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Google Opens Gmail To All
Reader Russian Art Buyer lets us know that GMail is now open for all ("Google Mail" in the UK). The service is no longer by invitation only. This welcome page shows an ever-increasing amount of storage available per user, currently about 2,815 MB.
I wonder if we'll see a drop in storage capacity with the increased number of users.
Also, my GMail account still says I only have 73 invites left. If it's open, why don't they drop the limited number of invites?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
...and I don't see any way to sign up other than the "use your mobile" promotion that they've had going for a while. There's no link from TFA either.
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If I try to go to gmail.com, I get the old URL (the one with <mpl=m_wsad and no way to sign up) but the link in the summary (with <mpl=m_blanco ) has a sign up form. Interesting. This with clearing my cache first to be sure that it isn't a browser caching issue.
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There's a big Sign Up For Gmail link
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Maybe the submitter has a different definition of all than I, but Gmail still requires either an invation or the ability to receive text messages. While the number of people who can't get text messages may be small, there are still many people who cannot sign up.
How does gmail compare to fastmail? I've been using a fastmail account (the kind where you pay once to set it up and it's free thereafter) to consolidate my emails for years and it's ok but it's gradually being overwhelmed by the amount of spam I get. How does gmail stack up, especially in the area of spam killing? Does anyone have both?
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Now if only they would add IMAP support and improve security, they might have a chance of being successful with Google for Domains.
Throw the bums out!
By invitation only was a perfect way to protect against spammers signing up quickly. Well, not perfect, but at least you could always know who the root of the spam tree was and could handle the whole tree. Now they (at Google) destroyed the reason for their own success.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Great. Now we get to see how Gmail handles thousands of accounts being created just to send out spam.
Come on. I can't think of anybody who wasn't able to get a GMail account. If a large number of users necessitated a drop in storage, it would have happened a long time ago.
Palm trees and 8
In the case of Google, it will find increasing the switching costs to get out of gmail not very easy. Reason are:
1. It uses a simple browser as its interface and it does not have the same level of control over http protocols and XML protocols MS enjoyed over Windows platform.
2. Users have become more aware of these issues. The resurgence of OpenOffice and fandom of Firefox shows that.
3. Google says its motto is "dont do evil" and atleast part of its fan base is taking it at face value.
Overall, IMHO, if google wrests significant portion of the data from the clutches of MS and shows how advantageous it could be for companies and users to keep their data in a format with eye on the switching costs it would benefit the consumers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Now will I receive as much spam as I do from Hotmail addresses?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Invite spoolers have been around for some time.
--- sig moved for great justice.
Open to the world, yet it's still a "Beta" application. Huh.
So, I hope that we don't begin to see inumerable amounts of bot-generated Gmail accountslike one finds in other web-based email services.
That article is 2.5 years old.... There is no link at Gmail allowing a free signup without a cell phone.
m obile&answer=22245&hl=en
This is what Gmail says about signing up currently:
Can I sign up without the invitation code? Or without a mobile phone?
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=
Ya, I've danced around the gmail pages, and I don't have the text messaging capability required. Can anyone send me a Gmail invite?
I dont see the "sign up" link at all at www.gmail.com. (Cleared cache etc)
Either this is geographically limited or Google is slow to implement it in all countries....
i'll be the first to admit that i am a pretty serious google fanboy and i haven't used a fastmail account so proceed with caution.
i have two public access unix accounts, one on SDF and one on hobbiton (hobbiton stopped being public access like 6 years ago). two years ago there was a sudden astronomical increase in the amount of spam that i was getting on both accounts. both systems had not yet set up greylisting or some other anti-spam measures and so i was worried that i would have to abandon an email address that i have had for almost 10 years.
i got a gmail invite from a friend and set up my new account, and gmail has an option where you can choose to send mail as another account and make that the default method for sending mail, so i set up my gmail account to send as the two unix accounts and then added the gmail address to a .forward for each shell account.
so now i use gmail as the central store for all of my email. now that both shell accounts have graylisting and other spam filtering i take advantage of that PLUS gmail's ability to bucket spam, so i have not seen a spam email in something like 6 months. i could go back to the old way (i look really oldschool using ssh to check my mail with pine) but i have become so lazy and spoiled thanks to gmail that there is no real reason to go back.
so, if you want to keep your old address and switch to gmail, it is possible, provided your old provider has some means for you to forward your mail.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
You mean I am no longer one of the very select, very few, Chosen and Invited Ones of the email aristocracy???
;)
Say it ain't so...
