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100 GB Email Account

soccrates writes "An article on Toms Hardware describes a Californian company giving out 100 GB email accounts to its customers. They even extended a challenge to get the first user to completely fill up the account, the winner getting a 1 terabyte account ! "

47 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdot Effect by typobox43 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think Slashdot could easily fill this mailbox. If everyone switches their email address to one of these mailboxes, the viruses and spambots would certainly do the work for us.

  2. But is it a . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Gmail account?

  3. Ugh by ShatteredDream · · Score: 4, Funny

    I can't even imagine how much time you'd have to spend finding unique porn mailing lists to get enough spam to fill one of these babies up. You'd see so much T&A that sex would be just... boring....

    1. Re:Ugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I can't even imagine how much time you'd have to spend finding unique porn mailing lists to get enough spam to fill one of these babies up. You'd see so much T&A that sex would be just... boring....

      Amateur.

    2. Re:Ugh by Kris_J · · Score: 4, Interesting
      "attachments in sizes up to 500 MByte."
      Anyone with an archive of, say, video files on around 24 DVDs (or a dozen DL DVDs) and access to a nice fast link could fill 100Gig in an afternoon.
    3. Re:Ugh by Progoth · · Score: 4, Interesting

      you mean something like

      for i in `seq 20`; do dd if=/dev/random of=file$i bs=5M count=100; done

      ?

    4. Re:Ugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Apparently you've never tried to cat /dev/random. That's going to take a looooooong time to fill all that space.

      Your better bet is to use if=/dev/zero (much higher throughput), or take a small random sample and repeat it.

    5. Re:Ugh by Rufus211 · · Score: 4, Informative

      or use /dev/urandom which is psudo-random numbers but will give you as many as you want.

    6. Re:Ugh by Pieroxy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      could fill 100Gig in an afternoon
      Sorry to spoil the fun, but you would sure need a heck of a lot of bandwidth to do that. Home DSL/Cable connections are de-facto excluded here.

    7. Re:Ugh by Dark+Lord+Seth · · Score: 3, Informative

      The site in your sig currently has nothing but a few dozen cheap referer-style links to pay sites.

      http://www.empornium.us/
      http://www.thehun.com/
      http://www.madthumbs.com/

  4. *Sigh* by Pantero+Blanco · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It appears that Google has started the email equivalent of a penis contest. First they came along with 1 GB...then MSN with 2 GB...and now this.

    1. Re:*Sigh* by typhoonius · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, they've forced other free e-mail providers to compete, and the consumers are benefiting.

      What a rip.

    2. Re:*Sigh* by Pantero+Blanco · · Score: 3, Insightful

      How are they benefiting, exactly? On a practical level, a terabyte-sized email account isn't really any better than a gigabyte-sized one. Anyone who needs an account that big probably runs their own.

      I'm not attacking Google for coming out with the initial 1 GB service; I'm attacking the idiots who feel they have to outdo it as an advertising gimmick.

    3. Re:*Sigh* by Red+Alastor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They are benifiting before they were getting 1 mb from hotmail and 4 from yahoo (6 for those who had an account since some time). Google with it's offer made all the other companies offer enough disk space for everyone.

      --
      Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
    4. Re:*Sigh* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What happens to all the consumers that use one of the gimmicky new webmail accounts that goes out of business or loses emails because they don't have backups?

    5. Re:*Sigh* by slyckshoes · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, but fortunately (or unfortunately?) penises aren't growing at the rate that mailboxes are. Size is good up to a point, but a 1Tb penis would make it hard to walk. It would have to be on a dedicated server, so to speak.

    6. Re:*Sigh* by suckmysav · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You would have to be a complete knob to keep anything important in a free webmail account.

      --
      "You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
    7. Re:*Sigh* by slarshdot · · Score: 5, Funny

      soon I will be releasing my email service which will allow u to store 1 million bytes!!

      muwhaha!!

      --

      I'm not out of order! You're out of order! The whole freaking system's out of order!
    8. Re:*Sigh* by Council · · Score: 5, Funny

      Clearly, the solution is 1TB of email explaining how to make our penises grow fast enough to keep up.

      --
      xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
    9. Re:*Sigh* by kyrre · · Score: 4, Informative

      Heh. Even .Mac upped their accounts from 15mb to 250mb. (shared with iDisk). Thanks a bunch Google.

    10. Re:*Sigh* by Dusabre · · Score: 4, Funny

      It would also need a dedicated client with a modified female port the size of a SUV. Which brings to mind a blue whale which I don't find appealing.

    11. Re:*Sigh* by dcw3 · · Score: 4, Funny

      soon I will be releasing my email service which will allow u to store 1 million bytes!!

      Can't imagine why anyone would need more than 640k!

      --
      Just another day in Paradise
  5. To win 1TB by erick99 · · Score: 5, Funny

    You are allowed 500MB attachments so I assume you could upload 200 or so of them sequentially until you have filled up 100GB and then you win the 1TB mailbox. And then.... Profit?

