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30Gigs Web Mail Launches Into Beta
gaanagaa writes "Neowin reports, that a new web mail service launched today is promising to bring users an email inbox of 30gb." The original intent of 30gigs.com was apparently to create an "'All in one' site for the webmaster and avid computer users. According to the sites 'about us' page, combining personal file storage, GD2 signatures and anonymous email all in one service, which would be free." In their brief review of the service a Neowin user also offers a word of caution with regards to their extremely short terms of service and privacy policy, calling them "shady".
To anyone that thinks this is a serious contender in the Webmail wars, you're missing the point. I doubt very many people use their entire storage, or even come close. It's just used as a marketing point. The reason that any particular mail storage will beat the others is because of it's features. Gmail is popular (well, for starters because it's google and at the moment google is sexy among some geek circles) because of it's interface. Yahoo recently realised this and brought out a new interface of it's own (well, I say new. As in new for a webmail provider. From the articles it's just an Outlook Express clone, although it may be quite useful, I don't know. Like google, Yahoo has decided to not open it's new and improved webmail service to everyone, at least last i heard anyway).
Having said that, I doubt anyone is going to win the Webmail wars. All that will happen is they'll fight amongst each other to get more of a customer share by adding more features. Which is great for us. But 30gigs isn't going to be a contender anytime soon (if ever).
I remember when everyone used hotmail, back when it used to be usable. Then Microsoft screwed over its users with more and more intrusive ads, shitty interface and more. I'm just waiting for Microsofts response to Yahoo and Google's improved webmail interface.
See, if you could use it as intentional FTP space or some such, there might be a use, but really, a 30 GB e-mail service is no differnt than a 250 MB e-mail service for 99.9% of people out there, including me. Most mail systems limit attachment size somewhere around the 5 MB mark, so it is not like you can either expect or send large files to use that space. Nice advertising gimic, but no real use.
The privacy policy doesn't state that they won't read your data or not give it out to other people. I certainly wouldn't store my tax return on this server.
I agree that competing on storage is kind of pointless now, but when Gmail launched last year offering a gigabyte of space, that was a really big deal. People were used to having to delete their e-mail every so often; now, they didn't have to.
There's not much difference between 1 gigabyte and 30, but there's a huge difference between 5 MB and 1 GB.
I tried out this thing yesterday for a bit.
Here's the problems:
1) The domain name sucks. Who wants to be john@30gigs.com
2) The interface sucks. Hard. It's about as plain as it can get (it looks like they're just using Squirrelmail with their own stylesheet).
3) Their privacy policy is vague on what kind of information they share
4) There doesn't seem to be any reputable parent company behind it meaning it's chances of survival are questionable.
Overall rating: THUMBS DOWN.
Besides, size isn't everything!
- Do anyone know how much spam you get with this service?
- How does it handle attachements and their sizes?
- How fast does mail travel through their servers?
- How high uptime do their servers have?
- Customizable mail filters to manage mail?
- Multiple labels per mail, set by filters?
- POP3 forwarding/servers?
- Address books?
- Antivirus checks?
- Do they backup?
I mean, if you have 1 GB+, why in the world would you want more?
My over-a-year-old Gmail account use 16 MB now. 0.016 GB. It can fit about 150x more mail. Now, how many years is that?
To me, it's just not a valid selling argument anymore.
I was talking to a friend the other day and we were laughing about our old systems. I remember having a conversation where we said "What on earth would you do with a 1GHz processor?" or "I got this new 1GB HDD and it should last me a couple years at least!" 30GB email boxes seem rediculous now but don't discount them. It's hard to imagine now but someday in the not too far future we will be laughing about how we somehow managed to get by with our 500MB hotmail account or our tiny 2GB GMail accounts!
Email is really a horrible bunch of protocols not at all designed for real world use today. It seems crazy to me that we shunt around binaries encoded as text and that we have to pass duplicates along the same path rather than sending a single copy. Not to even get into the mess Email is in other ways. It'd be nice if major email providers at least could arrange a more effecient means of trading mail. I hope Yahoo, Google, etc don't store every single copy of duplicate messages and attachments. That'd just be stupid.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
So a long privacy policy is a good privacy policy? I think not. 30 pages of lawyerspeak is for the birds - all privacy policies (at least the ones you have to click through to obtain some service) should fit on a page or less, else they aren't generally read.
What I'm waiting for is someone that offers a PAID service, say around $5-10 a month.
Not only would this eliminate any and all advertising in the interface and your outgoing mail, but it would invariably come with guaranteed availability. Y! and Gmail make no promises whatsoever that the mail stored on their servers won't get wiped due to a failure, upgrade or whatever.
Such a service would also probably include features that you'll never see from the free ones, like telnet/SSH access (perhaps with a pine-like interface), access via POP, IMAP and maybe even certain groupware suites (GMail has POP, but the terms suggest they might do away with it in the future), ability to use your own domain, and high-security storage (encrypted disks and such).
I agree, they're extremely forward with what they do and don't do (and one thing they claim they don't do is sell out your information). If the TOS and Privacy Policy is the only reason people believe they're shady, then I disagree completely.
Extremely forward isn't a phrase I would use. Sure, they tell you all about cookies... but what about your actual privacy? Nobody these days cares about cookies anymore. How about the contents of the email I send and receive? Oh... nothing at all to say about that. How about any personally identifying information? Suspiciously absent from their privacy policy. What if I'm under the age of 13? Who cares! Their privacy policy should state how they are protecting my privacy, not how I'm going to get bombarded by cookies from all manners of ad companies they've signed up with.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
It's a testiment to convenience. People use email in the ways they do, and ignore other protocols that are more suitable, becaue it's just easier for them.
At the company I work for I constantly get requests to let larger and larger attachments through. The reason? We make it hard for them to get data out any other way. Our bosses are (somewhat justifiably) paranoid about opening up easy access to our file system from outside the company so the users use the one method that's relatively open, email.
You see this all over the place. Would you tell your aunt that it's ok to open a share to the outside on her Windows computer? Heck no. What's her alternative? Email. Can you name a service tha lets her upload a couple of gigs of non-specialized files that she could then share with her friends and family? No such service exists, unless you consider Gmail to be such a service.
The only way you'll ever get people to use the proper protocol, meaning one that's designed for the purpose it's being used for, is to make that protocol ubiquitus, easy and cheap. As long as you make the proper way hard, even if it's for a good reason like security, people will find other ways to route their data, even if those ways are a horrible kludge.
TW
why do they need to know my rl address?
why do they need to give you 1tb of space?