Hotmail, Others Follow Gmail's Storage Boost

competition by some_god · 2004-06-23 22:41 · Score: 4, Insightful

hurray for competition :)

Re:competition by mikera · 2004-06-23 22:46 · Score: 5, Insightful

Yep - just shows the power of the free market once again!

Think how little progress we'd see if large segments of the IT industry were dominated by single large corporations with no incentive to innovate..... oh wait.....
Re:competition by Anonymous Coward · 2004-06-23 22:52 · Score: 4, Insightful

Google is a large company. They're worth quite a bit of money.

MS and Yahoo are offering the e-mail systems that they are now because they know Google is going to steal a lot of their business (The business model is draw in people with free accounts and try to sell more).

Actually, if you think about it, this is probably going to really hurt MS and Yahoo's business because much fewer people see the need for having more than 100mb of mail, as opposed to needing more than 6mb.

Google may just be hurting this whole e-mail industry more than it is helping.

And just to add a little twist to this comment, imagine of MS was doing what Google is doing. People would be screaming bloody murder and citing the reason I cited above. Sort of sad really....
Re:competition by tekunokurato · 2004-06-24 01:46 · Score: 5, Insightful

Google may just be hurting this whole e-mail industry more than it is helping.

Um, the original point was regarding the benefit to consumers. It's not hurting anyone, from that perspective. The competition is free and serves to remove excess profits from the industry, not profits altogether (the definition of a market approaching efficiency).

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Read jack phelps dot net
Re:competition by RevDobbs · 2004-06-24 01:50 · Score: 5, Insightful

Do not send large attachments over email.

Again, do not send large attachments over email.

Nothing is worse then trying to download a really important email, but being stuck waiting for a hand full of large, mostly less-important messages to download. Ofoto, Shutterfly, and others offer free image hosting, allowing your friends & family the chance to view pictures at their leisure -- and often order hard copies as a bonus. Not everybody has broadband access, and us "Technology Haves" should be teaching the "have nots" to 1) not send huge f'in emails and 2) don't blindly open every attachment you get.

In conclusion, do not send large attachments over email.
Re:competition by pdp0x14 · 2004-06-24 03:01 · Score: 2, Insightful

One assumes that storage is allocated on the fly in all these systems, as opposed to giving each user an entire allocation at account origination time. Consequently, the players only have to increase storage on an actuarial basis.

However, Gmail encourages its users to approach e-mail in a new and storage-intensive way, i.e. to "never" delete messages and use search to recover them. The incumbents have standard user interfaces and are not attempting to change their users' usage paradigms. Thus, users of the incumbent systems won't be particularly apt to increase their storage requirements even if more storage is available.

This suggests that the incumbents are not dramatically increasing their costs by permitting larger e-mail storage and that the average Gmail user will have significantly higher storage requirements than users of the incumbent systems.

I also question the extent to which Gmail will become the primary account for people who currently use Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. People don't switch e-mail addresses lightly.

However good the Gmail paradigm may be, it's one of those things like power windows that you have to use to "grok." There's also a bit of a learning curve that might be enough to further discourage users who are perfectly happy where they are.

Email Arms Race by Anonymous Coward · 2004-06-23 22:43 · Score: 2, Insightful

With the amount of spam Hotmail accounts get my guess is that this will simply increase the amount of junk mail Microsoft has to store.

Has google kicked off an email arms race that will end in tears?

Hard disk manufacturers happy campers? by jaf · 2004-06-23 22:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

With this extra demand, will it lead to a faster curve towards even cheaper hard disks with even more space on them?

Time to invest in Seagate? :-)

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-- jaf

Re:Hard disk manufacturers happy campers? by Shadarr · 2004-06-24 09:32 · Score: 2, Insightful

Are you serious? gMail's 1GB of storage is huge for free email accounts, but it's still only 1/40th of the size of the smallest harddrive you can get in a new computer. People who buy 120 gig drives aren't doing it for email.

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Bite the hand.

Its good to see them changing.... by Cyb3rBull3ts · 2004-06-23 22:47 · Score: 5, Insightful

Trying to save customers, but honestly, with a sleak, sexy UI of GMail, without those SUPER ANNOYING banners. 2GB of free space, or even unlimited wouldn't be enough to bring me over since those HUGE and OBNOXCIOUS banners are still there.

