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.

Comments

I can't even

[stoolpigeon]

people to take my gmail invites any more. I think it's a little late to open it to the public-- everybody already has an account.

Re:I can't even

[NeoSkandranon]

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

Re:I can't even

[jp10558]

And me, the why should I switch from my own POP3/Imap/Webmail server? I hate webmail !

Re:I can't even

[Drooling Iguana]

Gmail lets you connect via POP3.

Re:I can't even

[lucabrasi999]

why should I switch from my own POP3/Imap/Webmail server?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe that I have found and anti-Google Blashphemer in our midst!

Re:I can't even

[CrankyFool]

There are actually valid reasons for some of us to not use gmail for general-purpose emailing.

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-alread y that you seem to be thinking it is.

Re:I can't even

[kevcol]

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.

Re:I can't even

[nickname225]

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

Re:I can't even

[edesjardins]

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.

Re:I can't even

[CrankyFool]

It's remarkably simple (though, true to OSS principles, it's also remarkably non-obvious if you don't pore through documentation). You need two things in your .muttrc:
A) Specify what addresses might be valid addreses for you, using 'alternates'. e.g.:
alternates user@dom.ain.com
alternates otheruser@other.domain.com
alternates @myspecial.domain.com
The last line is the one that says that any mail address @myspecial.domain.com is a valid address for you;
B) set reverse_name=yes

That tells mutt that, if you get an email that's to one of your addresses (see A above), even if the current machine name is not that address, it should formulate the 'From:' address based on the recipient address, rather than the local machine name.

That should be all you need.

Eagerly awaiting my Offtopic moderation ...

Re:I can't even

[jp10558]

I don't know - I like the lack of ads. I like the speed of Eudora on messages on my local machine. I like being able to look through messages and not have to be online. I like the lack of "tags". I like unlimited attachment size. I like GPG plugins.

I like e-mail being separate from websites. I like not having my mail processed to show me ads.(wait I already said that didn't I?)

Oh, wait - I like not getting spam from those people who try every combination of @gmail, @yahoo etc....

And, I like VNC through Java applet for checking my mail or anything elsewhere! Just me though, I like taking the whole interface if I can(which I can do via broadband).

I also like not being more beholden to big companies for my communication.

Re:I can't even

[k.ellsworth]

email me to k.ellsworth@ THESPAM gmail.com and i send you an invite... as anyone else need one i'll send back invites. i have 50 left

Re:I can't even

[edesjardins]

I've never receieved ONE piece of Spam at my Gmail address since I've had it - I got the account in August. Just sayin'.

Re:I can't even

[alanh]

>For example, I've got my own wildcard domain -- anything at this domain goes to me.

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....

Re:I can't even

[shellbeach]

Ah, Gmail misinformation. It's a wonderful thing ...

A big thing is privacy. Google may be wonderful, but what about tomorrow?

If you're that concerned about privacy, you could still use POP3 and SMTP with GPG or similar. Why would you bother, then? Well, having a non-ISP linked email address is a highly useful thing - for those of the community who don't run a mail server (e.g. don't have broadband or don't have the skills) this is vital to being able to switch providers and get the best deal.

The other is web interfaces suck.

You've obviously never tried Gmail then. I was a diehard PINE user before seeing Gmail, I hated Yahoo, Hotmail, Fastmail, etc interfaces and thought Gmail might be a good mailing list replacement for my yahoo account because of the greater storage space. I think it took about three days to forward all my mail to it and use it as my primary account. It's a beautiful interface, runs with some incredibly neat javascript - you have to see it to believe it.

A third is the problem of using POP3 access, but still having to hike your mail client mail via SMTP. If you use your own ISP, you're at risk of getting flagged at some point in the future of failing SPF.

But, you see, Gmail actually provides an SMTP server for you to use. That's right! You get POP3 and SMTP. And if they ever decide to stop that, there's still mail forwarding so you can throw everything else over to the email address of your choice.

Re:I can't even

[ducman]

I'm one of those people who are still asking, "why?" I admin my own server and use IMAP. Since I travel regularly, I'm more likely to have my PowerBook than an internet connection. Mail.app lets me have my mail with me, search it, work offline, move things onto and off of the server, if I want to. And of course I can use the web mail client on the server to read mail from any other machine. So why would I let Google search through all my mail and target me with ads?

