enhance and improve GMail. One utility, Mbox
& Maildir to Gmail Loader allows users to upload their existing email to
their GMail account. Another, POP
Goes the GMail, offers the ability to access your GMail account with any POP
mail reader, giving users the ability to permanently archive messages. GTray
lives in your taskbar and alerts you to incoming messages. Other, more
general programs, allow you to forward your Hotmail
or Yahoo! Mail messages to your
new GMail account. The question that remains, however, is whether Google will
work with or against third party developers in GMail's future."
it has still gained cult-like status
OK, I was one of the sheeple who used to go a few times weekly to the gmail website to check things out.
But I awoke earlier this week to my Yahoo premium account suddenly offering two, not one, gigabytes of email storage... and all without the (overblown) privacy concerns and advertising. *And* I only pay $19.95/yr. for it.
I'm not (or at least don't need to be) interested in Gmail anymore. I've moved on and Yahoo has succeeded in taking the wind out of Gmail's sails, at least for me.
Sigs cause cancer.
Educate a rube.
What's so big about Gmail, anyway? Is it the gigabyte of storage? The allure of using something offered by Google? The excitement of being admitted to a semi-exclusive online club?
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
By the time any normal person can accumulate 1GB worth of e-mail from a service starting today 1GB will be so fantastically cheap (they aren't already?) that it just won't matter.
Got the invite, love the interface, can't view it from work.
Still hanging on to my shell account.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
The success of Gmail is not the amount of space. That's called a gimmick. The success of Gmail is its searchability.
In the long run, having a gig of mail is pointless if you can't find what you're looking for. Assume you can have all the space in the world and you didn't delete a single email. How will you find the email sent sometime ago that you can't remember from a girl you can't remember who conversed with you on craigslist but you did remember her fantasy about being your naughty bukkake star?
You can't! Not without search.
How do you think the spam filters work? Magic ESP SPAM detection?
No, it scans your mail - just like GMail does when it's filtering SPAM of considering ads to feed up.
The only email providers that do not scan mail are the ones that allow anything to pass.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Gmail isn't a POP3 killer. Its a Hotmail/Yahoo killer.
face the world with eyes of fire.
Man, I love it when people start whining about a computer searching their e-mail. So i guess yahoo dosen't have a spam filter then? What, hotmail has to parse the text of every e-mail before it determines that that message about penis extensions is spam. How do you think e-mail programs work out that not every mail saying 'Hey, haven't talked to you in a while' is spam
G-mail's problem is not that it scans your e-mail, but rather that the good people are honest and upfront with what they are doing.
I'm sure people would all be thrilled about a virus check if it was billed as 'automatic file parser.' Sure, it might seem weird having a conversation about your favorite jewish actor and getting an add for 'learn hebrew in 24 hours' but that's only because google is utilising what everyone else has. And their only crime was the niavety that people would find this useful. Had they said 'magic pixies work out what you want and sudgest how to get it, while you browse your e-mail,' the tinfoil hate wearing community would embrace it (after all, fairies can't get through tinfoil!).
G-mail is a wonderful, not only because of the unprecedented amoutn of free space, but because of it's intuative and innovative features that help you organise your e-mail while still having that sexy, clean, not 'all up in yo' face' look google is so good for.
If i had to chooose between microsoft and google, i pick the one who vows to 'do no evil' and, so far, has done nothing to make me think otherwise
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
Many think that the fact that it reads your email in order to provide targeted ads is disturbing.
As a point of reference, "many" think that the moon landings and the Holocaust are hoaxes, or that extraterrestrials are in the business of abducting cattle and rednecks for experiments. In other words, don't put too much faith in what "many" think.
What is so disturbing about using keywords in your email to target ads when they do the same thing when you type keywords into their search engine? It's not like humans are reading your email.
Imagine Google IM, it would read your conversations as you were having them in order to send you targeted ads. Now that is creepy.
In what way? It's just another source of keywords.
Imagine if somebody started saying "hey, you know Google look at the words you are searching for and give you ads based on those keywords - HOW CREEPY!!!1". Would you start to get worried, or would you consider them a fool?
And this thread is how some spammer out there just received a high-quality, targetted list of addresses. Ironic, no?
-M5B
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Every single email you send anywhere on the internet is read in it's entirety by at least one machine not in your control. That machine can trivilaly copy and archive the contents of your message and leave NO TRACE.
If you're paranoid about GMail, but you're happy to send unencrypted email to other addresses, then you're an idiot, that's all there is to say.
Advanced users are users too!
Google owns Orkut, Blogger.com, the largest search engine on the 'net, and is now offering free, high quality web-based email accounts with a gig of storage. Except for a few lone voices, I haven't seen any serious discussion about why this huge corporation is spending so much resources on providing these services for free.
The advertising revenue couldn't possibly amount to a significant fraction of the costs involved with these services. The value must lie in the personal information that people are donating to Google, Inc.. What are their plans for it? They obviously plan to datamine it - but how will and how can it be used? What new knowledge can be generated by correlating and cross-referencing your orkut, blogger, gmail and google search information?
It is troublesome that it seems to be popular and hip to be totally unconcerned about privacy. Attitudes like "we have none anyways" seem to prevail, and its funny to criticize those who voice some concern as tinfoil-hat-black-helicopter-seeing schitzos. It looks like people have forgotten that privacy matters. Like many other companies that try to collect personal information, Google's privacy policy is subject to change at any time. This makes it almost meaningless! It is effectively the same as saying, "We respect your privacy right at this moment, so have complete trust in us. Tomorrow we might change our minds."
Sounds great as long as they run Jabber.
Advertising in my inbox that I didn't ask for is Spam.
I find it funny that Google (and webmail in general) has gotten people to accept this as normal.
Ads relating to what I'm searching for is one thing. Ads relating to what my friend is telling me about is another.
Emails are considered to be private and personal correspondence. Some people who mailed you might not appreciate the posting of that image of your gmail inbox. Just a friendly reminder.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Ads aren't inserted into messages -- they're displayed alongside them, and can be different every time the message is displayed. If Google is actually recording which emails get which ads, they're wasting disk space and risking subpoenas like the one you describe, for NO reason.
So no, I don't think that what you're saying is a possible result. All you could subpoena from Google is the emails they hold, the ads they're currently serving (with no connection between the two, because there IS none), and the number of times each ad has been served; and I don't see ANY way a judge would allow that kind of shotgun subpoena.
-Billy