Slashdot Mirror
How Does Gmail Stack Up In The Webmail World?
Wrecks writes "Flexbeta compares several email services that promise 1 GB of storage to see how they measure up to Google's Gmail. The review mentions how one service, ShireMail, offers far less features than SpyMac yet cost 10 times as much. The article also mentions how well Gmail is able to filter spam messages." Among the webmail options not mentioned in this review (the authors compare a total of five offerings) is another gig-of-mail offering from the Indian rediffmail.
So how far will you be down-modded for talking bad about it?
Because of GMail, my yahoo account went FROM 6 MB storage to 100MB storage.
Shiremail won't be offering anything if Warner Brothers manage to claim proof of ownership to the word "shire". The Register had an article where they are now taking the owner of shiremail to court because if might confuse their customers who might think that it is related to LoTR.
Jonathanjk.com
..that a google ad appeared below this article.
It's a great deal - you get your gig of email, web hosting, POP access to the email, blog, forums, etc, etc. However, the Spymac servers are almost painfully slow and it's webmail interface has nothing on Googles. POP access was barely adequate, with the POP servers being unavailable probably 50% of the time.
Also, I trust Google to stay around as a viable company and keep providing me with my email service for a lot longer than Spymac (no offense to Spymac, of course).
There's also a German service that offers 1.5 GB e-mail with POP and SMTP for free. I've not checked it out personally, but here is the link:
http://www.directbox.com/
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
It's not about the gig-o-space as much as it is about the superb interface. Don't get me wrong. I really like having all that space but the UI is really slick. I've heard a lot about the lack of folders but once you get used to the lables you wonder why nobody else had implemented it first. It's great being able more then one label to a message.
Gmail isn't perfect. If it were it wouldn't still be in beta. The filters and addressbook are a bit primitave. I would also really like to have the ability to filter based upon a Google search.
Thus far I give Gmail an A+ and don't see any sign of Google slowing down with it's development and improvment.
If you want a good service check out runbox.com - they are 100% MS free!
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
fewer features...
The article also mentions how well Gmail is able to filter spam messages.
<tongue-in-cheek>
I don't know. I haven't noticed any spam -- not even a single piece, to be exact -- going to my gmail account.
I'm making it my new experiment. I figure if I don't give my address to anybody, including school, online stuff, etc., but only give it to friends and people I know from face-to-face world, I shouldn't be getting any spam. This is only theory, of course, becuase eventually, somehow, the spammers always get my email addresses. So my experiment is to see just how long it takes them, and then I can question my friends -- and my enemies -- and see who gave my email on something that wound me up on a mailing list.
If you want to contact me and discuss my theory, you can reach me at m0gart3304haha@gmail.com.
</tongue-in-cheek>
The problem with GMail is that you have to use a web browser to read your e-mail. What I want is the ability to use a normal client like Thunderbird to read my mail, but have the search capabilities of GMail. I can't find a way to accomplish this even though I own and run my own Linux mail server.
:)
Is there any way of indexing my Maildir mailstore, or perhaps replacing my IMAP server with something more powerful that could give me a Gmail type search? If not, why not?!
Providing 1GB space for each user is not at all costly ! The latest price quote for a 40GB HDD is approximately $80 if not less. So for each user ie for each GB the cost comes to $2/user which is nothing for gaints like Google, Rediff, Spymac etc etc...
In India, you don't need hard drives to run a gigabyte mail service. You just get a billion peasants and pay them 50 cents a month to remember a single character.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
This is probably offtopic, but what the hell...
Google currently handles a good USENET service, a good news service, the internet's best web search service, a blogging service, and now an email service.
