Slashdot Mirror
Gmail Goes Public
An anonymous reader writes "Google has apparently given the green light for Google's e-mail (Gmail) to be open to the general public." From the registration page: "As we make room for more Gmail users, we want to first extend invitations to Google users. We're still working to make Gmail better, so for now, we're just inviting a small number at random. Looks like that's you! We're really excited to share Gmail with you and we hope you like it." Observed at the P-I Buzzworthy Blog as well.
everybody already has an account.
Everyone who wants one anyway.
Some of the people I invited promptly followed my lead and abandoned their six or seven hotmail (and ISP-based) email addresses and had everything useful forward to Gmail.
Others made an account and check it from time to time.
The bigger group is the last one: The people who really don't care (either through lack of understanding or sheer apathy) about Gmail's advantages.
These days I can't give away an account, because I've sent them to all my group 1 and 2 friends already. The only ones left are the "Why should i switch from Yahoo/Hotmail/Webmail?" crowd
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Actually, the plan DOES seem to be coming together, for Google anyway. I remember several months ago, I asked about 20 people if they had heard of Gmail, and of course the people that read Slashdot had, and ordinary people in my History course hadn't. Now I have people emailing me who are completely non-technical (e.g., have other people come and fix their computer for them), telling me that their new address is @gmail.com. I have high hopes for Google; like it or not, places like Yahoo have some nice free services, yet Google was very successful in getting a lot of users switching to their services quickly.
Partially, it has to do with simplicity; I'm really hoping that eventually users will come to appreciate neat and clean appearances instead of whiz-bang embed-tag-wav-file nested-tables best-viewed-in-IE ad-clogged flash-driven interface X.
I just hope Google can apply this to other things. For a long it seemed as if it was Yahoo's way or the highway, which in turn reminds me of Microsoft.
Do more stuff, Google. Do more stuff! XMPP!
Take off every sig. For great justice.
They're missing a huge revenue stream IMHO. How many small and medium sized companies systems admins could get BACK to work (instead of writing spam rules).
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
There are actually valid reasons for some of us to not use gmail for general-purpose emailing.
d y that you seem to be thinking it is.
Aside from the obvious privacy issues -- any company who has its people put company information on another company's systems is a little nuts -- there's also the power and flexibility of running your own MUA/MTA pair.
For example, I've got my own wildcard domain -- anything at this domain goes to me. In addition, my MUA (mutt) is configured to automatically make my replies come from the address to which the email had been sent. I consider this useful to me, and a way to give out specific addresses so as to see how spam ends up getting to me.
gmail actually takes a step in that direction -- they let you use '+' notation (eg 'user+whatever@gmail.com'), but they don't do the next step -- making it so you can automatically respond as 'user+whatever' to emails sent to 'user+whatever'.
And, frankly, it's just _faster_ for me to use my own CLI MUA to go through a bunch of emails, and more convenient and familiar.
On the flip side, my dad recently decided he finally wanted to get an email account, so I created a new domain for him and had all mail sent to this domain forwarded to an account I set up for him at gmail. So he'll be using gmail for mail. I really do like gmail -- I use it for some specialized purposes -- but it's not the one-size-fits-all-so-everyone-should-use-it-alrea
Everyone in gmail has 50 invites left. They currently replenish your used invites daily. I've handed out a few gmail accounts in the past few weeks and my number of invites continues to peg at 50.
As a result, gmail was effectively completely open quite a while ago.
You, of course, are speaking only for yourself. :-) I run my own mail and Gmail is still very useful for me, most notably for the very effective search. I have procmail bouncing a copy of inbound mail to gmail that I can access on the road if I am not using my laptop to ssh in my own server (I am not running Squirrelmail or Imp, etc.). I also like sending all my list mail to my gmail account which for me makes it easy to read. I like the 'conversation' method of threading for lists. A year later and I am currently at 29% capacity.
I am a lawyer - although products liability is not my area of concentration. If we ignore for the moment the fact that software developers almost never have any liability when their products fuck up. It is very doubtful that any court would let Google escape liability simply by putting BETA in the corner. If you make a product and offer it to the public - substantially as a non-experimental product - you will be held liable. The courts generally look, not at technicalities, but at the substance of the transaction
This comment baffles me. Why on EARTH would you still want to use POP3 mail? I manage an Exchange server as well as my own POP3 server and now use neither for my personal email in favor of Gmail. Why? Simply because I have so many computers that I use! With Gmail I have pretty much unlimited space, the ability to SEARCH my email and actually find what I'm looking for (ever tried to find something in Outlook that you've filed away a year ago?), and I always have ALL of my email on any computer I use! I don't have to think "Wait, I sent this at home on my Mac, but I wish I had it at work on my PC in Outlook... Blah blah." Those days are gone, and frankly... GOOD RIDDANCE! Just my opinion, of course.
I used to do this as well. If I needed to give my address out, I'd come up with a company specific one on the spot. However, I abandoned the "forward all" account when someone started spoofing the From: line of their spams with <random text>@alanhoyle.com addresses. I started getting thousands apon thousands of bounced spam messages showing up in my inbox. My choice was either to train my mail filters to catch these bounces as spams, or quit the forward-all account. I still get more than 100/day, but the load is greatly lessened.
In my experience, the vast majority of my spam comes from email addresses posted on either my web site or from WHOIS information. Only one of my company-specific addresses ever seems to have made it onto a spam list.
Until recently, I prefered my tweaked solution with Pine, bogofilter, and a modified version of IMAP Spam BeGone. With an SSH client like PuTTY, I was using the same interface I was used to wherever I went in the world.
However, I've become hooked on GMail as it's so much more convenient to deal with Spam there. Click, click click, poof! it's gone....
- AlanH
Disclaimer, Craig Shergold was a kid with cancer who became a internet hoax. Please take this as a joke and don't bother him.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
GMail has a number of powerful advantages over Notepad:
- Filename is optional. No need to think of a unique filename to save under -- just enter your content and go.
- Search all your past files at once. Try that, Notepad!
- Spell-checking on demand
- Load/save your text files from any computer in the world
- Cross-platform
- Undo Discard. Ever wish you could retrieve your file after closing it without saving? Now you can!
This is incredibly cool - a viable web-based replacement for basic desktop text editors. Yes, the Web OS is slowly coming together!