The Webmail Wars

latif writes "Much of the excitement around Gmail has centered around its innovative interface, but a pretty interface is hardly Gmail's biggest contribution. Gmail's real contribution to webmail is its innovative business model. The new business model is what's allowing Gmail to offer 1 GB storage quotas, and still have an expectation of making money. Of course, Microsoft and Yahoo have noticed this too, and one can reasonably expect them to move their webmail services to the new model. An interesting battle is shaping up between the big three webmail providers, and my article "The Webmail Wars" analyzes some possible scenarios and outcomes."

Comments

Battles

[AlexTheBeast]

As I have previously mentioned on tech-recipes, I honestly don't see how there is a real war between these webmail services.

Gmail kills them all in spam blocking and space...

Plus, now... they have free pop as well.

The privacy issue is the only thing that has been preventing my complete switch over.

Re:Battles

[cervo]

nevertheless hotmail and yahoo have all the accounts. Can they keep their giant market share or will gmail gobble it all up? Also with the mass storage the bigger user bases cost more of a fortune to maintain while google is smaller so its initial investment is smaller. Anwyay the targeted search idea that gmail uses is brilliant. Too bad they had to go and try to file patents on it.

Re:Battles

[Nuskrad]

The privacy issue is the only thing that has been preventing my complete switch over.

Really, there *is* no privacy issue - I assume your talking about the scanning of emails for targeted advertisment. It doesn't breach your privacy any more than a spam filter or antivirus software, and personally, I rather the adverts be relevant (and discrete) as in Gmail that annoying flashy banner ads in some services.

As I side issue, I use GmailFS to provide an extra, remote drive on my computer - will Google be stamping down on this, do you think?

Re:Battles

[Chess_the_cat]

I've had Gmail since June and it's far from perfect. The Gmail search function needs a lot of work. Sometimes even searching by recipient won't find particular emails in the Sent folder.

For all the talk about labels vs. folders, I find labels are counter-intuitive. Here in my filing cabinet I sort documents into folders; I don't stick 3 or 4 different labels on documents and throw them all into the same drawer. It's crazy!

There are missing options like how about being able to permanently turn on Display External Images or turn off Auto Add to Contacts? Yeah, yeah it's Beta but that's actually my point. It's a little early to declare a Beta product the winner. How about we wait until Gmail allows signups before handing them the trophy? Because after all is said and done it isn't any better than Yahoo! mail except for the storage capacity.

Re:Battles

[Examancer2]

Unfortunately a products success does not rest solely on the products ability to perform, especially in the IT industry. Windows and IE are not the most used because they are better than the competition. The sucess of webmail services from Yahoo and Microsoft have historically been from their placement in a larger portal system that has nearly endless features and content to attract users. Google does not (yet?) offer instant messaging, gaming, sydicated content (Google News generates no revenue and is aggregation not syndication), career tools, finance tools, caladers, or any of the other thousands of little features Yahoo and MSN offer under a single brand. I believe that they are fighting for different users. Very few Yahoo and Hotmail users will switch over to Gmail, especially since they both have SOME spam blocking and lots more space than before. For most users, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail will continue to be enough for existing users of MSN and Yahoo portals. For those who are in the future attracted to the MSN or Yahoo services, they will continue to sign up for Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail accounts. But, that doesn't mean Gmail won't take off... it just won't take off by taking mass numbers of users away from Yahoo and MSN.

Re:Battles

[LiquidCoooled]

I've actually grown to like the gmail advertising model.
Half the links they give are adverts, but the lower half are related links. The same links you get if you search for the same keywords.
99% of the time, I find the automatic matches listed there mean I don't have to do a seperate websearch to find out more info.
Its amazing how much more interest you can have in a subject if you can find out extra information about it :)
I can't be the only person in the world who feels that they are a good thing.

Re:Battles

[Chess_the_cat]

Oh, and one other thing. Conversations are not a good way to organize e-mail. If you're looking for an e-mail you must know which conversation it was in. It's difficult if you have a few conversations with the same person. If you don't know which conversation it was in you must check each, expand it so you can see each e-mail and manually read through them. Sure the search feature might find it but 1. It only finds the conversation, not the e-mail so you'd still end up reading the entire thread and 2. What search terms would you use to find an e-mail like the following:

Jim, Meet me at 6pm Tuesday.
Later.

