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Rediff Joins The 1GB Webmail Club
BGT writes "Gmail has for sure caused a furor by offering announcing 1 GB of space for free. But they are still in the beta stage and you cannot sign up for an account yet. Now India-based Rediff claims to be the first to actually start offering 1GB of space for free, with their Rediffmail service." (Spymac mail users might disagree with the "first free gig" claim.) Signing up for a rediffmail account was straightforward; the site has an intelligent add-a-contact interface when you send email to a new address, but lacks the searchability and multiple-label capability of gmail.
the 90's called. they want webmail back.
Rediff.com will also start freeing up over 15 million email addresses that have not been in use over the years, giving new users a better chance of finding an email id of their choice
...
So.. 15,000,000 X 1 GB =
What will happen after two years when those inboxes start filling up to the top?
And it is being blocked on several black lists.
It's interesting to see all of these companies upping their e-mail storage space, however, the 1 GB aspect is just the headliner of Google's product.
Google has quite the list of other new features in development including their own take on spam filter technology, and their intelligent sorting among topics. They also their text-based ad model that nobody else has been able to knock off yet. Yahoo has the chance to do so with Overture, but they've yet to connect Overture to Yahoo Mail.
So, even if everybody else in the free e-mail space can pull 1 GB out of their hats to, they still have a lot of work to do to catch up to what Google's working on.
I use to use this server a while back like a couple of years because a friend reccemended it.
It sucks, and is down a lot for "maintainence" (yeah fat guy tripped over the cat5 and pulled it out again I know!) etc...
My advice: wait until gmail's public, but don't register all the good names before I do!
Email me at jonkelley@gmail.com
But how you use it :)
:)
Seriously... I would still use Gmail even if it had 10Megs of space... it is too cool not to use it... now who wants Gmail invitations?
The summary even points that out. This clearly is not the first e-mail project on the Internet to get 1GB storage going. They may have beat Google to the punch, but so have others. The claim of "first" is bogus.
So what if email accounts are getting bigger, jeez, like giving users more space was something that could never possibly be envisaged before google came up with GMail. Its a natural progression folks and absolutely nothing to get excited about.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I can say one thing cool about google mail, the heavy, working use of JavaScript is pretty cool. It works in Safari, Mozilla, and IE the same. Must have been hell to code :)
-Ralph Bonnell ralph@ralph.cx ralphbonnell@gmail.com
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
That any of these new 1gb webmail companies will be around in 3 years? Google has proven staying power, and thats where my moneys at. (quite literally, heh. I actually shelled out 25 bucks for 2 gmail accounts.)
I think I'll stick with gmail. For one thing, they don't want to know where you live and what you named your pet!
----- Wtcher Dragon, UDIC
what amazes me is why the VAST MAJORITY of people continue to use hotmail, the crappiest email service ever. with its whopping 2 mb of space, irritating user interface, MS adverts, and many many other annoying features.
most people use it because 'it's good enough' and 'it's what everyone else uses' . well, they would know what a bad service it is if they use something else and have a comparison.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
I would estimate at this point Google's given out about half a million invites.
Somehow I don't think smaller free mom and pop sites are going to beable to compete.
Overall, I fail to see how GMail will ever be a profitable enterprise for Google.
I just don't see how the ad revenue would ever surpass the bandwidth costs they incur.
I'm not sure how you work, but webmail, at least for me, is infinately more useful than a regular POP client in some cases. With webmail, I can check my mail anywhere, and I don't have to worry about storage. It's that simple.
What about spymac? They offer 1GB email and /. has covered them in the past.
Is it that hard for the editors to edit?
Spymac is well worth mentioning as an example of what NOT to do.
"Don't rush in and let a free for all take you down". Spymac may be the first to offer a GB, but it's not yet a "service". It's down far too often to be useful, and when it's up it's often so abysmally slow I just use hotmail instead. In its first days I was lucky to USE my spymac mail account one day out of seven.
Google's invite system looks to be their way of controlling that. They can get a setup working, then increase its size as they want bit by bit, and work out where fixes need to be made.
i will be willing to laugh maniacally at a box of kittens for a gmail invite.
kthnxbye.
nizaam34(at)telus(dot)net
But search capability is. I find it amazing that everybody and his grandmother keeps trippin' about the 1G of storage. Who cares. If I want to keep old emails around I archive them in a tarball that I keep handy somewhere. I receive large amounts of non-spam email and what I really, really need is a decent search capability (not only on literals but also on categories and so on). Mailsmith (MacOSX app) does a decent job. It uses grep and indexing iirc. In my tarballs, I just grep for what I want. But it feels clunky in a way, so if Google can offer ueber search capability and allows for intelligent filtering of incoming mails, I'll sign up the moment it reaches 1.0
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
anyone signup for this free 2gig account? i did about a week ago and starting yesterday they seemed to have disabled alot of accounts for no reason. anyone here anything?
Some folks have already tried to outdo gmail/spymac et.al. on the 'bigger is better' kick. Aventuremail recently offered 2GB accounts for free (and still appear to if you go to their site), but they apparently bit off more than they could chew and are no longer accepting new registrations (though they will certainly let you try, for marketing purposes - if you try to sign up for one now, they'll take you through the whole process, then tell you you're more than welcome to a 3GB account for $22USD/year).