Re:I can't even

[willfe]

I don't know - I like the lack of ads. I like the speed of Eudora on messages on my local machine. I like being able to look through messages and not have to be online. I like the lack of "tags". I like unlimited attachment size. I like GPG plugins.

You can use POP3 to fetch mail to a local mailbox (or another server elsewhere) and send through gmail via SSL+SMTP. Apart from the attachment size limit (not sure if SMTP lets you break it or not), where's the problem? Your local mail client won't offer up ads (and you can keep Eudora). It can use GPG plugins. It can skim through messages without being online. And much to my annoyance, those pesky "tags" you dislike are completely stripped when you pull mail via POP3 (it'd be handy, whether you specifically think so or not).

I like e-mail being separate from websites. I like not having my mail processed to show me ads.(wait I already said that didn't I?)

Yes, you did already say that. You repeat yourself a lot in this post, but that's okay. We still love you :) Besides, now I get to repeat myself too. Use POP3+SMTP and you're back on local client, no webmail interface.

Best I can tell, mail is parsed real-time for ads when you view them on gmail.google.com; presumably if you just POP3 them they're never parsed for ads. Then again, it's not as if Google's the first to do this; Yahoo and friends sometimes shove interstitial ads into their mail interfaces. They want you to pay for POP3 access too.

Oh, wait - I like not getting spam from those people who try every combination of @gmail, @yahoo etc....

Sorry, but spam's a problem everywhere, not just gmail.com; the only reason a dictionary spam attack hasn't been launched against your domain is they haven't gotten to it yet.

And, I like VNC through Java applet for checking my mail or anything elsewhere! Just me though, I like taking the whole interface if I can(which I can do via broadband).

Wait. So you want to use the VNC Java client, via your @!#$ing web browser, to read your mail on the local machine sitting wherever you're not when you get the burning urge to check your mail? Yet somehow just using the original damned webmail interface is beneath you?

I also like not being more beholden to big companies for my communication.

Please, take yourself off the cross. You said you like Eudora, so you're "beholden" to them trusting their stuff isn't spying on you. You use VNC via Java, meaning you're beholden to Sun and their Java implementation (or one of the few other vendors, like IBM and Microsoft, who ship VMs of their own) for the viewer. Then there's the VNC vendors. Then there's the people who wrote the OS you're running.

I won't make the "if you have nothing to hide, why do you want to hide?" argument because it infuriates me and because I do think privacy is important, but please, please, please stop acting like e-mail is your achilles' heel. For truly secure communication you shouldn't even be using e-mail in the first place, but Gmail provides enough tools to encrypt mail as needed if you plug a mail client into it (like Eudora, which you already use).

the link is one-time

[eobanb]

the link that appears on the front page of google for certain people only works that one time. There is no universal link for creating a gmail account right now. You need to just go to google.com and it may or may not show up.

Re:the link is one-time

[Mr. Sketch]

No, but you can always get an invite from the GMail invite spooler. It has almost 500k invities waiting to be given out.

Re:the link is one-time

[WormholeFiend]

I doubt it.

I noticed a few days ago that the 10 leftover invites I had were removed from my account.

Made me wonder if something was up, but having no one else to invite, I just shrugged it off.

Thanks, but no thanks...

[lucabrasi999]

we want to first extend invitations to Google users

Thanks, but I've already received about 1,000 invitations.

Open to everyone? Great

[filmmaker]

There goes my best pick up line.

Re:Open to everyone? Great

[mekkab]

I dunno about that. I tried to brag to my wife about my gmail account when they were semi-rare and she said "GAY-mail? You have a GAY-mail account? HAHAHA!"*

*Yes, my wife has a Catholic school girl's sense of humor and is down with poop jokes. Its quite endearing.

Re:Open to everyone? Great

[KarmaPolice]

I dunno about that. I tried to brag to my wife about my gmail account when they were semi-rare and she said "GAY-mail? You have a GAY-mail account? HAHAHA!"*

I believe that would be a hotMALE.com account...