When it's the time and date you want to find out.

Re:Battles

[deuce868]

I look at the beta title a lot like Firefox and Tunderbird. They are both functional programs, but they don't include all of the features and testing required for a full 1.0 release. I used both of them through their "beta" phase and I think gmail is the same sort of thing.

Re:Battles

[BetterThanCaesar]

I don't stick 3 or 4 different labels on documents and throw them all into the same drawer.

That's like saying you don't use email because you wouldn't blockquote when answering real letters. Of course you don't stick labels to real-life files. Do you know why? Because your filing cabinet wouldn't sort them by these labels. The computer (i.e. Google), however, can and will.

Re:Battles

[goynang]

For all the talk about labels vs. folders, I find labels are counter-intuitive. Here in my filing cabinet I sort documents into folders; I don't stick 3 or 4 different labels on documents and throw them all into the same drawer. It's crazy!

You're so wrong it hurts me!

Computer interfaces don't have to be exact mimics of the real world. They can improve on it too sometimes! If your filing cabinet could hand back the right documents when you just ask for some specific label then you probably would just throw them in the same drawer. Just because your real world filing cabinet can't do this doesn't mean an on-line version of a filing cabinet should have the same limitation.

Being limited to only one 'home' for stuff that could be categorised into many is what's crazy.

Re:Battles

[jafiwam]

Experts-exchange is a slimy outfit anyway.

They repost usenet articles as being written as their "experts" without mentioning it's Usenet.

Their users spam usenet with useless crap that is the modern version of the AOL'ers first visits there. (Where the [AOL] Me too![/AOL] thing came from.)

I can imagine the mail admins at Yahoo.com got tired of them for other reasons.

If I had my way, EE would get chased off the net with extreme predjudice. You should stop using them rather than stop using Yahoo.

Re:Battles

[cmacb]

"For all the talk about labels vs. folders, I find labels are counter-intuitive. Here in my filing cabinet I sort documents into folders; I don't stick 3 or 4 different labels on documents and throw them all into the same drawer. It's crazy!"

So, how often do you go to the Xerox machine, make three copies of the original document and file the four copies in four different places? How do you keep track of the fact that you have done this? Do you write on each copy a list of all the other places it's been filed? Do you ever have to make a note on one of these documents and then have to go locate the copies to make the same note? You must have lots of filing cabinets.

The nice thing about labels is that there is only one copy of each document. Evolution handles this also with what I think they call "Virtual Folders". In the real world, of course, you must rely on the Xerox machine and whatever complex scheme you come up with to maintain these copies of things and keep them in synch. This is one of the many things from the real world that need not, and should not be copied to the virtual world. It takes some getting used to, but labels (virtual folders or whatever you want to call them) is a better system. Trust me.

Of course, for people like you who are already USED to some very specific filing system Google could have taken a slightly different approach. I would have (and have suggested) that they allow for "move" and "copy" operations between the labeled groupings. So rather than apply label "friends" to a new message and then Archive it (to remove it from my Inbox), simply "move"ing it to "Friends" would have the same effect. I could also "move" a message from one label category to another in order to remove the old label and attach the new, or "Copy" from one label grouping to another in order to have both labels. The advantage of this paradigm is that it saves a step in most cases. It would also satisfy the needs of some people for the paradigm they are used to. The only "odd" thing about my way of doing it would be the need to warn a user if they were about to delete the last "copy" of a message. Deleting all but the last "copy" of a message would simply be removing extra labels from it, deleting the last copy would be marking it for trash. At no time would there actually be more than one copy of the file though.

I suspect some future versions of file systems will take this approach too, using "links" to store the apparent copies without the user having to do that explicitly. Some extra tools would be required to allow for backups (when you actually want a copy) or clean-ups when you actually want to delete files. File systems that implemented this at a low enough level would save a lot of fragmentation as well, since a lot of files that are opened for update end up never actually getting updated.

Re:Battles

[cmacb]

"How long ago did they promise 250 MB for each account? And I'm still running on 2 MB? The new credit cards they hand out have almost as much memory as a Hotmail account, which is just sad. But hey, we all knew it was a Microsoft marketing stunt."

