Slashdot Mirror
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."
Initially I got a couple of invitations I could give away, every couple of weeks, and it was easy to find close friends to give them to. Then I found I had seven invitations this week and had run out of obvious candidates. I tried gmailswap, but the interesting ones (like a pound of Kona coffee) went too quickly, and the others were uninteresting to me. So I sent a note to my orkut friends, and quickly had well over a dozen requests for accounts despite including a disclaimer pointing to gmail-is-too-creepy.com :). I gave away the ones I had, and surprisingly got a few more the
very next day. I still have a queue of about 5 people I owe accounts
to.
PS. This was a really, really nice Slashdot article, with a treasure trove of gmail information. Well done.
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
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.
But instead bought an old 1 GB harddrive on eBay for 50 cents.
Unknown host pong.
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.
Yahoo now offers 100 mb to all free accounts, and 2 gigabytes to premium accounts. I love competition.
My impression: It's nice webmail. That's it.
I don't see the huge hype, but then again I did click on that invite link, didn't I?
sulli
RTFJ.
What I noticed was that as soon as Yahoo announced they were upping their email limit, Gmail started letting me invite about 5 people a day.
Understand that I already have a backlog of 10 slashdotters waiting for accounts, but I labeled them all and as the invites trickle in, I'll pass them on...my friends and family and irc buddies are already hooked up.
Cheers!
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
.. would be Google Messenger.
Use Gmail address as a login ID, use it to capture the business IM and email market
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
ohhhhh me!
send it to: Mekkab @ gmail DOT com.
Oh, Wait...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Perhaps all three, but I think after using Gmail for a couple of months, the idea that I can quickly search the full content of everything I've received is nice; the threaded conversations are really cool; and the sharp user interface is pretty nice.
On the other hand, the filter model doesn't cut it for me. Tagging things with a label but leaving them in an "inbox" makes it hard to find the good stuff. Maybe if I could "star" incoming messages based on criteria as well?
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
Spymac.com has free hosting, 1GB of email, none of the privacy concerns of gmail, and a very easy to use site.
And it existed before gmail
One thing I noticed about GMail was that it was, at least for a short time, a small commercial market within itself. The market ebbed and flowed depending on if invites had become availble that day or not. Originally, there were few accounts, and I managed to snatch one up thanks to my Blogger account - while it lasted, my invites were gold. Before the market "crashed" a few weeks ago, I managed to get unlimited virtual hosting and some nude pictures from a college CS girl who wanted one for "geek cool". My, it was great.
Of course, then the market crashed. So now GMail Swap and others are worthless. But I've been using my invites for another purpose now - I currently have 30 GMail addresses to my name, including some interesting ones. I figure, although the rarity may not exist in having an account, the rarity could exist in having the account you want. Commercialism rises again.
How does one get invited. I crave the invitation. I am almost tempted to start my own Google just so I could then invite myself to gmail.
----
Is Your Boss A Muppet?
Personally I love the following:
1) It's webmail like the ORIGINAL hotmail before MS tookover. Few ads, non popups, just gets you to your business
2) Google search for your e-mail, nice and fast. Beats the hell outta Eurora and Outlook searching
3) Threaded e-mails. I sent out an e-mail to a group of 10 friends, they all responded, I responded to some, etc. It all gets stored in ONE thread.
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.
Wil Wheaton [clevernickname] is working on a project to donate Gmail invites to soldiers serving overseas who all have Hotmail which sucks. Go to his weblog entry for the skinny.
Actually, it is indeed 1024 MB. I heard about somebody who filled up their Gmail account (sorry, I have no link) and got the message at the bottom to say, "You have used 101% of your 1000 MB." They probably just call it 1000 MB so as to not confuse those who do not know that 1 GB is 1024 MB, which is totally lame.
Audioscrobbler
Alternate.
...You can "star" incoming messages based on criteria. Edit a filter. "Star It" is one of the filter options.
Problem solved?
The interface is really fast. A lot of functions don't require real page re-loads.
I do need to check POP mail (IMAP would be grand), but I realize they're probably holding off on that until the real release.
I'm glad someone values keyboard commands again.
I see Gmail as a novelty item right now. More of a way for people to brag about their gig of email. My pop3 account holds 15 meg, which is enough since I only give it out to personal friends (and the Dilbert Newsletter ;-)). I use hotmail for registering for services and all the spam goes there. I am muchly content with my non-Gmail services.
