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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.
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.
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.
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