I agree that it's both a joke and a stunt :) But I DID finally get my 250meg a few days ago. Something like six months after they convinced all the technical journals to make the claim for them. I'm very disappointed (but not surprised) that so few of the professional publications called them out on this. The Hotmail interface sucks. Yahoo is much better, and Gmail is better still. Ditto for performance.

I think the biggest impact of Google to both Yahoo and Hotmail is that both services are now having to give away for free service levels that they were previously charging for. My guess is that sign-ups for these extended services are way down, and those who are signing up are doing so because they actually intend to make use of all that extra storage (2-gig for Yahoo for example) and are going to want to be on the phone yelling at someone anytime it's not available. In other words those that do pay for these formerly free services are going to be the squeaky wheel types that will eat up all your proffit margin.

It hasn't been that long (1999 or so) since several companies were offering free online disk storage, online word processing and several other services. The dot-com-bust made them all dry up real fast. I'm glad to see the moneyed players start testing these waters again though since I think the future of computing (especially for the home user) is going to be free or near-free online services rather than having to have an ad-hoc systems administrator in every household in the land. The Microsoft "everything on your desktop" model was moronic from the get-go and it took a "genius" like Bill Gates to actually profit so well from such a bad idea. Now if we could get back to true technology, which was already in progress before the Microsoft interruption.

Re:Battles

[douthat]

The grand-parent wasn't talking about file-system links like the ones that have existed for decades, he's talking about copy-on-write.

Example:
If I were to run the following commands on a *nix system today, here's what would happen:

cp ~/foo.txt ~/bar.txt
the above line would copy the contents of file to another area on the hard disk and insert a record into the file tables. If this is a 10GB file, then your hard drive just lost 10GB of free space.

What the grand-parent was suggesting was, instead of copying the contents of the file at the time the command ran, copy the contents only when the new (bar.txt) is modified.

Example:
cp ~/foo.txt ~/bar.txt
The above command would increase the resource count of the contents of foo.txt and NOT copy the contents to bar.txt. It would also set some "copy-on-write" bit to on for bar.txt

echo "some more text " >> ~/bar.txt
only at this at this point would the contents of foo.txt be copied to bar.txt

Now, lets pretend we didn't run the above echo command.
echo "some more text" >> ~/foo.txt
since foo.txt holds the same content as bar.txt, the contents will now be copied to keep the contents of the two files distinct.

The net effect of all of this is that the system doesn't have to do I/O expensive operations when they're not necessary, and keeps disk utilization low.

If I were to copy a 10GB file 100 times over my hard drive, the file system would still note the same amount of free space. The free space amount would only be updated whenever one of the 100 copies is updated.

So if I wanted to "backup" a huge directory so I can make some changes without the risk of breaking the original, the copy operation happens instantaneously, and the "real" copy operation only has to occur when one of the files is modified.

I realize I have a tendency to ramble, so here is the wikipedia article on the subject.

Re:Battles

[StikyPad]

Conversations are not a good way to organize e-mail.

That's why labels + filters = ... golders? Anyway, you can automatically have labels applied to all e-mail from yourfriend@someisp.com, which essentially puts them in folders. If your friend has multiple e-mail addresses, you can still create multiple filters to apply the same label to all of them. Presuming you know who that your e-mail is from Jim, you just find the relevant conversation (most likely within the past week), and scan through it for the little blurb. If your e-mail was just 1 line, you wouldn't really have to read all the big e-mails in the conversation to find the small one. In fact, if it was just one line, you'd see it in the preview without even expanding the message panes.

Hotmail was good...

[dosius]

Back in the days when HoTMaiL was the only webmail, it was good... Then MS bought them out and they turned to shit.

My webhost gives me e-mail addresses. I just use them. I do have a gmail addy and it's nice. XD;

Moll.

Webmail vs "regular" mail

[chia_monkey]

I still find webmail an interesting phenomenon. I know there are millions of users out there. And I myself find it quite handy when I'm traveling. Being able to hop on any computer, open up a browser, and check my mail is good. But...I still don't use it that much. I have a Yahoo account (I think), I may have done a Hotmail account way back in the day, and I have my Gmail account. But even with those, I use my other accounts MUCH more. I liken it to AOL...I don't fully understand why someone would use AOL when they can get a much less intrusive and cluttered way to get to the Internet, yet they have millions of users. Same goes with my thoughts on webmail...why would someone pay for Internet service and then opt to use Hotmail?