They have to Googleize, and learn that small, relavent banners produce more then spaming me with flashy popups that install spyware, and that Mozilla/GoogleToolbar will block.

But it is a step in the right direction.

Re:Its good to see them changing.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-06-23 23:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

mozilla + adblock.

I am a regular Yahoo user and the few times I've had to use it from IE I've gone mad with all the annoyingly fast flash animations and popups.

OTOH, I browse with colours disabled to so maybe I am weird :)

Re:Very good news by sigaar · 2004-06-23 22:49 · Score: 3, Insightful

Now imagine Google was just bluffing and causing everyone to panic and enlarge their free storage offers. Either ways, for a change the consumer scores....

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sigaar

Is it really a good idea... by 91degrees · 2004-06-23 22:50 · Score: 5, Insightful

To use a remote computer as permanent storage?

I just don't trust a free service provider to care too much about my data.

Re:Is it really a good idea... by kfg · 2004-06-23 23:40 · Score: 4, Insightful

Whether or not you directly pay them do not forget you are still their source of income as their advertisers will pay nothing without you.

However, bear in mind that this makes you their product which they are selling to their customers, the advertisers.

And it's the customer who is always right.

KFG

Hotmail sucks. by autopr0n · 2004-06-23 22:50 · Score: 3, Insightful

That's a little surprising, given that in the past they were so pressed for space that they decided to delete every sent message stored on their servers, so pressed for space that they decided to delete all mail after 45 days of not logging in, up from a year as it had been originally.

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autopr0n is like, down and stuff.

It took Google to do this! by puke76 · 2004-06-23 22:50 · Score: 5, Insightful

It took Google to do this. I mean, what were the chances of the incumbents doing this, if Google hadn't?
That's what happens when you sit around and be complacent.

Well done Google! The others are just playing catch-up.

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London's finest organic fairtrade coffee

Re:It took Google to do this! by mjh · 2004-06-23 23:48 · Score: 4, Insightful

Well done Google! The others are just playing catch-up.

You think so? I don't. I think the others are playing "user retention". They're trying to lower the impact of 1GB of space on their existing user base. Remember the incumbants have some inertia on their side. Most people don't want to have to deal with changing their email address. So if you make the storage disparity less, then it makes the cost of changing your email address more.
I think this will have the exact intended effect. Users were tempted to put up with the pain of changing their email address to get the huge increase in space. Those same users probably won't switch now, because they've not got 100x more space than they used to have. Space isn't an issue anymore. Changing your email address is.
IMHO, it's a good move by these guys.
I think that google's response to this should be to offer free, permanant email forwarding. Essentially, what they'd be saying is this: OK, yes, you have to switch your email address today. But it's the last time you'll ever have to switch your email address... EVER. Do this, and it lowers the long term cost of switching your email address to gmail.
$.02

--
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.

Whoever you use for your free email, thank Google by WIAKywbfatw · 2004-06-23 22:51 · Score: 4, Insightful

In less than three months since their announcement of Gmail (April 1st) they have redefined what a free email service should provide, in terms of storage and attachment size if nothing else.

If Gmail hadn't appeared to shake up the status quo then Yahoo, Hotmail, etc would still be providing storage in the 2MB region rather than two or three orders of magnitude more.

--

"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg

I'm still not seeing the point.... by Atrax · 2004-06-23 22:53 · Score: 2, Insightful

the thing about the 'loads of storage space' thing is, right, archived mail, right? and to get to a web-based email service, I have to be online, right?

what if I'm not online? what if I'm in hicksville on my laptop and want to access an old email message from someone for some really important reason (yeah I know, incoherent sentence, but bear with me)

with the POP mail I have, my messages are RIGHT HERE. In have no need to go connecting to tha Intarweb to do this, right? but Gmail's amazing search capabilities so heavily plugged, are aimed right at this, going through your archived mail, right?

Is there some link I'm not making here? Forgive me, I'm in the pub so maybe I'm just lost.

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Screw you all! I'm off to the pub

Re:I'm still not seeing the point.... by ecrips · 2004-06-23 23:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

what if I'm not online? what if I'm in hicksville on my laptop and want to access an old email message from someone for some really important reason
On the other hand what if you are in hicksville without your laptop and want to access an old email. Being stored on a webmail account means you can access it with any internet connection computer anywhere. Which for those of us without a laptop is a definite plus.
Personally I think a mixture is the best solution. Forward your email to Gmail, but also keep it on your own machine. Then you don't have to access the internet every time you want to read an email, but you can read your emails from any internet connected computer.

