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

[Drooling Iguana]

Gmail lets you connect via POP3.

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

[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

[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.

Open to everyone? Great

[filmmaker]

There goes my best pick up line.

Re:Open to everyone? Great

[coolfrood]

Homophobia is so gay!

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.

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: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?

Re:SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

[antifoidulus]

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

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

[CanSpice]

Yes it is.

Bottom posting is for grizzled usenet hippies.

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: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.

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.

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.