I would switch to Rediff in an instant if they can turn my spam into a music and dance number with a large ensemble cast.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Just like Gmail, Rediff forces people to copy everything and do top-posting when replying to mails.
This is really anoying.
{{.sig}}
Setup your own mail server and have unlimited storage and no attachment or message size limitations.
Use qmail with vpopmail, spamassassin, clam antivirus and rbl checking with spamhaus. Then setup some webmail client like IlohaMail or oMail.
Now thats geek points.
And of course you'd run this all on your slackware server.
has been free from the beginning (April) and has never had a limit on the storage. Claiming 1GB is just an oversell. It also features the ability to search e-mails.
It also sports IMAP, POP3, SMTP (with alternate port for those with port 25 blocked), and web-access with SSL. And no ads. It's supported by Icarus Independent which uses AdSense.
Anybody with a weekend to spare, Mercury Mail and some talent can put together a free e-mail service. The web-mail front end uses Apache 1.3.x, PHP, MySQL and OpenSSL. It just parses the files Mercury uses. Simple and secure. Mercury has built in web-mail support but I've never used it. I prefer having the flexibility of writting my own front end.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I wouldn't count SpyMac in. There are many reports of too slow operation, long periods of being down etc. My personal experience? They never sent me any answer when I joined in. I simply filled some forms related to some personal information and then there has never been any answer....
I run a mail server. It doesn't take much bandwidth at all. Sure there's 1GB of storage but a very small percentage of the users are going to go anywhere near the limit. E-mail is a very inefficient way to send large files. There's about 20% overhead.
Smaller "mom & pop" shops can compete by offering a unique/catchy domain name.
I offer POP3 and IMAP as well as secured web-access. Google doesn't support those other two without a third party hack.
Google offers a lot but they don't offer anything that nobody else can offer except the domain name. And they don't offer all the possible features people want for an e-mail account.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
One of the biggest reasons that Google's GMail is still more attractive is simply stability.
If you sign up for Spymac mail or Rediffmail you don't have the backing of a major corporation that has an infrastructure in place to support future growth, investors looking for the company to *not* fold, and a dedicated staff just for your data.
Any fly-by-night place can buy a massive hard drive and start offering 1 free GB of mail, but if they run out of cash and fold then what happens to all of your mail in their old system? At least with google there is a pattern of longeviety that seems to ensure your data will be protected for a long while.
If they're fully based in India, I doubt any US laws would apply to them. What can they get away with that a service based in the first world couldn't?
This just goes to show that Google is once again leading when it comes to innovation, by offering a free mail service where you don't have to delete mail. Then other services follow... Say, why didn't they do this before Google?
But I guess it's good with competition. I don't know how this compares with Gmail though, since there's of course much more to a mail service than how much mail you can store. Uptime and speed for example, and this is another area I believe Google can be trusted in, since I rarely see their services getting overloaded or being down temporarily.
I also noticed Gmail has a "report as spam" feature so the users will build a massive spam database. Many mail services simply provide some unknown filters that catches maybe 60% of all spam. It's good to know that Gmail does this, since I don't doubt they'll have a problem building their spam database with all their potential users.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Yes, I love df -h being my 'mail quota'. Also, searching is nice and fast. And the ability to create a number of accounts and implement very effective spam filtering/prevention is nice too.... Total control of how I access my mail and send new mail is good too, Authenticated smtps relay, imaps access, and webmail only for when I'm desparate means a much smoother experience.
I have honestly been surprised why geeks have been so excited over gmail when they often have the resources to give themselves whatever they want. True, it is more work and worry, but the benefits are incredible and the work and worry not significant for people who do or have had to do this sort of thing for a living (and for those who haven't, what better way to develop a more sophisticated skillset).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
6 billion*1000MB= 6 trillionMB. That's not a 6TB array, it's a 6exabyte array. Hardly feasible.
---
I didn't want to leave this space blank.
10 MB, 100 MB, 1GB, 3GB -- I really could care less about the storage space. What I want is reliable webmail.
Yahoo Mail has been out since this morning -- by my account it's been down for at least 8 hours now. This is not the only outage in the past few weeks either.
Maybe I should head over to ebay and bid on a gmail invitation.
Spymac may claim to be the first to offer 1gb email, but it was only in reaction to Google's announcement.
In any event, Spymac's servers are tremendously overloaded and are therfore sluggish. I've also had problems with Spymac email never arriving, whether incoming or outgoing. Probably something to do with how overloaded they are. I've got a couple addys there, as backup, but I don't (can't?) actually use them at the moment.
I'm looking forward to Gmail. If it's as good as it's claimed to be, I'll probably switch to using that for my primary email, and use my ISP-provided address as a spamcatcher.
Well it sure does. I had an account on rediff and due to their atrocious spam policy my email address is unusable. But soon it is about to change. Rediff has employed the services of one of the best anti spam guys in the business :). Cant name who but i am sure its just a couple of months when rediff becomes the best anti spam email. Infact i expect it to rival outblaze!
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