We all live in a #FFFF00 submarine...
Since I am a Treo user, I still valued having the ability to check my account from my phone. But I also really liked the Gmail interface when I was at my desktop. So here's what I did:
I was pleased to see that Google allows you to override the reply-to address, so I immediately changed that to my current email address.
I then deleted my IMAP account and set up a mail forwarding alias that directs any incoming messages to my Gmail account as well as a pop account on the hosting provider's server.
I use the POP account to check mail from my Treo, and it also gets picked up by my Outlook client for permanent archiving.
The best part is I was able to switch my email exclusively to Gmail without anyone noticing the switch. This is top notch stuff.. Google has done something extraordinary here.
www.lonseidman.com
They are making their webmail a playfield like is the domain name ownership one, and if it last months a to have really big webmail mailboxes, ligth webpages, intelligent spam/virus filtering and threaded mail view will be so common than when it will be finally out could be no news.
I even wonder if in the open source webmail market not exist already one that provides a good part of what gmail will give who knows when.
At this moment i would open the registration in gmail, not by invitation, but at will, still leave there the "beta" mark to show that still could be rough edges, but to accaparate the market before is too late. What if i.e. the actual Teoma come out around the same time google started? still google would be the #1?
Well, anyway, i could be wrong, not tested yet so i can't say how hard or easy could be duplicated with advantages, but so far for non-users is almost vapourware.
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
I've been experimenting with a Python interface to Gmail. Just released version 0.1 today. Hope it's helpful to someone.
Gmail isn't a POP3 killer. Its a Hotmail/Yahoo killer.
face the world with eyes of fire.
The question that remains, however, is whether Google will work with or against third party developers in GMail's future.
Provided that the things such as the POP3 forwarder do not circumvent the ads which are highly non-intrusive, and which Google relys on a good deal.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
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
If you're really paranoid, just PGP your messages. Granted there's no direct plugin I know of yet, but I'm sure it's about to come. Then again there's always c&p into your email.
The propensity for unencrypted emails to be read and intercepted has existed on the net, but people just ignored the possibility or figured the probability of it happening them is low.
If it bothers you there's an indefinate log of your email, encrypt it--So what if google shows you nothing by PGP ads on the right side of your screen ?
From the entry:
A worthy cause, I should think. Currently, I believe people are just looking over at gmailswap for service men and women to donate their invites to, until this 'clearinghouse' is created.
I thought some slashdotters might be willing to participate.
Voices--Art, Poetry, Photography
Slashdotting a site which encourages users to repeatedly hit refresh?
;)
A new low, or were they just asking for it?
Gmail also has ability to run secure:
https://www.gmail.com
If you don't accept/reply to messages from Gmail your gesture is worth less than the click you didn't take.
Want secure email? Get a cert and encrypt your messages. Only send messages to people on your same server. Make sure no one else has access to the server. Only you. Because as soon as that message leaves your client it is vulnerable to attack.
Now is this likely to occur? Unless you are some sort of leet cracker duude or on some govy watch list or undersurvelllience guess what... Your rantings and "insights" have less value to the BigBrother complex than they do to the poor sap to which they were sent.
Your messages are only valuable as part of a larger statistical model. If you have had an expectation of privacy when dealing with email you have been sadly mistaken.
I am pro-lifechoice.
Please send me an email to coderman at peertech.org with your first and last name, and email address (this is for the form).
I will reply with your current position in the queue of people wanting an invite, and when I get more invitations (currently 5 every one to three days) I'll send you one.
All I ask is this:
1. Please tell me if you get invited before your turn in queue, otherwise I will waste an invitation.
2. Please don't sell this invite, or sell the invites you subsequently get from your own account.
People who sell or extort for invites lack integrity and are selfish. Don't be that kind of person.
Slashdot vs. a 1 Gig Inbox: Who Will Win?
From the Gmail Help Center:So, unless you've covered your tracks very well, don't expect to hold onto those accounts. I know of at least one case where a user who made more than one account had all his accounts shut down.