What's keeping them from taking a unifying approach to everything they have? I'd love to have a home page that I could customize the content (sort of like what my.yahoo has). Latest threads in subscribed-to newsgroups, headlines from news.google.com with my favorite filters, quick summaries of who's sent new emails, etc.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying that this sort of portal service should be mandatory and the only way to get at the individual services. I understand that google's simplicity is part of its elegance. But, at the same time, one of the things that spymac is doing right is that all of their services are available from a central location. If google is going to keep branching out into all these new areas, why not try to create a singular portal to get at all of them?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
If someone wanted to mail bomb you, then it would not be very difficult for him to do so....However it will be difficult for you to clean up all the mess.
hell
they could insert ads in the msg's and if they are useful that would be great
just let me access it by imap as well as web...
regards
john jones
I've been using Gmail for a few months now. The interface is very good, very useable, and has quite a few features that the other services do not offer (such as hot keys).
The only problem with Gmail is that the address book sucks. It only stores basic information, it adds weird people to your address book without your permission (mailing lists), and worst of all it doesn't yet support distribution lists.
IF they fix the address book, the Gmail service will be awesome.
Bryan
To be totally honest:
I haven't found gmail to be that good at filtering spam. I forward two accounts to it that have been around since, oh, 1998 or so and it catches maybe 30 percent of the spam, the rest ends up in my inbox. We're talking about 500 messages a day.
Using Hotmail with those same two accounts, I'd see about 5 percent of the spam, maybe less. Yahoo is a little worse, about 10 percent in the inbox.
So I hope gmail gets better. I do like a lot of things about it; the conversations, stars, etc... very nice and easy to use.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
(mostly) -- for my usage, that is.
-- I use webmail, but not for high-volume long-term storage.
I download-and-delete my webmail to perm storage, so I don't need massive space,
and I'm happy to let my local filter do my spam filtering.
-- I use webmail just for two purposes:
(1) to keep a long-term copy a few things I might want when away (e.g., editor, telnet client, etc.);
(2) to check my mail when I temporarily can't access my perm mail storage --
and at those times, I'm willing to tolerate the spam if the server doesn't catch it.
Every email client has that problem, the difference being with 3rd party applications you can use the mouse or keyboard to highlight multiple emails to delete mass quantities at a time.
However, unless you keep all your email that you have read in the inbox rather than in the Archive folder (which is what is recommended, placing read email in the Archive folder) it would be much easier to use the "Select all" feature and then just deselect the valid emails.
I don't forsee this being a real problem.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
Any spam filter that doesn't run on your own system reads every email you receive.
Does your ISP have a spam filter?
Stop the world; I need to get off.
Sure gmail is considered webmail, but its definitely one of the first webapps I've that seen. When i'm checking my gmail I don't feel like i'm using webpage, I feel like i'm using a very well crafted application.
------------------------------ SirPhreak - "It's Thinking..."
Since about a month, my Yahoo mail Plus account offers me ad-free email with 2 GB of space. Integrated with an address book which I can export and import in a number of formats, and a calendar. They also have a feature where I can create disposable addresses as often as I want, for example when I am web shopping. I also pay for their Personal Address feature, so that they basically host email for a domain I own. I also get POP access, forwarding, (but I don't use it) and great spam filtering.
This costs some money of course, but I think it is worth it. I haven't tried gmail (no one has invited me), many people here think it has many unique features, but yahoo mail has features that gmail does not have. Until gmail offers personal address, there is no chance I will switch.
So is lunixmail.org, that's what I use.
It "just works" for me.
When you notice spam, click the box beside it and then the button "Report as Spam".
Google will eventually be able to build up quite the comprehensive list of email/servers to block, but for now, like the software itself, that spam detector is in beta.
Note, this isn't a troll to just state the obvious feature of spam reporting, but to remind people that their database of spam to block may still be small until we continue doing our job of reporting it in.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
...not being shy I'll ask it anyway. Isn't it possible, given that you can buy cheap generic hosting now, to just run your own web based email, instead of using a third party service where you don't have as much control over it? All I can see as an advantage with gmail and whatnot is that it is free, but after that, it is still a hassle and you get ads, etc. I would think that getting your own independent email service might be better in the long run, it adds an element of security-no evile stuff gets downloaded to your machine, and you have control over what gets saved and doesn't and who looks at it,and the obvious portability and access from anyplace that is the same with other web based emails, etc. Well, somewhat anyway.