Re:Go Google Go!! by LiquidCoooled · 2004-06-23 22:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

The 1gb limit is simply a carrot for us all.

Most normal users won't get anywhere near filling a gMail account for a good long time.

Its used to show the difference between the good and the bad.

Now - when google move into ISP land, with 100mbit broadband i'll be happy :)

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liqbase :: faster than paper

It's funny... by jb.hl.com · 2004-06-23 23:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

The main people who won't switch away from Hotmail are the home users who like Hotmail. If you ask them if they want to try something better, after they complain about spam/not being able to send big attachments/spyware, their response will be "NO, I'M HAPPY...shit, this service has so much spyware..."

And now that Microsoft has disallowed signing up for a Passport with a non-Microsoft email address, tieing these (usually) MSN Messenger using Hotmail to Hotmail, we'll have lots of people locked into it, and they'll bitch, piss and moan at you to help them, then ignore you.

God, I love users who are deluded as to the utter shitness of their email service. Trust me, I know loads of them.

(I'll bet there's not one Hotmail account NOT covered in spam by now. They're all just spam buckets. Evil, evil Hotmail...we hates it my precioussssss...)

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By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --

Re:It's funny... by Spad · 2004-06-23 23:43 · Score: 2, Insightful

Actually, the reason I usually get given by Hotmail users, when asked why they don't switch to something decent, is that they don't want to have to change their email address.

It's a fair bit of hassle notifying all your contacts, updating mailing list subscriptions, changing account details at online retailers and soforth.

Especially as AFIAK Hotmail doesn't allow you to forward your emails to another account - besides, it's just be shut down after a month of "inactivity" anyway, so it's far from a sensible option.

Re:All the storage I need. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-06-23 23:11 · Score: 1, Insightful

Beleive it or not, a lot of people perfer to have webmail, but then, because dyefade said it's not so, I guess everyone else is wrong eh? bleh.

p2p? by RMH101 · 2004-06-23 23:16 · Score: 1, Insightful

what stops you using the 1GB for data storage, then publicising your password so it can be used for filesharing?

Re:p2p? by fredrikj · 2004-06-23 23:26 · Score: 3, Insightful

Easily stopped by preventing an account from being accessed by more than a few IPs in a limited time.

WTF? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-06-23 23:19 · Score: 1, Insightful

Hey moderators: How can the first post be redundant?

Too little too late by swerk · 2004-06-23 23:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

Fortunately, I've snatched up a beta Gmail account and am finding it to be the bee's knees thus far. I've been fed up with Yahoo for a long time. Had I gone with Hotmail I'd have been even more fed up.

For several years I've had to trim all kinds of stuff out of my email archives due to the claustrophobic 4- and 6-meg limit on Yahoo mail. Then suddenly I log in and there's 100 meg available. Well that sucks, I've deleted maybe half that in stuff I'd rather have kept over the years. And it's still Yahoo; they still puke up obnoxious ads every chanse they get, and at the end of every single outgoing message.

On the other hand, since the dot-bomb, most over-the-web services have gotten crippled or disappeared entirely for non-paying users. It's a breath of fresh air to see some things actually improve, regardless Microsoft's and Yahoo's motives for doing so.

If an all but ad-free environment, a clean interface and the other Google niceties become competitive features that many webmail services mimmick, then great, everybody wins, including those unwilling to switch services. But for my money (or lack of it), I'd rather be signed up with an outfit whose mission statement amounts to "don't be evil" rather than "always be evil except to save face".

Re:All the storage I need. by mark_lybarger · 2004-06-23 23:21 · Score: 5, Insightful

perhaps you're kidding, i dunno, but these free services do provide a lot. webmail, hosted on someone elses server has more reliable backup/recover procedures. in the 7 years i've used yahoo mail, i've _never_ has a message just disapear. i have had a hard drive crash w/o a backup anywhere in sight. and once i d/l my email from ISP and delete from their server, it makes it more challenging to get to the emails. hotmail/yahoo/gmail whatever is generally accessable anywhere you can get a public ip and out the firewall on port 80. though sometimes it may be more challening from some business who deem necessarry to block the well known webmail sites.

now, personally, i think that while gmail will be enticing (and i'll certainly sign up when given a chance), they'll need to really provide more than email. yahoo's calendar is really nice. it becomes a challenge now to simply forget when the date you officially became a domesticated individual.

