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".

Comments

Send me an invite?

[rdwald]

Can someone give me an invite? Oh, and maybe First Post.

Re:Send me an invite?

[SpectreBinary]

pfft. 30 gigs ought to be enough for anybody.

Malibu

[Blimundus]

According to their website, they provide you with a "malibox"!

30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone!

[Palal]

I can't fill up my 2 gigs on Gmail, nor my gig on Y! mail, why in the world would I need 30 gigs?

Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone!

[Baricom]

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.

Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone!

[pahles]

I get more than a gig of email a day not even counting the couple gigs I get of pics, video, etc (pr0n) a day.

No wonder the internet is slow...

Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone!

[PhotoBoy]

I run a few webmail systems myself, you would be amazed at how quickly people manage to eat up space. On one system we have a problem with people who sign up, turn off the spam blocker and then sign up for lots of spam. Their inbox fills up but they never actually use the service, making us wonder what the point to signing up was. We suspect it's just people who have a grudge against the company to whom we are supplying the webmail.

Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone!

[MikeFM]

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.

Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone!

[Itchy Rich]

From 30gigs.com: "Our main goal is to increase our space even further, to 50 gigs, or maybe 100 as time goes on."

Looks like they're going to keep changing their name to match the storage capacity. Foolish marketeers know nothing about encapsulation.

Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone!

[Total_Wimp]

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

Signup requires invite, like Google Mail

[marcello_dl]

I am not sure i like that. I think a playful method like a web based slot machine that lets you win an invitation (ajax based not to hammer the servers) would be nicer. Sigh.

phffff.. 30gig, that's amateur mang

[porksoda]

1 terabyte, right here.

TOS

[Lussarn]

word of caution with regards to their extremely short terms of service and privacy policy, calling them "shady".

It should be a good thing to not have a long lawyerlike TOS. Terms of service is a way for companies to bypass the laws and shouldn't be needed at all. Period.

Re:TOS

[XaXXon]

I just read their terms of service. It's almost all about cookies. They basically say how they use their cookies, that they aren't responsible for the contents of the sites their ads link to, and that you may get cookies from their ad provider.

While not being a service I would want to use, they don't seem to be "shady" in that they are hiding anything, just that they do things you wish they wouldn't, but they're honest about it.

This is, of course, assuming their ToS isn't an outright lie.

Missing the point

[aussie_a]

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.

Huge Uses?

[Famatra]

With a box that big you could, if you developed a network, work out an eMail p2p system.

Simply upload the stuff you want to trade and forward it to people who need it. How do you know who would want the stuff you've uploaded? You'd need to develop a network where your node advertises what it has available, and autoforwards the file when someone requests it.

After the initial uploading there is really no more bandwidth costs for you as you can forward the files for free - the email providers' servers handles the load.

Who cares?

[Telvin_3d]

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.

totally shady

[XenonDif]

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.

Re:totally shady

[Nasarius]

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.

On the other hand, your data is worthless to them if you encrypt it first. Of course, I wouldn't really trust these people to keep backups, not go bankrupt, etc.

30 webdrive?

[ZeroExistenZ]

If there would be the ability to have a "webdrive" like there's available for google, this might be interesting.

Otherwise, to keep 30G of chainletters, spam, and the occasional email seems like a waste of space. In the line of google's history, they'd come out with 50G mailboxes in no time to stay current and on top. ;)

One Word: Pron.

[Famatra]

"I can't fill up my 2 gigs on Gmail, nor my gig on Y! mail, why in the world would I need 30 gigs?"

If you belong to a lot of yahoo and google groups, and the groups you belong to like to send a lot of attachments (porno) you can fill up 2 gigs in a couple of days.

Not that I know from experience or anything...

Re:One Word: Pron.

[ahaning]

So that we may all avoid said groups, please post some examples of the worst offenders. Thanks.

I tried it, here's my review

[boingyzain]

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.

1 TeraByte FREE WEBMAIL

[linumax]

Hey folks!
I'm planning to unveil my ONE Terabyte Free webmail service by the next couple of weeks and all people on slashdot will receive invitations ASAP.

PS: Anybody got old HDD?! wish to get rid of em? Don't hesitate to contact me

Can't miss moneymaking opportunity!

[Anonymous Squonk]

The domain 700petabytes.com is still available!

Leading the way in privacy policies.

[samj]

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.

Size isn't everything?

[dascandy]

> Besides, size isn't everything!

Ah, one of those again... luckily I've just set up my own dual RAID-5 mailserver for just my own mail, on 2.4TB disk.

Whaddayamean, compensating?

Re:SMTP is not a file transfer protocol!

[generic-man]

So what? HTTP is a protocol meant to toss hypertext around, and look at all the people carelessly using it to upload files, do their e-mail, and even use so-called "web applications." For shame. I even hear that some people are transmitting XML by HTTP -- the horror!

Review from an actual user

[nacs]

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.

(I posted this review to Neowin yesterday BTW).