The only answers I can think of is to have a "safe" spot for addresses where you may end up getting a lot of spam. Or "secret" accounts. Or multiple accounts. And that's why I find these webmail wars fascinating...wars are being fought over this with the major players in the industry over something so seemingly unimportant (as say compared to OS wars, browser wars, etc)

Re:Webmail vs "regular" mail

[WarwickRyan]

Why do I use webmail:

a) I can access it anywhere.
b) It's free.
c) It doesn't change when I change ISP.
d) It's backed-up properly by a commercial vendor, which is better than I can offer myself.
e) Spam filtering is generally great.
f) POP3 boxes are usually 30mb, which will fill in a week. Gmail is 1gig, that'll fill in a year.

Personally, I use addresses at my own domain, and just foward the whole lot to gmail. Works a treat, and if gmail fails I'll just forward to my POP3 box again..

Not likely

[The Cisco Kid]

All of this suggests that in the coming months, Microsoft and Yahoo will roll-out much improved webmail user-interfaces, and complement their webmail services with automated email scanning systems for the purpose of ad placement. Such systems will lead to some controversy, as some people are worried about the privacy implications of automated email scanning. Fortunately, Google supporters have made a lot of effort to appease Gmail privacy concerns, and the road is mostly clear for Microsoft and Yahoo.

The primary reason google 'scanning my email' doesnt concern me is that google has a reputation for being honest. That google has attained that reputation gains absolutely nothing for Yahoo (spammer, spam supporter) or MS (convicted monopolist)

I trust google several orders of magnitude further than I would trust Yahoo or MS. I would *never* use a hotmail or yahoomail account for anything other than a throwaway - yet I have in fact started using a gmail account for normal email.

Anyone who lists an @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com email address anywhere even remotely business-related is showing that they are 'part of the consumer herd' - an @gmail.com address, on the other hand, suggests an air of elitism.

If they follow this model, Im sure Yahoo and MS's ads will be flash and javascript popup ridden - Gmails ads are much less intrusive.

Google knew exactly what they are doing - they arent looking for mass market share of morons.

Re:Not likely

[AlexTheBeast]

Anyone who lists an @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com email address anywhere even remotely business-related is showing that they are 'part of the consumer herd' - an @gmail.com address, on the other hand, suggests an air of elitism.

I may be a gmail fanboy, but give me a break. If you list your email address domain as any webmail provider, you are going to lose my business. Sure, you can use gmail for your email address, but buy a domain and forward the email. Crap, it's only a few bucks a year.

Remember also that gmail has not promised anybody that they can keep their email accounts. If I am depending on somebody, I don't want to see some gmail account listed.

That being said, gmail probably has a better chance of being up than most ISPs... but still... having a gmail account for business purposes looks cheap and nonprofessional.

Gmail does not "suggest an air of elitism." It suggests that one is too cheap to have their own email service.

Re:Not likely

[Malfourmed]

an @gmail.com address, on the other hand, suggests an air of elitism

Not for long.

Re:Not likely

[Jorrit]

Gmail does not "suggest an air of elitism." It suggests that one is too cheap to have their own email service.

I think you are way too elitist (is that right english? I'm not a native english speaker) if you require people to have their own email service. What's the point in that exactly? I'm certainly not willing to pay for such a thing.

Greetings,

Re:Not likely

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that the parent is talking about business. Nobody cares if your personal email address is hotmail, yahoo, or whatever.

Doing business with a @hotmail or @gmail email address would make me feel uneasy.

Re:Not likely

[GeorgeH]

"The primary reason google 'scanning my email' doesnt concern me is that google has a reputation for being honest."

That reputation may not be well earned, somoene reported that his Gmail account was cancelled because he had warez in it. While copyright infringement is illegal, I don't want any of my service providers scanning stuff for illegal activity without a good reason.

Just found out one reason gmail is better

[antifoidulus]

gmail supporst non-western characters I just found out. Yahoo does not(despite the fact that yahoo.co.jp for example does). Something to think about in an increasingly interconnected world.

Text vs. Graphic

[pedestrian crossing]

For me, the big difference is the use of text for the ads. Gmail advertising is not in your face. Hotmail advertising is obnoxious. Will MS and Yahoo get it? Can they sell toned-down ads to their customers (advertisers)?