Compression for fun and profit. by kinema · 2004-06-23 23:30 · Score: 2, Insightful

I never understood why email providers limited their subscribers to a measly 5 megs. Most email is pure ASCII text. Every time I have felt the need to compress a text file it nearly disappears. This is even the case when I have used gzip on the 'fastest' settings. A gig of email compressed onto today's unbelievably cheap storage costs a provider like Google, Yahoo or Hotmail damn near nothing!

Next month... by kinema · 2004-06-23 23:34 · Score: 3, Insightful

In the next month or two I fully expect that we are going to see some admititly slow but inexpensive storage solutions. Actually I'm supprised we haven't already seen GmailFS and HotmailFS.

Well, the desire for bigger profits I suppose. . . by JSBiff · 2004-06-23 23:45 · Score: 3, Insightful

I mean, you're absolutely right - storage costs next to nothing per-megabyte, and compression can make it go a lot farther. But consider it like this: almost all the free email services have 'free' and 'premium' offers, and the main thing that differentiates the free from the 'premium' is how much storage you get.

Now, when they give free customers >= 100MBytes of storage, there is less reason to pay for the premium service. So, until GMail came in and broke the cartel's artificial shortage, the email services could count on plenty of people coughing up the cash to get a useable amount of storage.

At this point, given the above, why are they increasing their storage quotas? . . . Because if all the free & premium customers decided to move over to GMail (or at least a significant percentage of the user-base), then their current revenues would plummet fast. So, while they get a lot less money per 'free' customer (just the revenue they derive from advertising), by increasing the storage, they mostly take away the prime driver for people to go to GMail.

Predictions: now that GMail is eating away at their ability to sell 'premium' accounts with more storage, I expect that

We will see advertising taken to all new levels of obnoxiousness by the free email providers, to compensate for revenues lost from premium account sales declining.
I suspect some of the features that are currently available with the 'free' accounts (like spam filtering) might be moved over to the 'premium' accounts to attempt to still have differentiation between them so people might still consider using the premium accounts.

Re:Go Google Go!! by MrRTFM · 2004-06-23 23:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

Most normal users won't get anywhere near filling a gMail account for a good long time.

Agreed - and even if everyone in the world filled it up, how much would be genuinely unique content. Not much, I'd guess the size ratio would be something like:
70% - Funny videos of dancing monkeys or Powerpoint jokes
25% - MP3 files, zipped software (legal or not)
5% - genuine emails

Of the 95% size, Google would keep one copy of the file and link the others (hell - they probably already have a copy in \pub\jokes anyway)

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You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you

Re:And it will still be no good by epsalon · 2004-06-23 23:46 · Score: 2, Insightful

If you want to pay "e-mail insurance", better buy your own domain and host your e-mail address there. If your ISP goes under, you can always switch.

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Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org

Re:Competition? by johannesg · 2004-06-23 23:50 · Score: 3, Insightful

They have felt it hundreds of times before. Their response was always the same: (cue robotic voice) "Eliminate. Eliminate. Eliminate."

The fact that you don't seem to realize this confirms they have been wildly succesful doing just that...

Re:Go Google Go!! by LiquidCoooled · 2004-06-23 23:54 · Score: 3, Insightful

Absolutely - I've thought about this as well.

The same could hold true for viruses, trojans and spam inside mails.

If google decide to zap one virus, then they have zapped it worldwide and cured a problem instantly.

There are problems with implimenting such a (on the surface) simple solution however. Not anything the massed collection of PHDs and brainiacs at Google couldn't solve though :)

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liqbase :: faster than paper

Gmail=Good IDea, Poor Execution by pgrst · 2004-06-23 23:54 · Score: 2, Insightful

Google may be the poster child for a 'good' corporation but the roll-out of the gmail system is most definitely not one of the better acheievements. By pre-announcing gmail so far in advance, all the other free providers have now upped their storage. While gmail is still not publicly available.

The barriers to switching email address are high; no one wants to ditch the address they may have been using for seven years. gmail's real selling point was the extra storage, but with that advantage negated I don't see so many people likely switch.

Compare with this scenario:

gmail carries out large scale internal testing, carries out a low-key public beta (no additional invites, etc.) and then BOOM! Press announcement "gmail is up and running!!!" . Users now flock to the service because the other providers don't currently offer anything like the storage space of gmail.

the gmail rollout could definitely be handled better. aside from the goolgle fanboys, how many regualr hotmail/yahoo useres will switch now that hotmail/yahoo have increased storage?