Gmail is currently in beta. Use of that beta is a priviledge, not a right, so abusing it is the quickest way to find yourself locked out.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
About two years ago, my colleagues and I at Cape Clear devised something called GoogleMail. It was an extremely simple email interface to the Google API. You just send an email to google@capeclear.com and receive a reply with the top ten search results. I just checked it, and it still works. As you can see by the news coverage (scroll down), everyone loved the idea, even though it was practically useless. The only exceptions seemed to be visually-disabled people and those in countries whose governments blocked Web access to Google. We were contacted by Google and asked to change the name, which was fair enough. It now goes by CapeMail. I imagine a scenario, though, where somebody at Google brings up our little invention at a meeting. "GoogleMail? They can't call it that. Get legal on the phone." Legal calls us, and we change the name. However, the phrase GoogleMail sticks in somebody's head back at Google corporate HQ. Two years later, Gmail is borne. Coincidence? Probably, but it's fun to speculate.
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!
So, I guess it's inevitable that someone's going to make a site that lets you send to GMail while avoiding it. Imagine checking your GMail and getting a message saying:
which would be a link to a web page which held the message for, say, two weeks. The service could be set up as a mail relayer, of sorts, where it would be easy to reply to GMail people. For example, the site could be, say, notgmail.com. Then, when replying to someone at GMail, you just add "not" to the address and the service would handle saving your message (only for two weeks, remember) and sending the real Gmail recipient the notice that they've got mail waiting.
I'm surprised that something like this isn't here already. Just imagine GMail's archives getting flooded with "You have received....".
Tagging things with a label but leaving them in an "inbox" makes it hard to find the good stuff.
Not sure if you wanted to leave them in the inbox, but if you just want mailing lists filed off into only their own labels, then you can also set "skip Inbox", to get mail-folder-like abilities.
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."
Come on now, if you're going to grovel, be creative!
There was a man without gmail
Whose VAC could tell quite the tale
his wife worked real hard
to stack the punch cards
but she died, and now he's in jail
One gig, two gigs or three
Gmail's the right size for me
Don't be upset
I read the usenet
all archived, from 1903
My Friendster, and his big gut
has been reclusive somewhat
Gmail requests
he won't address
I think that he moved to orkut
I could be rich, without a doubt
I found an unbeatable route
this Nigerian guy
wants a reply
but I can't with my inbox maxed out
My mailbox will always O flow
inflators, fellators, you know
I get lots of spam
Thanks to my mam
That woman named me Info
Anyone have a spare invite for a clever guy?
cgenman@pobox.com
The ______ Agenda
I got 1338 on the Gmail Machine, and they gave me a HOTMAIL account! So close....!
Best Buy can have you arrested
kilo, mega, giga prefixes refer to multiples of 1000, 1000000, 1000000000.
Just because computers go crazy if something that is aproximately 1k is exactly 1.000k instead of 1.024k doesn't mean that the standard definitions are wrong.
If the marketers at Maxtor wanted to quote inflated numbers, they could easily list the unformatted capacity which is much higher than the formatted capacity.
I have alerted the gmail team to this and they say they are working on it, but they can't fix it soon enough for me as I occasionally forget to delete this gmail generated text from my replies.
Anthony
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
Has anyone actually tried the utilities listed in the original post? The lack of import and export options from gmail is a real limiting factor (I already have a lot of mail I'd like to search). What happens if/when google goes under? How do we extract our gigabyte? These utilities look very promising, but slashdotter stress-testing seems in order...
I think I'm going to cry. I was trying the Gmail Machine lotto. . . I was hitting refresh so fast all I saw was a blink of a page with a big yellow font that said "Winner!" with a text entry box below it. Then 1/5 of a second later, I tapped my touch pad and the page refreshed. I think I need a moment of reflection.
hey all, i keep getting new invites on a fairly regular basis, if you just head-on over to my blog, find the "GMail Invites" post and add a comment with some info as to why u want a gmail account and a valid email address (feel free to use creative obfuscation to protect yourselves from spam crawler bots).
I can't guarantee you an invite but your chances should be pretty good. I'll favor in that order (mostly), people who have a blog on blogger.com, people who have at least bothered to register with blogger.com to place comments, people I've marked as /. friends, people who've marked me as their friend, unless i change my mind :)
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
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.
