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Gmail's Birthday Presents
Jicksta writes "Since today marks the first birthday of Google's online email service, Gmail, the Gmail team is rolling out some great new features. Every user's email account storage has been doubled to an astounding 2GB and users now have the ability to use some new snazzy rich text formatting features including fonts, bullets, colors, and highlighting. Happy birthday, Gmail!"
In light of April 1st I have to say I'm not sure if this is legit or not.
My gmail account has slowly been growing today (it's at 1440MB capacity now) and have noticed the rainbow features being integrated.
Will this last till tomorrow? Who knows. I'm liking it as is. I wouldn't think that Google would offer a service only to rip it away. If I had to speculate I would say that this is their answer to Yahoo!'s recent 1GB offer of e-mail. And as for those of you who keep complaining about gmail being in Beta still, I think Google answered it best regarding their "Gulp" product in their FAQ:
11. When will you take Google Gulp out of beta?
Man, if you pressure us, you just drive us away. We'll commit when we're ready, okay? Besides, what's so great about taking things out of beta? It ruins all the romance, the challenge, the possibilities, the right to explore. Carpe diem, ya know? Maybe we're jaded, but we've seen all these other companies leap headlong into 1.0, thinking their product is exactly what they've been dreaming of all their lives, that everything is perfect and hunky-dory - and the next thing you know some vanilla copycat release from Redmond is kicking their butt, the Board is holding emergency meetings and the CEO is on CNBC blathering sweatily about "a new direction" and "getting back to basics." No thanks, man. We like our freedom.
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
More google news :)
http://www.google.com/googlegulp/product_line.html
Yummmy...
My Blog
Check out the napkin drawing on the login screen.
Gmail is like a sore dick; you can't beat it!
The disk space is going up gradually over the course of the day (I'm guessing, from the counter on the gmail front page (viewable when you're logged out)). When I checked early this morning I had 1128 MB, then 1129 MB, and when I set my system clock ahead, it jumped up (then back down when I set it back).
ag
zing
Seriously though, this April Fools thing was funny for a while, but it has to stop. I depend on this site for serious news. But today its all joke articles like this one. Come on now, two Gigabytes? For email? Very funny guys.
Unknown host pong.
Take a look at the main gmail page. You can see the counter slowly increasing your space allotment throughout the day.
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
2 gigabytes of storage might be pointless for just email, but it could be useful if you use a Gmail Drive Extension like http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm
I got lucky and got a great picture of it going "You are currently using 44MB (3%) of 1337MB" http://slyfox.zapto.org:8082/display_entry.php?65
Oh? I thought it was all the email I was receiving on how to make things larger.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
For a long time now I've been thinking of making a rich-text editor in pure Javascript, so that it works in any browser, unlike past offerings from Hotmail. And now, it looks like that idea wasn't that crazy after all. Of course, I missed the boat to fame, pretty badly, now that Google made it so public. Yeah, I know, someone else probably did it before, but those efforts were obviously pretty obscure.
Most importantly, though, I think this shows the tidings of the new application: built entirely using the browser as a client interface, and the server as the app-logic/storage. Don't buy Microsoft Office, get a free consumer version from Google. Of course, business-features are also rentable, for a small pay-as-you-go rate of $.05 per minute. The customer is happy - all they need is a browser on ANY PC with teh intarweb; the vendor is happy - no more piracy issues, EVER. Plus, the software "seller" doesn't need to bother with tech support nearly as much - only need to answer the occasional "my JavaScript is turned off/I use Lynx" call.
I'd like to hear what you folks think of this vision of the future. And of course, links to existing examples that prove that these sentiments are soooo 1999.
http://zero-to-enterprise.blogspot.com/
Geez...just what we need. Email should be plain text...you are just wasting bandwith with all the rich text crap.
Geez...thought it was bad enough with trying to get idiots using MS Outlook to quit putting crappy wallpaper on their emails...not to mention the other stuff. You get a 2 line email, that is like 1.5MB+ in size with all the formatting crap, dancing images....etc.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Here's the URL of the drawing so you can see it without logging out.
I'd love to ditch my local mail apps altogether and all that's holding me back is the lack of a calendar in gmail. It doesn't seem like it would be a difficult feature to add, and the combination of mail, contact and calendar management is largely what has made Outlook so successful. Yahoo's implementation is adequate but their mail interface is nothing compared to gmail's.
I realize that many /.ers have no problem with plain text, but the important thing to understand about the new Rich formatting feature is that it goes much farther than just making your messages look pretty. If you enable Rich formatting, when you reply to or forward a rich formatted message that you received, it now retains all the formatting. Before, everything was converted to plain text. Gmail finally allows you to manage messages unaltered. This is good news for both personal and business users.
This potentially positions Gmail to be a WebMail client for the masses, because what you receive is what you will reply to or forward. This was a hugely lacking feature that has now been added.
Kuddos to the Gmail developers!
-Jim
GmailTips.com
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
It doesn't do backgrounds or any of that crap. it just gives the basics- size, color, alignment, block quotes, a few fonts... the cool thing is that they've again incorporated the appropriate keyboard shortcuts ctrl-B turns on Bold, ctrl-I Italic, etc...
That doesn't add a significant amount of size, particularly in light of the 2GB you get for mail. Even slashdot supports some level of message formatting. It makes it much easier to add emphasis. If someone overuses it, blame the writer, not the application...
Yahoo says will keep competitive to Google, and is now offering Infinity plus Infinity megabytes.
Google replies, offering Infinity squared megabytes.
The format is irrelevant; the point is that you're sending something that's not plain text. As the person to whom you responded points out, this is only okay "...if you absolutely know how your recipient is going to read the message...".
More specifically related to Gmail:
Mind the Gap
Mozilla 1.7.6 seems to no longer be a "supported" browser... unless they are playing some sort of sick prank...
Yesterday my 1.7.6 install worked fine with gmail, but today I keep getting routed to the "Basic" view with none of the candy that made me like my gmail account in the first place (filters, selections, etc).
I hope this is some sort of practical joke...
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
Unfortunatly, you can't rely on ASCII art 'cause retarded MUAs (like gmail) won't display messages in a mono-spaced font. That is a feature I've been requesting for ages.
And your argument of using style for structured communication is bunk. What does colors and fonts have to do with your message, and how are they going to render in pine? Bullet points? What's wrong with an asterik?
If you want to sell me something, send me the URL of a webpage. If you want to effectivly communcate with me, send me a plain ASCII email. If you need back up images, send links to web page, but for the love of god don't email them to me.