    --
    http://www.busyweather.com/
    1. Re:To win 1TB by OverlordQ · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes but how many services allow you to *send* 500MB attachments (excluding running your own mailserver). Then again you need to upload *100GB* which would still take alot of time none-the-less. Either way 100GB/1TB at that point everything is just gravy.

      --
      Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  6. Rediculous by FiberOpPraise · · Score: 3, Funny

    Okay, 1GB was fine, a reasonable limit that was more of a marketing ploy than a palpable number for the average user. Soon, 2GB and 5GB email accounts were offered in response to Gmails initial 1GB. This was really pushing the limit of being reasonable. 100GB totally crosses the line. When the advertised size of email accounts becomes larger than most people's hard drives, there is a problem. This is getting absurd. Please stop.

  7. Ugh-Fragile-this ego side down. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "You'd see so much T&A that sex would be just... boring...."

    Well I guess we know were your moniker came from.

  8. Re: by Fluid-X · · Score: 5, Funny

    With 100 Gb, they can hardcode the "You are using 0% of your mailbox" message.

  9. HORRIBLE Website by Grey+Ninja · · Score: 5, Informative

    For the people too lazy to read the article, the link is here.. But the site's design is just the most horrible thing I've ever seen, and the email capacity seems to be only 10GB.

    I would still love to see these idiots slashdotted. Go get em boys.

  10. Too Easy by Nova+Express · · Score: 5, Funny
    This is too easy to win, assuming you have broadband.

    Step 1: Rip all three Star Wars and the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings Movies (yeah yeah, the third isn't out yet) to your HD.

    Step 2: Mail copies to 25 of your friends with GMail accounts as attachments.

    Step 3: Have your friends change each of the file names and mail them back.

    Bingo! Instant excession of 100 GB.

    Alternately, you could just post your e-mail address here and say something like "You wussy, panty-wasted Linux hackers couldn't spam-bomb my account even if you wanted to! Your hacking skills are pathetic and lame! Besides, everyone knows that REAL MEN use Windows!"

    I figured that's good for getting mailed 500 full distros within an hour. That should do the trick. ;-)

    --
    Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)

    http://www.lawrenceperson.com/

  11. What they didn't tell you is... by kylemonger · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... their mail server is behind a 2400 baud modem.

  12. A real use for this stuff by Deep+Fried+Geekboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I dunno about anyone else but I USE this stuff. I gave all my gmail invites to myself so I now have many Gmail accounts, which are all used for the same thing ... offsite backup.

    The 100 G account would be great for backing up digital images, something that is extremely hard to do otherwise (bit rot on CDs, DVDs and even naked hard drives, which is what I use now). Yeah, I take a lot of pictures.

    I just got notified that because I purchased extra .mac storage, mine has been upped to 1.2 Gb. Hooray!

    You cannot have too many backup strategies. I use .mac for all keychains (containing serial numbers, passwords and private banking details), plus current 'work' folder... then I have a Retrospect backup to a remote FTP server for my boot drive, plus a nightly mirror onto a second hard drive. You CANNOT have too much of this stuff.

    The day I walked into my office and my HD was dead, I saved the entire accumulated cost of all this by being able to boot up from the second drive within seconds and carry on working.

    --

    I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.

  13. 36 million subscribers * 100Gb = ???? by seanvaandering · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In order to attract interest, the company launched a 3-Gigabyte free email service a little over a month ago and since then has signed up more than 36 million users...

    Another alternative is, of course, to post it on Slashdot. But the question that lingers, is how in the hell did a little unknown magazine end up signing up 36 million people?

    Now I'm not a biker myself, but you'd think with that many e-mail addresses from this company I'd of seen it once or twice working in tech support...

  14. Re:Slashdot Network - p2p by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Imagine All the slashdot guys sharing all their interesting stuff!This email account could very well serve that purpose

    Yeah but what would the rest of the 100 gigs be used for?

  15. Already unlimited by suso · · Score: 4, Interesting

    suso.org has already been doing this for 7 years for over 80 local customers. I basically don't have quota support in the kernel. So its not just for email. My philosophy is that if you don't give people a limit, they won't try to reach it. And guess what? It works. People don't abuse the service. They use it normally. A couple of users are exceptions and have over 1GB worth of email that has amassed over the past several years.

    I'm getting ready to install a server with 200GB of home space, so thus its like I offer 200GB email accounts. Whenever I get close to running out of space, I upgrade.

  16. 100gb mail? just give me the stinkin drive! by tonyz2k · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Where are they getting all this cheap storage? Instead of giving me a 100GB mailbox (with annoying blinking GIF ads), how about they just send me a 100GB hard drive (and a bunch of regular snail-mail junkmail that i can just throw away)?

    Yes, chide me, fellow slashdotters.. for I did not know that they are relying on sparse mailboxes.

    This company would terminate the service (or file for Chapter 11) long before the millionth user took their first gig.