Re:Open to everyone? Great

[coolfrood]

Homophobia is so gay!

Google Section

[dadybeef]

1st Post Recommendation - Google Section!

Just refresh...

[mobiux]

if you don't get it the first time, just keep refreshing.
It took me 3 times to get the invite on the screen.

Re:Just refresh...

[snuf23]

Or just send me your email address and let me finally use up my 100 mojillion invites that nobody wants.
I promise your email address will not become inundated with pornographic spam.

Maybe just penis enlargement ones.

Bad Gmail link.

[Osty]

The link to Gmail in the story goes to a page that says:

Account Already Created

The link you followed to this page has already been used to create your Gmail account. To access your account visit http://gmail.google.com and log in with the username and password you chose during registration. To create another Gmail account, you'll need a shiny new account creation link. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Here's a better link for Gmail.

I don't see any way to create an account yet.

[Behrooz]

2. How do I sign up? When can I get a Gmail account?

We're currently only offering Gmail as part of a preview release and limited test. We don't have details on when Gmail will be made more widely available, as that depends in part on the results of the test.

Uh. Without a way to create public accounts, this is just another form of beta. Looking on the main gmail page, it sure looks like there's no way to create an account for someone who doesn't have a google account yet.

Beta? Yes. Public? About as much as it was before.

On the other side, I've got about 50 invites left.

Re:I don't see any way to create an account yet.

[Nuclear_Physicist]

On the other side, I've got about 50 invites left.

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.

Re:why not sooner?

[lucabrasi999]

Rock solid, score one for google.

Yeah, they really made huge advances in e-mail technology and turned it into something special.

BTW. Can anyone tell me how do I turn off my sarcasm tag?

Google: Fix the top post reply method

[Neil Watson]

Please fix the interface so that replies do not top post. (Yes, I did submit this to Google when I first discovered it).

Re:SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

[antifoidulus]

Now if only we could turn "Ask Slashdot" into "Ask Google" we would be set!

POP3

[FiReaNGeL]

I just hope that the best feature of Gmail will remain free now that they've gone public.

POP3 access, no strings attached (read, stupid Hotmail requiring Outlook). Gotta love that.

Re:That's why they gave me 50 invites!

[eobanb]

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!

Direct link

[turtled]

Here:
https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
Just truncated from the paragraph. The posted link was the result of someone singing up already. I also have 50 invites... but, with the link I posted, everyone is ready...

Re:Direct link

[ral315]

Er...that's a link for a GOOGLE account. It's not the same as a Gmail account.

Once again, Gmail accounts are NOT available to the general public, just a random sampling of the population.

gmail is still buggy

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, I'm surprised. Google has introduced a few bugs in its latest release of gmail.

For example, the "mail forwarding" feature cannot be disabled once it has been enabled. Any change to it does not not save.

Re:Google: Fix the top post reply method

[Anonymous Coward]

Please fix the interface so that replies do not top post. (Yes, I did submit this to Google when I first discovered it).

Bottom posting is for grizzled usenet hippies.

Re:You can always get an invite

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, each time you post this message in a reply to a post in this story, it's modded +5 ;-)
see how many you can get!!

Re:why not sooner?

[interiot]

What happened when Blizzard released World of Warcraft to the public? Its popularity far outstripped Blizzard's predictions, and their previous rock-solid product became an endless string of "emergency maintenance" announcements.

Same with Google... GMail requires space to be dedicated to each new person. If the influx of new people is greater than the rate at which they can aquire new hardware and squash new scalability bugs, then it won't be rock-solid anymore.

Controlling popularity is important. Google might be overdoing it a little bit... But in this game, it's far better to err on the side of going too slow, especially when you're as popular as google is.

Re:Google: Fix the top post reply method

[CanSpice]

Yes it is.

Bottom posting is for grizzled usenet hippies.

What gmail needs to do

[Monkelectric]

host MX! I'd be glad to pay money for to host my domains email accounts!

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).