Anyone have an experience in this, any recommendations?
~20$ a year
We are now pleased to announce that your storage capacity will be increased to a massive 2GB with 20MB attachment size by the beginning of September, at no extra cost to you*!
Interpet the asterix anyway you choose:
*At the end of your current subscription period, the current annual price for MSN Hotmail Plus will be automatically charged to your credit card until you cancel your subscription or select an alternative plan. Prices and service subject to change. Hotmail Plus accounts that are in good standing are exempt from automatic e-mail deletion due to inactivity.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Yeah, Google is reading my mail. You realize that Google isn't Mr. Google right? WHO THE FUCK CARES if a machine is "reading" my e-mail? lol. Oh shite. Do you think that the computers at Google can understand what you've written? lmao!
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
I think one of the attractions to gmail is that it is run by Google and not that "other" company.
I just feel dirty when I use hotmail, regardless of current or propsed mailbox size.
Plus gmail's interface totally rocks and I barely notice the ads. :)
Friends don't let Friends use Internet Explorer.
Google don't "read" your email.
Your email will be processed by their servers but to the servers don't "know" what they are doing. Whether they are parsing through your email to choose an advert or simply to format it in html the servers don't know or care, they are just mindless computers executing some instructions.
I think a webmail service whose computers don't process your mail will be a rather useless one.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The intrusiveness of gmail is almost non-existant.
However, I actually LIKE IT! I was reading an email from a friend about solar power, and sure enough on the right side were adverts for websites that had solar panels. This was very handy and saved me from the logical next step.
So IMO it's actually nice GREAT to see adverts that pertain to something you might actually be interested in instead of randomly targetted crap.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
I got my g-mail account and discovered my mail is stuck there. I cant move it to another account or dowload it to my home computer. Having 1GB of legacy e-mail that could go poof at anytime is not very attractive, so I stopped using it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
There are "Ads by Google" just under every page's review text. At the very least, there's a conflict of interest here.
Your current email provider can read your email.
But you know what, they don't cos you are a DULL FUCKING TWAT THAT NOONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT.
Have a nice day.
I figured, what the heck and upgraded to Spymac Pro for $20, but in three months of using it, I know it is not ready for prime-time.
Pros: Lots of features (?) Cons: Sluggish, confusing and inconsistency in feature packages, e.g. my "Pro" account is now called "Wheel." Somewhat confusing to navigate and determine which features are enable based on what you paid for.Spymac management seems to be flying by the seat of their pants as they add software and features that clearly are not stable. Documentation is sparse.
GMail, on the other hand, rocks. It is streamlined, bare-bones and ridiculously F-A-S-T (blows away all other web-based clients).
Bouncing between it and my Hotmail account makes me want to ditch Hotmail all the more. Hotmail used to be OK (pre-MS days), but so many stinking ads and an overall MS-kludgey design and interface, and a ton of spam make the "experience" pale in comparison to GMail.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
All I want to know is one thing. Which free ones work with plain text only ? No java, javascript, active x,.....
"For £3.50/month or $6.50 US you get 1 GB of email space, virus scanning, and spam filtering. Calculating this amount into a yearly term, that's about $195 US per year; which is about 10 times what you would pay for a SpyMac Mail Pro account and six times as much as RunBox."
Duuuh $6.50x12=$78.
Or are they beta testing some calculators too there?
"You know you want me baby!" - Crow T Robot
From gmail help: Not at the moment, but Google believes in helping people access information whenever and however they want to do so. In the future you will be able to access Gmail messages from non-Gmail accounts for free or at a nominal fee.
