Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.