Its also the only service that can logically work

[auzy]

There are many other factors too..

Due to the nature of hotmail and yahoo, and the lack of searching, even deleting 50 emails is difficult. Even worse, the spam detection on hotmail is very unreliable (about 50-75% accurate), meaning its very difficult to manage emails.

The 200megs storage limit on hotmail can hold about 4000 emails, and since its difficult to handle even 50, I'd hate to leave my inbox unattended for a week.

Overall, the reason gmail is succeeding isn't just the business plan, but the features make it more usable then hotmail or yahoo. In my opinion though, yahoo is still doing a much better job then hotmail, with its features.

Having a hotmail account has no real benefits (it has the smaller space, you can get a passport without a hotmail account, they tend to get very spammy, and theres no "hotmail groups" which needs a hotmail account to sign up) and because of all the email addresses, its very hard to end up with a remotely decent email on it. Gmail has started to suffer the same problem, but I severely doubt it will ever suffer it as bad as hotmail or yahoo (yahoo for instance has different domains such as auzy@yahoo.com will accept the same emails as auzy@yahoo.co.uk, but someone might not realise it and sign up for both with different ID's, halving the total domains).

Its not just about advertising, its about the usage. Everyone has a hotmail account they leave around for junk.. Which means that they are just gathering emails at the moment costing Microsoft in Bandwidth costs.

nope

[excaliber19]

This is frankly retarded.

Sure, email will change. It might not even be recognizable as email anymore. But there is still a need on the internet for some type of "mail" system, where both parties don't have to be online. Furthermore, there is still a need to contact people you might not know.

For instance, I had to recently contact a prof. at a university. He had no idea who I was, as we had never met or exchanged mail. Sad day for me if the new system only accepts mail from known people.

Think a little.

Re:Would like to go to gmails party....

[bhtooefr]

Join the gmail-invite-board on Google Groups 2 (groups-beta.google.com). It's something I set up when I was looking for invites. Basically, you post that you need invites or that you have them, and people give you invites or give their e-mail addresses. It's that simple.

Also, look around Slashdot, and copy the URLs from those GMail Invite Trolls (the ones that LINK to Last Measure, but have five invite URLs in their link text). These might be OK, but keep in mind, the troll will have your new e-mail address.

I love how everything is a "business model"...

[__aavljf5849]

So, Google is using their software to match search keywords to ads on email to, and suddenly that's a "business model"? No of course not, it's a way to get more klick-throughs. It is an *improvement*. Nobody claimes a new "business model" because they have built a better mousetrap.

A business model is rather from where you get revenues, or how you are organised. I get my money from consulting, and the software I'm building is free. Microsoft charges for their software. THAT is different business models.

For all of you waiting for invites...

[anakin357]

Sign up here: http://isnoop.net/gmailomatic.php

I know it works, as I just sent 3 invites to their email address, and within 10 minutes someone had already activated the first one. This is a really cool service, and since it's automated, it's easy.

Using gmail.. Don't like it

[freelunch]

I remain disappointed with gmail.

It still won't open messages in a new window. Is it so unnatural to want to view the message index in one window and open the messages in new windows while retaining my view of the index? I mean, some of us can chew gum and walk at the same time.

On Yahoo, I can do this simply by middle clicking links. Not on gmail. Javascript and frames hell prevent it. As if that makes it "okay".

I still can't find an option to get a traditional chronological view of my inbox. Gmail only seems to provide their threaded view. Many times, that view is not optimal.

No folders. They do not support folders. Sure, they support filters. But I can't use a filter to put mail from a mailing list into a folder. This is good how? What alternative to folders are they providing?

No option to show full headers by default.

5% of the time, gmail says it is unavail when I try and login. A retry gets me in.

It is great as an inbox for registering accounts, etc. But aside for the benefit of the 1GB causing everyone else to raise their quotas, it ain't that great.

Re:Using gmail.. Don't like it

[anakin357]

To get "folder-like" behavior, and this is kinda a hack, label the email conversation, then archive the email. Then click the link on the left and there you go, folders... kinda.

Re:Using gmail.. Don't like it

[Vicsun]

To get "folder-like" behavior, and this is kinda a hack, label the email conversation, then archive the email. Then click the link on the left and there you go, folders... kinda.