It isn't really a "wait" since everybody and their grandma has Gmail at this point, but the thing is, Gmail is free and easy to use. I don't know why someone would pay money for a simple e-mail account.
...is a desktop client that will let me download my mail to my own computer (including all the neat features like search and conversations, of course!)
If it offered that, gmail would be about as good as today's obsolete e-mail system could get.
What it really needs to be even better than the current obsolete system can get, is public-key based encryption and authentication to fight spam and preserve a little privacy.
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
I have a gmail account. I can't login to it from my phone because of all the javascript. For a company trying to keep it simple with plain text emailing, they sure f* it up there. So that's one thing hotmail is better than they on. Some of my emails to my gmail account aren't recieved at all. No spam, nothing, just turned away. I'm trying to get a capture of that now.
-Promethyl
A lot of hosts come with webmail access included (Dreamhost gives everyone webmail.[domain].com, for example).
If you want to install your own, have a look at SquirrelMail, Open Webmail, or Horde IMP. I've only used SquirrelMail, and it's pretty good.
That said, you'll be hard pressed to find anything with an interface anywhere near as good as Gmail. Cheap hosting is also likely to be slower and less reliable.
Not only adverts but also relevant links that are not commercial at all. Both are clearly identified.
I guess that non-commercial links were created so you take the habit to look at the right of your screen and see the adverts because they really are non-intrusive.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
Yes, I remember when mac offered email for life -- free webspace and email, and I was so proud to have a .mac email account. I could show the world I was a proud mac user, and mac took care of their people.
Until they decided that the whole shebang was worth $99.
Sorry, what they offered wasn't worth it. I have my own website that worked much better than what mac gave me, and didnt need all those other bells and whistles. But they wouldn't give me the option to keep my email, not even for a smaller fee just to keep the name.
So the name I used for everything that mattered to me, was completely lost to me.
Now I just use my own domain, so if a company (like gmail) does something like Apple did, I can still use the email addresses I wanted.
Why do people want spam filters? This is slashdot, if you can download a firewall and virus scanner then you can sure as hell protect yourself against a little spam by not giving youe e-mail address out to people you don't trust.
In the last few years I've had 3 major e-mail accounts (G-mail, hotmail and yahoo!). Neither of them have had any spam I can't trace back to pissing off a little girl who signed me up to loads on my hotmail account (all of which I unsubscribed from and never got spam from again).
Remember spam doesn't just find your e-mail address, it must be given it some how.
I like muppets.
Hi guys,
p /isp s/>
I've been using both <A HREF="http://www.fastmail.fm/" title="fastmail.fm">Fastmail.fm</a> and <A HREF="http://www.spamgourmet.com/" title="spamgourmet.com">Spamgourmet</a> for over a year. Both services are free and very useful.
I've found the information provided at
<URL:http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/ima
provides balanced reviews of free and pay-mail providers. Fastmail, in my opinion, is the most reliable free provider I've ever used along with the best web interface I've ever found.
I've been using both Fastmail.fm and Spamgourmet for over a year. Both services are free and very useful.
Fastmail provides a ad-free web-based and free access to IMAP. Spamgourmet provides a free full-featured email alias system. Using both of those free services, I get essentially no spam. I haven't gotten a single message of spam to my fastmail address ever in fact. I've found the information provided at Infinite Ink provides balanced reviews of free and pay-mail providers. Fastmail, in my opinion, is the most reliable free provider I've ever used along with the best web interface I've ever found.
I've been using them for a couple months now, not sure if they're still taking new signups (got shut down awhile back when the link was passed around all over hell's half acre) but if they are it is an excellent service.
2GB email storage and a nice compose/address book/calender suite of options.
All your base are belong to Google.
So they are... er... ten times free ?
I agree, the ads are helpful.
The same exact thing happened to me. I'm involved in a wind turbine feasibility study, and further information was readily given on the right of our e-mails.