Re:Gmail=Good IDea, Poor Execution by The+Cydonian · 2004-06-24 00:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

Actually, I'd say the Gmail public beta is one of the most successful viral marketing attempts I've seen in recent history. I mean, think about it:- had Google announced Gmail through a teeny weeny link on, say, labs.google.com, I'd probably have not bothered about it. OTOH, now that there's such a big hype factor about owning a Gmail account, I'm all ga-ga over it, virtually blackmailing a (Slashdot) friend into sending me an invite. :-)
Always remember; Gmail isn't just about the space, it's also about the UI as well. It definitely isn't easy for either Hotmail or Yahoo or any other webmail to compete against it easily.

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More than mere navel gazing.

Re:Yeah, but Gmail's better by trix_e · 2004-06-23 23:57 · Score: 4, Insightful

GMail *is* better... much much better. it's quite possibly the best UI I've ever seen in a web browser. if you take a few minutes to figure out the shortcut keys, it's better than just about anything else out there. Yes, you can't format mail just yet, but still it is in beta.

it's fast, incredibly intuitive. I'm in love.

the only thing I didn't like was the lack of new mail notification, so I downloaded Pop Goes the GMail (windows only... one downside -- but I doubt its long before something like this comes along for other platforms) and it takes care of that for me.

In short I'm never going back to any other webmail service. It'll take me a lot to pry me away from GMail.

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No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.

Re:Whats the diffrence? by superyooser · 2004-06-23 23:59 · Score: 4, Insightful

You're exactly right. Google's competitors are falling into a trap. All that space is good only if it's organized and easy to search. Hotmail and Yahoo are digging their own graves by incorporating only one piece of Google's business strategy. Google has made clear their philosophy of why they're giving users a whole gigabyte. Google wants to leverage its superior searching ability. The other email providers don't have this! What are they thinking?

Google has pulled off a perfect rope-a-dope scheme, perhaps unintentionally. At first, GMail appears vulnerable since Microsoft and Yahoo could easily match its 1 GB storage. But that's not GMail's real strength. By its competitors raising their storage limits, they are *emphasizing* their own strategic *weaknesses* (no automatic organization, lousy searching), and Google will pummel them in the webmail market with its arsenal of exclusive advantages.

backup solution by peu · 2004-06-24 00:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

Is it just me or these new huge free email accounts serve as a zero cost online backup solution, for example your digital photos?

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NEOCA - Custom LED Flashlights

1GB not the only draw by jbarr · 2004-06-24 00:15 · Score: 3, Insightful

While 1GB of storage is nice, it's certainly not the only reason I like Gmail. Features like "Search", "Labels", "Conversations", "Keyboard Shortcuts", and a lightning-fast interface help leverage the 1GB of storage enabling me to easily and quickly find and manage my email information in ways I never could.

Also, and sometimes more importantly, Gmail's ads are so unobtrusive and relevent that implementations like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail seem like complete jokes with their flashy, intrusive, irrelevent ads.

--
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!

Is not size what matters.... by gmuslera · 2004-06-24 00:26 · Score: 5, Insightful

... is to have an interface that makes sense to store and manage that size. With traditional mail client software (when only 300Mb of stored mail), if i have to retrieve something and not remember where it is and some clue on how it will look (with good details) i'm out of luck.

Google move was to give not only a big enough (?) space for mail, but also a interface to effectively deal with it, and...well, google to search within.

Is like those pills that have "the vitamin C of 40 lemons" or something similar, you can handle that in that way, will feel like a pill but will have the amount you need, but if a "traditional" vendor gives you to eat 40 lemons to get that amount of vitamin C at the same price, and try to eat all of this you will end with problems. The "content" will be the same, but in a way that will be hard to deal with it.

Re:.MAC by YouHaveSnail · 2004-06-24 00:48 · Score: 3, Insightful

Now when are Apple going to follow suit and up the paltry 15mb e-mail storage I get for $99 a year!!!

Unknown. But I think Apple is one company that probably realizes that they need to do more than just add a lot more space. What are you going to do with a gig of e-mail storage unless you also get some cool tools for sorting through it all?