Re:Google: Fix the top post reply method

[Anonymous Coward]

But if I ask many questions, or discuss many topics, then it makes sense to indicate which part you are referring to. It also often makes sense to re-read what I wrote, since I have been dealing with many other things since I wrote you. I also often get copied into the middle of a thread, so I have to read from the bottom up to figure out what is going on.

I generally prefer to quote the relevant line, and then reply to it. Repeat until done. The problem is that since Outlook made top-reply the standard, everyone has become used to it. Now you'll get the entire email thread in every single email, and some people can't live without that. It's a waste of space (and dangerous, since people don't bother to read what they're forwarding sometimes). It would be far better to have a good threaded mail reader, but unless MS does it, it's irrelevant. People are trained the Outlook way, for better or worse.

Then again, I still use a text-only mail reader.

Re:Google: Fix the top post reply method

[jonadab]

> Bottom posting is for grizzled usenet hippies.

Bottom-posting (quoting the whole message and then putting your reply at the bottom) and top-posting (quoting the whole original message below your reply) are both cretinous and bad. The correct way to quote is interleaved, i.e., you quote a relevant excerpt, reply to it, then if necessary quote another relevant excerpt, reply to it, and so forth.

Gnus gets this right: it quotes the whole message (depending on how you have it set up) (except the signature (if it can tell where the signature starts)), but if you go to any point in the message and start typing, it breaks there and rewraps the quoted portions above and below, and your reply gets inserted at the proper place, unquoted, as a separate paragraph. Any parts of the quoted message you don't need to reply to, you're supposed to delete before sending. Gnus warns you if you try to send a message that's mostly quoted material and very little original response (though it'll let you do it if you insist).

But I don't suppose it's reasonable to hold a webmail interface to the standard of functionality set by Gnus.

Craig Shergold is dying of cancer and wants gmail

[infonography]

Disclaimer, Craig Shergold was a kid with cancer who became a internet hoax. Please take this as a joke and don't bother him.

Re:What's the deal?

[Roguelazer]

You get 24MB more with the 1GB deal... You should probably click on that one...

Top-Posting, Email Heresy

[Catiline]

YES!!! > Is it really all that irritating? >> It reverses the flow of conversation and makes relating >> parts of the message to the reply difficult. >>> Why? Outlook and most other email clients top post. >>>> Top posting. >>>>> What is the biggest email sin/heresy/faux pas?

Re:why not sooner?

[learn fast]

Another post from someone who's never taken a MARKETING class.

This has nothing to do with server space. Gmail would never be as popular as it is today if they hadn't used their ingenious "give these codes to all your friends!!! -- or else you can't get in" promotion. This has nothing to do with a beta stage it's a marketing promotion. Sometimes, making your product artificially scarce makes people want it more, and I for one am once again awed by Google's awesome duality of marketing and technical brilliance.

Re:Google: Fix the top post reply method

[Catiline]

Actually, the joke goes:

YES!!!
> Is it really that irritating?
>> It reverses the flow of conversation and makes relating
>> reponses to their originating comments difficult.
>>> Why? Outlook and so many other clients default to that.
>>>> Top posting; it's absolute email heresy.
>>>>> What is the worst faux pas to commit in email?

Re:the googlenet

[panck]

yes, indeed.

as i posted on my blog after Google Maps came out, here's my Google world takeover timeline:

• present: images.google.com, local.google.com, gmail.google.com, maps.google.com, news.google.com, blogger.com, et al

• 2006-2007: dating.google.com, jobs.google.com, groceries.google.com, voice.google.com, tv.google.com

• 2008-2009: dna.google.com, wherearemykeys.google.com, INeedToPerformAnEmergencyTracheotomyOnMyselfHowDoI DoThat.google.com

• 2010-2011: brain.google.com, LSD-over-IP.google.com, RealPhysicalSexSomehowContainedEntirelyInAURL.goog le.com, peaceOnEarth.google.com

• 2012-END: maps.hyperspace.google.com, quarks.google.com, beamMeUp.google.com, tomorrow.news.google.com, singularity.google.com

GMail as the Notepad of the Web

[Jon_Aquino]

Today I realized that GMail's latest features make it an excellent replacement for Notepad and other basic desktop text editors. (Use its Save Draft feature so that you can edit your text whenever you want.)

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!