I found information I would have not found otherwise.
One of my favorite features about gmail is that you can set the reply-to address to be whatever you want. I've currently got mine set to gmail@mydomain.com, which forwards to gmail. However, if gmail ever dies, I'll just have it forward elsewhere.
The only problem I have with gmail is that I've kept all my email since about 1996, transferring it from email client to email client. I'd love to have it all on google, but I want some way of forwarding it transparently - for example, if the email was from bob in 2002, I want it to spoof the headers so it's still from bob in 2002. Any ideas? All my mail is currently in Thunderbird.
Powered by Web3.5 RC 2
Plenty has been written about the supposed privacy itrusions of gmail, it has since been cast aside when people realized those privacy fears were foolish at best.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but a large portion of the web seems to be plagued now by the connnecting to page2.googlesyndication.com evil. There must be a timer delay in there as well because it always takes around 10 seconds to finish. And tons of sites are using this google ad service of course...
What i don't understand is why everyone jumped on the "someone is reading my email" as in a person is reading the hundreds of email per hour to select the best matching ads for them, but machine parsing of emails is something that is being done since the beginning of email, at least for separating headers from text.
Spam filtering, virus-protection, use your own domain name in your from-address, different personalities, file storage, a very powerful and fast webinterface, accessible by IMAP, POP3 etc, mail forwarding, rules, fetch mail from other accounts - even from Hotmail, an addressbook with lists, etc.
The only downside is that features and quotas vary depending on whether you are a free user, a member, full member, etc. But hey, maybe that's why they're still around.
I would never have thought that I'd be willing to pay for an e-mail account. But Fastmail is so great that I pay my yearly fee with a big smile.
Gmail's interface could wash my panties and it doesn't matter because Google isn't available to me and millions of other potential users.
That's something that I just don't understand. Know how much spam I get in my gmail account? 0
I chalk it up to simply knowing what sites I can trust to handle my email properly (and this means reading their Terms of Service and Privacy Statement that they link you to). Yes, I use it quite a bit and it is my primary personal account. But, because of that extra step to read the TOS and PS, my gmail is in the clear.
Also, note that the amount of servers gmail can get around to blocking from your reports in comparison to the plethora of spamming servers (and zombie computers) that are being used everyday, is suprisingly miniscule. I expect a good half a year to a year before their database becomes something formidable. Just consider how long Hotmail's had their spam system, and the amount of time and users that have contributed data to blocking the masses of servers.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
More goes into an enterprise disk drive than the cost of the hardware. Do you want backups? Do you want fast access? Do you need a warranty? Do you want RAID?
On the other hand, one really slick move that Google could have made would be to index unique messages. If you and I both get the same message, it could be stored once on the server, rather than twice.
If you figure that 50% of email is unique, then that's at most 500mb of content you have to store for a given user. If you figure that 1% of email is shared among 1000 users (e.g. securityfocus mail), then that 1k email is going to *appear* to be 1mb spread out over 1000 users' inboxes.
Probably because it is blocked in many places. I know that our servers routinely block anything from this domain, because it is mostly spam.
Granted, only about 1 in 100 spam messages we've received claiming to be one of the rediffmail domains has actually come from a rediffmail server. But the messages that were really from rediffmail were directed at long-inactive email accounts, and several spam traps. We do not have a block against their servers, but the from address better be on one of our whitelists, or it will be "soft bounced" until we can find out from the recipient if it should be passed through.
This is all subject to change when/if they publish SPF records for their domain, but I certainly wouldn't use an rediffmail account for anything you want delivered...
About three days ago, Yahoo! just deleted all of my mail older than 6/22 (years worth of mail), which coincides with about when I noticed the 2 GB changeover (yes I have Yahoo! Mail Plus). I have gotten no word from them about how or why this happened, and no idea if it will come back.
Has anybody else had this happen to them? If not, BACK UP your email before they decide to burn you too.