It's not a hack at all; use one label per e-mail and you get folders. In every single respect. The only difference between labels and folders is that labels allow you to have the same e-mail in more than one 'folder'. If you don't use that functions the label act exactly as folders. I can't believe people are complaining labels...

Imagine the following RL situation. You have the following cabinets. Work, Family, Important, and Unimportant. Now if you get an x-mas card from work you can file it either under work or under unimportant. After 10 years, when you want to read your card again for reminiscing purposes, you won't know in which cabinet it is.
With magical cabinets (which play the role of lables) you can put that card in both cabinets, so it will be there irrelevantly of which cabinet you search. If you decide not to use your cabinets' magical functions and still only put the post card in a single cabinet, the cabinets will act as perfectly ordinary cabinets.

Re:Using gmail.. Don't like it

[tji]

> No folders. They do not support folders. Sure, they support filters. But I can't use a filter to put mail from a mailing list into a folder. This is good how? What alternative to folders are they providing?

Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't you answer your own question? To get what is effectively a "Folder", use a filter to label the message..

Filter: If subject contains *cocoa-dev*, apply label CocoaML, and skip the Inbox.

It then is not shown in your inbox, but shows up as a new message in the CocoaML label (i.e. the link on the left side shows the number of new messages in parentheses).

This is the same as folders. The only distinction is the way that it is stored on disk, which is irrelevant to the users, since we cannot see/access the storage directly.

This also has the major benefit of allowing a single message to be in multiple Folders/Labels.. So, an e-mail from my sister with pictures of her new puppy can bin in both my Family and Pictures "folders".

Yahoo wins

[bigtallmofo]

Whenever I sign up a non-technical user for a web mail account (so I don't have re-setup Outlook and hear how they lost all their email everytime their hard drive crashes), I always sign them up for a Yahoo account. Hotmail just plain sucks because they open links in email in a frame. Come on now - they've had that "feature" in there for years. When are they going to get rid of it? I thought when MS modified IE so that it didn't accept cookies in a frame they would HAVE to do it but apparently they didn't agree with me. As a result, clicking on links contained within a Hotmail message is useless.

On the other hand, GMail is really nice. Part of the UI though I'm still up in the air as to whether it's more difficult for me to use because I'm not used to it or because it's just plain not better. For instance, I sent an email to approximately 40 people from my Gmail account and received a single response from just about all of them. Well all of those responses are lumped into a single unit called a conversation that I find very difficult to navigate/cleanup/etc. I know that's the point - that I'm never supposed to delete anything, but I think actually hitting that "ideal" might be counterproductive. So, I stick with Yahoo - especially since they added the ability to login using SSL. Can you believe for years you had to login with your password in plaintext!! And even now the "Standard" login is plaintext - you have to click on "Secure" mode to make sure nobody gets your login and password.

Bolded so more people see it.

[anakin357]

For all the talk about labels vs. folders, I find labels are counter-intuitive. Here in my filing cabinet I sort documents into folders; I don't stick 3 or 4 different labels on documents and throw them all into the same drawer. It's crazy!

There is a way around this, and it's not very intuitive, I'll give you that.

Basically just label an email, then archive it. It wont show up in the inbox, and it only shows up when you click on the label on the left (just like regular folders, but you can have the same email in multiple folders without taking up more space) or click on view all mail. Viola, folders, abeit badly designed and clumbsy, but folders, nontheless.

Market saturation

[yup that's me]

Business model aside, isn't the market pretty well saturated? I have a university address which uses my real name and is my rl address. When I graduate I get a grad address which will probably take on the same functionality. I have a yahoo account which I've held for the last five years with which I sign up to things that I reasonably trust but don't want to use my real name for. In particular I use it for newsletters. Then I have a dozen or so throw away accounts created for just one purpose, or for companies I don't trust at all. I don't *need* another account, and I have no reason to switch. I have a Gmail account, but no use for it. Yes, the searching would be quite nice, and so would decent spam filtering, but it's not enough to sway me off the other two. Most novices online will use their service-provided address. Maybe Gmail will grab their webmail accounts when they spread out, but these are less likely to be primary addresses. Most people who've been around a few months already have plenty of email addresses, and from my experience it takes a heck of a good reason to change.