Besides, I think most .Mac users read their mail at least part of the time with OS X's Mail.app. Can you imagine syncronizing the mail on your machine with your online account if you had anything close to 1GB of mail stored online? And on the flip side, if you're downloading your mail to your Mac at home, you can have as many gigabytes of stored mail as you like. It just won't be online and searchable from anywhere.

Don't get me wrong: I'm looking forward to the day when Apple increases the e-mail limit for .Mac users. But I can also see Gmail being a good thing for .Mac in the sense that at some point, more people may be willing to pay for a service like .Mac. Many people pay for premium cable channels like HBO, and non-premium, non-cable public broadcasting, because they like the higher quality content and they appreciate not having ads. If .Mac can become the HBO of online services, it'll be a very good thing for Apple.

Yet another space competition game? by deconvolution · 2004-06-24 00:58 · Score: 3, Insightful

As I remembered, in 1999, when most Chinese email services offered 2M space for free account, Sina, one of the leading .com companies started to provide 50M free space to attactive people applying their account. Then other competitors following up to add their space to 20M, 50M and 100M... and go to our campus and send us free email accounts for all students. Finally, etang.com says they provided unlimited free space to every one and put this to the adverts.

After couples months, most of them declared a free "large space" emails are "unmaintainable". Sina decreased their account from 50M to 5M, and even a company called 263 canceled their free email service, "As a professional ISP, we dont need click rate from the unrelated public" they explained the reason something like that.

Till now etang still provides unlimited space email access if you pay about 40 USD a year(Sorry, it is Chinese). But most people never interest it.

Regarding my previous experiense, a "unlimited" email space is not the key point attacting public to their service. The more important question is : HOW LONG?

Don't be a Hater! ;-) by Robert+Petersen · 2004-06-24 01:03 · Score: 5, Insightful

I think what Google is attempting to do with all that storage is get *life* users, i.e. people that will end up archiving 5, 10, or dare I say it, 15 years worth of email. In that span, I could see that 1GB of space coming in handy. One thing that I think Google could do to get me 100% on board would be a way to back up my email archive to my local PC. Not that i'm worried (*right now*) of Google going under, but who know's, 5 or 10 years from now when iv'e amassed a few hundred megs of email.....

Re:Competition? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-06-24 01:13 · Score: 1, Insightful

Yeah, by using anti-competitive tricks (DR-DOS anyone) and leveraging.

Memory or Storage space? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-06-24 01:14 · Score: 1, Insightful

My pet peeve. May be a little pedantic, but I do wish people would stop saying memory when they mean disk space or storage. Now it seems that ZDNet has gotten into this habit as well. Check out the link in the original post. I wonder how many times this happens to us in Tech support. I feel like pulling a McLaughlin on them; shouting "Wrong" and hanging up.

Re:Yeah, but Gmail's better by garcia · 2004-06-24 01:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

People are flocking to GMail because it is the geek thing to do. Everyone wants one and they will beg you for an invite (I know I just gave out my 6).

As far as the design of GMail I am not all that impressed. Search functions are nice and all but I don't use searchs that much. The "conversations" aren't exactly what I want as I would prefer standard folders. I certainly don't like not having an option to keep ALL old emails open in a conversation w/o having to click on them to "expand"). The filters are nice and seem to work well for my uses but I haven't played around with them enough to see just how useful they are.

I haven't received any spam but that's no surprise. I haven't had any issues at work but at home GMail seems sluggish. Almost too sluggish. I don't know why that is but there is a noticable lag after clicking on things at home before actions are taken.

The space is nice and all (and I am forwarding all mail from home -> GMail for now for permanent storage as a test) but it's certainly not necessary. They are going to eliminate it eventually claiming national security or kiddy porno/warez violations.

Re:But google is honest, thats the difference by singleantler · 2004-06-24 04:08 · Score: 2, Insightful

I'm not sure you can call Google honest, only that they have not been proven dishonest, unlike Microsoft.

Google is still a company, the point of which is to make a profit. I don't think they're going to do anything nefarious with my e-mail, but I also don't give them any special dispensation because one of their mottos is "Don't be evil." So far they're just a company which makes a very good search engine, and a few peripheral tools and utilities. I don't see anything to make me think they're honest or dishonest, they are just good at providing their service.

--
"What if they're using IE?" "I've dumbed Mozilla down to cope with it." - BOFH

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Hotmail, Others Follow Gmail's Storage Boost

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