Okay, not sure if tag is the correct word. So sue me.
:)
You know how you can request a read receipt?
And you can change the priority?
How about a "Strip my email address if this is forwarded by the original idiot I sent it to if they CC every person, company, and harvester in their address book" feature?
Or how about a "Modify this person's address book so that my address can only be BCC'd if the message is going to more than one person" feature?
I swear, I think my blood pressure spikes every time I get a "FW: FW: Fwd: FWD: FW: Fwd: This is SO cool" email that contains hundreds of addresses in both the TO field and the body itself. Because I just *know* that my address is being carried along on the tide of stupidity that it has been sucked into as well...
Aw hell, I'm just gonna stop using email. Makes me too angry.
I have used a Gmail account for about a month and find its navigation not very convenient.
I like having a delete button rather than searching for that drop down menu with "move to trash" towards the middle.
1GB of storage ok, but if I cant make folders whats the point? I dont want to use Starred. I rather have my own choice of folders than Gmail deciding which folders I should have.
Go here...
This guy has an account set up specifically test Gmail's spam detecting capabilities. Right now, Gmail isn't going so well - it's only identifying 41% of all spam. No doubt it'll get better though.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
I am using google since the last month and prior to it I was using fastmail.
I think google has a serious UI error in the fact that they do not have a "Save as draft" option. Many a times i type half of the mail and have to return to some other important job and I am stuck!!!
Grammar fag... nobody gives a fuck, it is the essence of the message that matters not semantics...
How Does Gmail Stack Up In The Webmail World?
In the webmail world?? Gmail kicks the ass of every local e-mail client I have ever used. Its searching, while not instant like Google web search, is hundreds of times faster than Thunderbird's. The way Gmail combines e-mails from a thread into a single page is awesome. It even has better e-mail address autocomplete than Thunderbird.
The shareholder is always right.
I thought before July, Microsoft/Hotmail was saying that they are going to upgrade everyone to 100MB after July 1rst or something of that nature. What ever happens to the 100MB mailbox?
I wasn't impressed with GMail's spam filtering. I've tried sending emails to myself from Hotmail and it looks like everything coming from hotmail is identified as spam. Heck, even I can write a spam filter that filters out everything from Hotmail. :)
I realize that they are comparing only 1GB services. But come on! They have to include the two most well known web mail services, Hotmail, and Yahoo mail.
My oldest sent email at yahoo is from august 2001, which makes sense for me
I agree that the archive search feature is terrific.
However, Google Groups is far inferior to any decent newsreader when it comes to quickly browsing articles. GG still can't deal with a lot of character encodings outside of pure ASCII. Its beta Google Groups 2 service creates postings with screwed-up headers.
Some of you may remember a few months ago I posted my gmail address on /. to test the spam filters. I have to say that aside from a handful of messages - usually only 1-2 a day - that I don't get spam in my inbox.
However, I get about 50 messages or so per day in my spam folder. And I've had 0 false positives since I started using gmail. None. Zero. Zilch.
Some 'helpful' /.ers signed me up to get tons of spam and I'm happy to report that the filter takes care of 96% of it.
I have ben using Gmail for a while and it is the best one I have used so far. I also use yahoo once in a while.
I have 6 Gmail invitations to give. Anyone interested, I might give you one...
I totally agree with this, and so far, has been the only [yet major] turnoff of the service.
Coming from Yahoo! Mail, I really liked how Yahoo would allow you to make e-mail groups [to send to multiple parties on a repeated basis] and all. I wanted to send an e-mail to the people on my gaming league [12-15 people] and would have to constantly copy and paste the e-mail addresses.
Google does let you just start typing into the To: line and bring up names, however. slick! just needs a good mass e-mail setup, which could be added fairly easily.
-Bullseye
If you have an extra invite, help me out.
gregcash39@hotmail.com
Thanks in advance,
Greg
As an average home user, I find it amazing that people NEED 1GB of e-mail storage.