By the way: Gmail is still beta

[stesch]

Gmail is still not ready. It's in its beta phase of development. You can't subcribe to it.

attitude and model

[brevity]

Half of what you say is right. But:

@gmail.com will not be a mark of the 'elite' for long. GMail is going for the mass market.

And the point is, it's not entirely Google culture -- it's that GMail's business model doesn't require distraction. Their model is based on ads being relevant. If other webmail providers come up with similar relevance technology, they may become as sleek and non-intrusive as GMail.

But you're right -- attitude matters. MS and Yahoo work by traditional techniques, i.e. dangling tasty candy to consumers, in order to deliver eyeballs to corporations. From the era of television.

Google, thankfully, has a different attitude. They're not trying to go against the nature of the web and make it more like TV. They're trying to draw more businesses into the internet way of doing things.

plug for fastmail.fm

[Charles Dodgeson]

Fastmail is by far the best webmail/IMAP mail service I have ever seen. They really understand IMAP and what works for webmail.

I have no affiliation other than being a happy customer.

Re:Would like to go to gmails party....

[Deorus]

> What's with the Google business model anyhow? Do they think they can prosper by having "exclusive" customers?

Your point of view is logical and indeed expectable, but Google successfully exploits one of the most ignored and powerful forms of publicity: the word of mouth. Word of mouth is effective because it is a friend of yours who is advertising the said product, and he's not being paid for it, you believe him because you know that he's telling the truth about his experience, and if the said friend happens to be a computer geek, you believe him twice more, so you better give it a try while you have the chance, otherwise you may lose your exclusive opportunity. If you scrap the first chance and everyone around you joins the "community" you will feel even more tempted to become a part of it.

I had to deal with this issue a year ago when massive amounts of IRC friends joined Orkut and began exchanging contents and speaking through and about it everywhere all the time. My reaction? No I didn't join Orkut, I left IRC! But this only proves how effective Google's publicity model really is. People would never pay as much attention as they do if it was not an "exclusive" service.

The entire 1 gigabyte size issue....

[weave]

A lot of emails are duplicated, results of cc lists, mailing lists, etc. Since google is already good at indexing web pages and caching stuff, if they applied the same sort of index/cache issue to emails and your gmail account was just really a list of references to the stashed messages, I bet they could reduce the space even further.

The same goes for attachments. Somehow index them and store them seperately.

For example, I was sent an Ashley Simpson 3mb attachment when that first came out, and I noticed 4 others on that message that had gmail accounts. How many other gmail users got that same attachment?

Re:The entire 1 gigabyte size issue....

[acidblood]

That has to be one of the best ideas I've read on Slashdot in a long time. Congratulations.

By the way, indexing email attachments is very simple, just do it like a P2P network would: compute a hash on the attachment, store it along with the attachment's size and check for matches.

Someone might complain about the possibility of collisions under this scheme. Now if a secure hash function were used (not MD5 as it has been broken) then the system would be, for all practical purposes, shielded from collisions: even a smallish 128-bit hash would require approx. 2^64 different attachments to be present in the system, before the probability of finding a collision by the birthday paradox would be non-negligible.

This is an unthinkable amount of messages -- even if all 6 billion people on earth were to send 10 messages a day, each with different attachments, it would take almost a million years before Google would need to worry about collisions. But of course they could check the size of attachments before declaring a match, making it even harder to find collisions (as if it wasn't hard enough). The statistical distribution of message attachment sizes is hard to predict, but it would easily add another few orders of magnitude to the amount of messages required to produce a collision.

Re:The entire 1 gigabyte size issue....

[hacker]

"Since google is already good at indexing web pages and caching stuff, if they applied the same sort of index/cache issue to emails and your gmail account was just really a list of references to the stashed messages, I bet they could reduce the space even further."

In fact, this is almost precisely how they do it. They take each incoming message, hash it, and store that hash and original message on their shards in their data management system, with a very fast lookup. Every time a new message is received or delivered, and matches an existing hash, the pointer to the original message is put into the user's mailbox. If a user deletes the message, the pointer to that message is removed from that user's mailbox.

This means if 30 people subscribe to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (notorious for being incredibly high-traffic), and 1,000 messages are received in a day.. only 1,000 messages are stored, not 30,000. This not-only saves space, but it saves mailbox lookup time and increases speed of the system overall.