Google is giving out GMail invites like candy at the moment, you can get anywhere from 3-10 invites every other day or so (at least I do). Of course every invite you use is recorded, since it adds the inviters address to the invitees contact list automatically. With this by-invitation-only strategy they've managed to drum up an amazing amount of hype and discussion on blogs, mailing lists and message boards all over the net. Of course it also helps that GMail, in it's true Google-like fashion, is pretty damn good. That means there's a high demand for it, it's the latest in-thing and you don't want to be left out.
So, with everyone inviting their friends, who in turn invite their friends and so on, Google is sitting on a gold-mine that would make any data-miner drool. They've probably got the biggest social networking dataset ever compiled right now. I'm just thankful it's Google and not Hotmail or Yahoo. As someone else already said, the 1GB storage is just a gimmick, it's the Google brand that matters.
It's like deja vu all over again.
>For those who still think email is secure I got news for you: Your email is already exposed in plain text on just about any server it is sent to.
So what - I don't care about any single email being exposed to someone's eyes. But I do worry if someone has access to ALL of my email all the time - I even wouldn't care if they would read it, but I do not like to be analyzed and profiled via content of my email.
>No human will ever read your email.
This is really a stupid argument - OF COURSE they won't because they can't possibly get enough humans to read gazillons of messages in millions of accounts!
It is impossible, it'd be too expensive and it wouldn't work because humans can't analyze huge amounts of data.
When will people realize that it is FAR WORSE that AI bots "read" (analyze, parse, whatever) your email because:
a) they don't "forget"
b) they can easily "read" all emails of all accounts
c) it is cost effective (essentially free) to use them for any and all purpose they see fit.
I'm not claiming they are doing bad things with it, but they certainly have all the tools they need.
So those who mind would probably prefer to keep their email on less creepy a place (one that doesn't analyze your contacts, URLs in your email and content of your messages to show you ads and whatnot).
I wrote a 2 minute script (perl and wget are our friends) and let it run overnight. Their server started out really speedy, then started getting laggy so I shortened wget's timeout to 60 seconds (900 seconds? please :)
:)
... over approximately 10 hours the script iterated just under 30,000 times before getting an invite, which averaged out 50 hits per minute for me. If you assume most of the heavy hitters had a similar script (maybe, maybe not) running for the same time period where the server got 20,000,000 hits, that means 666 scripters ;)
... only 1 process at a time, it gave the server a minute to respond, and it slept for 1 second between requests. No forked processes, no running as fast as it can. Did I defeat the "feel" of the process, sure, but someone had to be expecting it because there was nothing in the HTML that made this at all difficult. This means I would guess I could have gotten closer to 1 hit per second if I'd -tried- but there didn't seem like much point.
... it is /. where my behavior is unexplainable :)
During this run the chances went from 30,000:1 to 50,000:1 to 100,000:1
Results
NOTE: I made my script relatively friendly
I want to give a HEARTY congratulations for having a server with a dynamic page that took the load like a champ. No images had to help, but it was still pumping out >5K per request at 550-600 requests per second. Not an amazing feat technically, just good planning, but appreciated. I was quite surprised to see it had made it through the night (my invite came @ 8:30am, almost exactly when I woke to the thought of "hey, wonder if I got an invite?", maybe I accidentally invoked Telepathy::Broadcast).
And before someone goes "why did you waste your time for a freakin Gmail account", I spent 5 * the time needed to write the script to write this post
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I got mine on the 3rd try, but I figure seeing the text of the screen will help you boys and girls that are trying to write SCRIPTS automatically keep trying the Gmail Machine!
And no, you're not getting my new gmail address! I want to keep it spam free.
Best Buy can have you arrested
For those of you who are interested. It's called G-Mailto.
It is really simple. It associates mailto: html links with GMail. So when you see a link like this on the web:
rabidsquirrel21@hotmail.com
You can click it and have the GMail compose window open up instead of something like Outlook Express that doesn't work with GMail. If you are not logged in to GMail it will bring you to the login screen and then redirect you to the Compose Page.
I'm using it right now on my Windows XP machine and it works perfectly. Supposedly works fine on Win9x/ME as well.
It's free, open-source, comes with an installer/uninstaller, and you can always switch back and forth between using it from your control panel. Under Internet Options > Programs Tab > Email. After you install G-Mailto, it will be in that list along with any other mail program you use.
Anyway, if you're interested, I put it up on my site:
http://www.rabidsquirrel.net/G-Mailto