Personally, I rarely find the need to e-mail a file that's more than 25Mb (and that's a big file). If it's any bigger then I just serve it.
I suppose it's based on how you want to get your info. If I have 1GB of e-mail space then people can just stuff things into it whether I like it or not. Then I have to filter and see whether or not this info is pertinent to me. Seems ineffective.
I guess I'm missing the point on how this space is being used and am hoping you guys can enlighten me on how one may utilize it.
I'll second SquirrelMail. It's fast, lean, and comes with plenty of options. SquirrelMail's interface is just like Google: spartan, intuitive, and pretty damn efficient.
Quoting runbox.com "Runbox is the Premium Email Service for personal and professional use. Subscriptions cost US$ 29.95 per year, with a 30-day free trial. "
gmail is free! (read: subscriptions cost US$ 0.0)
i live on an alternate planet
If you use POP3 to empty your Gmail mailbox, then you don't have your email on the server to use indexed search to find things. Your email is just stuck on one of your PCs: the one you happened to use to download a particular message. So using POP3 is completely incompatible with Gmail's way of handling email.
IMAP4 is much less incompatible with Gmail. It leaves the mail on the server. However, IMAP mailboxes are quite universally implemented as "folders", and this is quite incompatible with Gmail organization of email: Gmail keeps email in a single mailbox, and associates labels with them. Using IMAP with Gmail would mean that you have one huge folder in your email client that you sync with your one huge mailbox on Google's servers. Then you'd need the same kind of indexed search capabilities on the client that you have on the Gmail web interface. And you will not have your Gmail labels. So for IMAP to be useful with Gmail, there would have to be an extension to communicate the label information to the client, and there would need to be clients written to take advantage of this, and they should also have strong search capabilities.
I think that Gmail in itself is not as important as its future influence on the email world, and I am not refering to the current superficial influence of getting the competition to raise storage quotas. Gmail didn't advertise their service as "store a lot". They actually said that the 1GB quota is based on the assumption that email usage does not change in volume in the future, and that the 1GB quota is needed to handle a "never manage" mailbox that stores everything ever getting in and uses Google search to locate things, rather than manual mangement of email by the user.
The more inmportant influence of Gmail would be the incorporation of better search capabilities to email servers (IMAP servers) and to email client software, and alternatives to the folder paradigm, such as the labeling system.
In the help section there are links to report problems. It used to work in the past. I doesn't seem to work at the moment. I sent them a suggestion once that they should have an email address for reporting bugs. Partly because sometimes one needs to forward sapmle email to explain a bug. They are an email service, so they should have email as at least one option to communicate with them...
Governments don't need your permision to read your email. They just do! And they don't need Gmail for that! The NSA could probably sniff enough backbone to reconstruct most email from packets.
I don't keep much there, but everything I expected to see at my Yahoo account is still there as of two minutes ago. The oldest message is dated 21 Aug 2002.
However, if some accounts are on a different server, maybe that one got nuked/restored and the restore didn't include mail archives??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Gmail is not "free": it's ad-based!
Hotmail is not free. It's ad-based.
Yahoo! is not free. It's ad-based.
Etc.
FastMail.FM free email accounts are free at the present (no ads yet), and offer a lot more functionality to the technically inclined user, but storagewise it's much smaller right now (10MB used to be a lot, but now it's not a lot anymore...)
Also free, and even better. Randomized addresses that forward to a real address of your choosing, AND you can reply to the e-mail and it will go through Sneakemail and not reveal your real address.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
It's the most powerful e-mail service around. Paid user for a year so far. Nothing better.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some of you might be interested in discussing Gmail in a forum-style environment. There are also many other Gmail discussions taking place. Some headlines:
... and more. Go to Google Community's Gmail Forum to check it out.
o GMail - Improvements?
o Gmail's spam protection
o Deleting Gmail
o Gmail talks
o A GMessenger?
o Gmail Wishlist
o HTML formatted mail in Gmail
o Google Clamps Down On Gmail Accounts for Sex
Spymac claims to be the first 1gb email, even though google was the first. Quite strange actually.