    --
    click here to incinerate homeless people
  17. 1 TB free service by microsopht · · Score: 3, Insightful

    When 10 GB email account is considered unfillable, so much that the owner is willing to give 1 server of 1 TB for the winner, the even better idea - to that owner and my fellow slashdotters ( if u wanna st art up a email service BTW },
    would be to offer 1 TB space for all- that would really be unprecedented and gain the maximum publicity and no one in this world would probably use more than a few GB - and the owner wouldnt have to worry about providing 1 Tb since as and when a user signs up , 1 Tb space doesnt need to be allocated and can be scaled up as and when required.

  18. Re:Unlimited! by JUSTONEMORELATTE · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Now I'm just waiting for the next company to offer true unlimited servce

    Uhh... You've come to the right place
    Of course, OSDN isn't giving them away, but they are also giving add-free access for $14/year.


    --
    Free gmail invites

  19. hriders.com by pmsyyz · · Score: 3, Funny

    Worst website EVAR.

    --
    Phillip
  20. Re:Good to know by Hadlock · · Score: 3, Interesting

    pic

    --
    moox. for a new generation.
  21. Not so wierd by photon317 · · Score: 4, Interesting


    I think Google (or anyone) shouldn't have a problem just giving people "unlimited" email space (and then whacking abuser accounts who mount gmail-based filesystems to store terabytes of pr0n...). For legitimate users of the system:

    1) It's text, compress it, save space.

    2) If you have a large user base, chances are there are many duplicate emails floating around the system. Hash everyone's email body-content globally. Then when that stupid email gets forwarded to 6000 of your customers, it only gets stored once for each unique form it arrives in. Ditto for mailing list emails.

    3) Make sure that your spam filter is really good, and especially that it never falses tosses legit emails, so that people trust it. Anything that's in the spam box gets autokilled in a week.

    4) Limit attachments to reasonable sizes. You're trying to stop people from email-attaching a 700MB uncompressed cd rip, or whatever. Gmail currently limits the entire message, all attachments included, to 10MB in size. They do other stupid things too though, like not letting you send zipfiles... A better system that leaves more freedom for the user might be to say that all attachment types are legal, but if a message's total length exceeds 10MB, then attachments in it will be "flagged for deletion", starting with the largest attachment in the message first, until the number is under 10MB. These larger "flagged for deletion" attachments get forceably deleted from your email archives after 24 hours, or 3 days, or something of that nature. In this way you can still transport large files via email, you just can't archive them there.

    Once those simple measures are in place, you can largely rely on statistics and reasonability. If a reasonably average webmail user actually received and archived over a gig of mail in a year under such a system I'd be impressed.

    --
    11*43+456^2
  22. Somewhere in Redmond today... by g3000 · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...an unnamed software company executive was overheard saying "1 GB ought to be enough for anyone." (A subsqeunt discussion was spawned discussing whether or not he actually said it.)

  23. What about the GUI? by Wizarth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sure, every-one signed up with GMail for the 1GB of Mail. But every-one I know who's used it, sticks with it for the GUI. It's so fast and easy to use. Thats the real power of GMail.

  24. mp3 storage by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 4, Interesting
    email each mp3 file to yourself as a separate email. In the subject line label it artist / title / XX song title.

    This way, where ever you go, your tunage is on tap. It might takea while to DL, but so what! I know if my house was ravaged by some Tornado or Hurricane, and all my CDs were blown to flinders or washed out to sea, I would definitely appreciate the back up...

    RS

    --
    Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
  25. Uhh.. Duh? by piecewise · · Score: 4, Funny

    Questioning the use of a 100GB email space?

    To backup my 100 gmail accounts, DUH.

    --
    The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
  26. Re:Spam Harvesting by BlackHawk-666 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not so. Feed this spam harvest into the bayes classifier for SpamAssassin or another filter system and train it to recognise that as all spam. This will seriously increase the quality of it's spam checking in future. I fed about 12,000 into mine, the result of about five months worth of harvesting.

    --
    All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
  27. Re:Spam Harvesting by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The problem is, one persons spam is another persons ham.

    "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"

    It all depends on perspective.

    Of course, there are common things that neither party wants, but giving a one size fits all filter for all but the most obvious will cause false positives.

    Don't you think the big mail companies would have sorted it out by now if they could? They have the largest harvest of spam around.

    [I was going to stop here, below are just random ramblings]

    Having said all that, I believe every person should be allocated a bloom filter with their mail classification preferences. This filter is used against the results of all the identification rules.

    All the mail companies should accept this token and display mail which passes. Currently, I have 4 mail providers who deal with spam differently, I would like to setup one set of rules.
    The good thing about using a bloom is that preferences can be merged increasing the effectiveness, for instance, a virus filter, a fakes filter, a childsafe filter, or an office filter, developers filter etc.

    Of course, this way, we don't change the front end mailing system itself, and people who don't use this token are free to handle the mail however they like.

    I'll stop wafflin now.

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
  28. Re:Spam Harvesting by MagicM · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Of course, there are common things that neither party wants

    Spam isn't about what someone wants or doesn't want. It's about what's unsolicited. Yeah some people like looking at the pictures in their porn spam, but that doesn't make it any less spam.