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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.
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
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.)
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 prefer that my ISP has a webmail front to my POP accounts. I can it anywhere, anytime, and still download it and keep it locally when I get home. I don't really worry about storage, but I don't trust webmail providers to backup the important messages I need to keep.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
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 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.