I use FastMail with both SpamGourmet and SneakEmail.
SneakEmail and SpamGourmet complement each other very well. Spamgourmet is suited for producing aliases for one-time use. slashdot26jul04.15.hadaso@spamgourmet.com would forward me 15 messages before expiring (the date in the alias is just my way of perventing accidental reuse of aliases). Sneakemail works differently, giving addresses that cannot be tied to the user (randomlookingstring@sneakemailDOTcom) and organizing them in a foldet tree, allowing the user to add notes and apply different filtering options to each, including forwarding to different email addresses. Sneakemail is very useful for signing up to services one means to stay with (such as slashdot). The data stored in its folder structure is easily exportale is several methods (text, csv, download or email) and the interface is very lean and fast. Sneakemail also tags all email that passes through it with several custom headers making the further filtering of received email very reliable. (I haven't done it, but if one uses script based filtering like FastMail.FM offers, one can write a program to convert sneakemail's data downloadable as csv into a filtering script automatically).
Both sneakemail and Spamgourmet have "reverse forwarding", meaning they repace the "From address" so that replies go back through the forwarding service that rolls back the header information so the sender receiving the reply doesn't see my "real" email address (though I forward spamgourmet and sneakemail traffic to subdoamin addresses of a disposable alias in FastMail - PARANOIA!!!)
FastMail.FM actually offers enough disposable address functionality that forwarding services are not actually needed: the forwarding services add conveinence:
Spamgourmet allows the confidence that addresses will self-distruct and spam won't eat up FastMail bandwidth, and not necssiate manual filtering.
Sneakemail allows the convenience of keeping record of all my signups that I want to remember and a reliable way to filter them by sneakemail labels in X-sneakemail headers.
FastMail is giving the most customaizable email experience by providing an extremely customizable webmail interface with Things like Sieve filtering language for filtering email, access to spamassassin scores in the headers for using the Sieve script to completely control the spam filtering, and so much more (and IMAP access, of course, or POP access to all folders for those paying users who prefer POP)
Insightful! Insightful!
The only server that Google will block as a result of this will be his ISPs mailserver forwarding this stuff to Gmail. In general, forwarding e-mail from one account to another breaks a lot of anti-spam stuff (IP blocklists and header parsers for example). ...that solves his problem. Atleast the spam part of it.
M2 indexes your messages as they come in, and offers a very fast search field, which finds relevant messages as you type in your search, and looks through complete message bodies as it searches. very fast, since the messages are already indexed.
like evolution and kmail, M2 allows you to save and name searches, so you can click on your "due bills" folder to quickly see whichever current messages match the parameters you set up for that search.
M2 calls these "filters", evolution calls them "virtual folders", and i think kmail just calls them "saved searches" which is the most accurate name. actually, even mozilla/thunderbird allows you to create "views" that are based on saved search parameters.
M2 and evolution have the most flexible systems, and M2's search function is much faster than evolution's. evolution also doesn't do the search until you click "okay", while -- as i mentioned before -- M2 actually brings up the relevant messages as you enter your search terms, kind of like autocomplete in browser URL fields.
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
Hello all,
I'm just curious. Have you gals/guys ever experience missing mail in your Gmail account? I'm trying to figure out why I do not see an email with a 7mb attachment that I sent from work to my Gmail account. It's not even in the Spam or Trash folders.
My friend also sent me a couple files for her website using her Gmail account -- twice already. I do not see it in my Gmail inbox.
Hmmm...
Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya!
Death to the Americans in Iraq! Death to the AMERICAN TERRORISTS and their Zionist lapdogs in Palestine! Soon we will show them what happens to people who invade other people's lands!