Now, apply this to the spam problem. Spam email to one person (such as shopping advertisements for Sears) may not be spam to another person ("Hey, I need a new lawnmower at Sears!"). So those who mark it as spam, get the spam heuristic scoring weighted higher and applied to their incoming message hashes, and those who do not mark those same messages as spam, get a lower weighting.

The system is actually pretty brilliant.

Now, in response to the other person who claims that their 3MiB email sent to their sister and friends created copies of the message in their "Sent" folder, that makes perfect sense, because the message is different if you send it on different days or with different contents ("Hey Sally, check out these pictures!" "Here's some pictures for you, Bob."). They should be treated differently in the sending user's mailbox. But to the recipient, the attachment itself, is not getting duplicated.

The precise reason Google can offer 1GiB mailboxes for every user, is because that 1GiB is "over-provisioned" across thousands of other users, much like how an ISP oversells their own bandwidth, knowing that all their customers won't saturate the entire pipe 24x7.

Gmail very un-Googlish

[geg81]

The biggest problem with the Gmail interface is that it uses so much JavaScript; it doesn't run at all on many handheld browsers. I think at least they need a simplified XHTML interface.

The POP feature also makes no sense to me; it basically begs you to download messages from their servers when their stated goal is to collect lots of mail. If they offered IMAP access instead, people could keep their messages on the server. They could even use IMAP for placing subtle adds (e.g., message "1" is always some kind of simple ad, but unlike spam or hotmail, there would always only be one advertising message).

An area where Gmail could really do something better is passwords: they really should offer one-time passwords for travelers. Right now, when traveling, there is a high chance with web-based mail that your password gets compromised.

In any case, for fairly little money, you can get large mailboxes with IMAP interfaces from other companies, and you get a lot more control over them than with Gmail. Currently, Gmail's "free" isn't good enough for me to save the money I get with a commercial provider.

Re:Gmail very un-Googlish

[geschild]

If you want to climb on a horse over the implementation of the interface, remember that javascript works on more than IE alone. In this way most modern browsers are supported, admittedly not some of the simpler handhelds but hey, you can't please everyone. Most 'simpler' handhelds do Pop3 nowadays so they are/will be covered.

Furthermore, if they would like to get on the Geeks good side they should make a XUL version of their interface. That would create the killer-app for XUL in one go.

Re:Pardon me

[martone66]

It's not the appearance, it's the functionality. The keyboard shortcuts are awesome and very intuitive once you learn how to use them. For example, I constantly finding myself hitting C or R in Outlook (for my work email) trying to compose or reply to a message.

Plus, I love the fact that the titlebar of the browser window gives an unread message count, and that the Gmail inbox periodically refreshes itself. That way, at work I can leave a browser window open and periodically check the taskbar to see if I have new mail.

(As an aside... hey Google... a proxy setting would have been nice in the Gmail Notifier applet.)

Re:1 GB storage quota

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

There was an interview with one of Google's top people in which he leaked a number about what they're paying for storage. Including the machine the drive goes in, the rack and rack space, the backup systems, the power and the cooling, he figures they're paying two dollars per gigabyte.

It doesn't matter

[Walkiry]

I was one of the "lucky" ones that had a 6 Mb Yahoo mail account (it was later trimmed down to... 4 Mb?) since I've had it for like 6 years.

6 years. But then Goggle comes and in a matter of days my account is upgraded to 100 Mb. They couldn't really afford to do that for the last 6 years, yet as soon as a competitor shows up they start offering upgrades.

Well, too bad, I'm going to Gmail and their targeted ads and I feel no remorse leaving behind Yahoo and their sucktastic advertising.

Great...

[ChairmanMeow]

So now not only will my Hotmail account get lots of spam, I'll also get to see banner ads proclaiming the virtues of V|4gr4...

It isn't the storage!

[unconfused1]

Someone else must have mentioned this also, but having not seen it in the first couple pages of replies...I'll say it again.

It ISN'T the storage amount that makes Gmail great. It is the method that Gmail does web-mail in the first place.

Gmail takes the hit off the server and puts most of the process of rendering pages on the browser itself. Their use of Javascript is brilliant. Something they likely learned from Mozilla.

Who cares if Hotmail adds 98MB more storage...their rendering time will still suck. Same with Yahoo and the others.