(Love my Gmail)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Welcome mass flood of spammers to Gmail! True there were some out there before, but now that it is open its just going to get thousands of times worse. Hopefully they tweak up their internal spam filter to allow for their own domain.
I'm just glad I got in early enough that I have the names that I wanted before they got snatched up and added extra numbers or other junk to them.
I was hoping to trade 1000 gmail invites for a joost invite
This may be a little off topic, but maybe many others here will benefit from discussing this same concern. I love Gmail, but there is a problem I see that's been slowly nagging me:
I use Gmail to read the messages off my work/academic Pine accounts, and it has rapidly become my main way to check email because it has a great feature set, and Gmail doesn't pull some of the stupid tricks that other free email services do. I also use it to send messages (i.e. the "from:" field pretending as if it is one of the other work/school accounts I have), and rapidly I'm accumulating email on my Gmail account that now doesn't exist elsewhere.
However, sometime in the far off future, Gmail may decide not to work one day, or there may be a new technology to replace it. We can't know for sure. So I would like to be able to have a backup of that mail just in case. As much as I trust Gmail and like Google, I need some way to keep my mail on my own, because if it were all lost, it would be awful.
Couldn't they offer a service, for some reasonable amount of $$, where they would burn my entire Gmailbox onto a DVD and send it to me? With the size of my mailbox, POP downloading is becoming impossible, and this would also be a great way to give users some peace of mind.
or has anyone else felt this worry, and come up with an interesting/workable solution??
Dragon hunting was actually really cool. The first person view takes away from the "reader as the subject" personal feel, so it was difficult to get into, but the ending (though expected) was pretty good. You definitely could use an editor: your punctuation is all over the place, starting (incomplete) sentences with And ("And flew away."), etc. :)
You kept the same tense throughout: good.
You didn't end sentences with prepositions: good.
Funny / Entertaining story: good.
I give Dragon Hunting an 8/10. Anyone who says otherwise is an Anonymous Douchebag.
By the way, I'm already aware this is off topic but feel free to waste your mod points on me.
finally........i havent managed to score a gmail account yet!
Hmm, see that actually suprises me. I've been using gmail for quite a while - its perfect for webmail and I forward my homepage's mail to it. I got my invite by going to one of those sites that banks invites from people and will send you one if you request it.
That said, am I the only one who was taken aback by the saved searches feature? I don't care that google has it, I DO care very much that it was enabled by default and I had a bunch of saved searches before I disabled the functionally. I then had to clear out all of the saved searches. That was not cool and in my opinion, a bad move on google's part.
I really hope that projects like RoundCube continue to develop. If the day ever comes where I want to get off the gmail ride, I'd hope to pick up a client just as nice.
I'm curious about GMail's spam filtering abilities. I've heard that it is pretty good. Can Slashdotters recommend the best way to pass my company's email through GMail and then back to the intended recipient? For example, I have a catch-all address which receives @mycompany.com's email when the recipient doesn't exist, and it just sits there in the catch-all inbox until I clean it out (since my email server's spam filter isn't pushing all the spam to trash). I can configure the catch-all to forward to a gmail account and hope that filters out more of the spam, but is there a better way to do this? And what about legitimated address email, can I filter it through GMail to catch the spam better?
Shouldn't there be some kind of mechanism in Slashdot to prevent months-old news?
I must be new here.
Selective quoting of discussion follows:
Prepare to be underhwelmed
Bad move
I really can't see it catching on guys!
They'd let you use some of that storage for Picasa's web albums. 250MB for pictures, almost 3GB for email? That's kind of ass-backwards.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
And at the very same time, Yahoo Mail Beta has blocked Linux users. Maybe it's time to switch.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 520
I take it you've never used crack before?
G-mail is hardly exclusive. Anyone that wants a g-mail account can get one. Even if this story is not true, and they have not "opened it for all". I'm sure many of us have gmail accounts with a lot of remaining invites...all anyone who wanted a key has to do is ask around.
:s
Personally I think its a marketing strategy used by gmail to make people feel special by having it "invite only", but by making so many invites they have destroyed the exclusiveness of it
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
Well, when you realize that nobody has actually found a way to do it without a mobile phone yet I still have 100 unused invites.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
> I wonder if we'll see a drop in storage capacity with the increased number of users.
Unlikely, since it's just a counter.
Blogger (also a famous google service), recently started the migration of all accounts (optional, for now) to the new ones based on the GMail login. For this reason they must open the subscription to everybody of Blogger who doesn't have a GMail account. From this to open up all the doors is a small step... I think they started the integration of all the company services under the GMail account. It's easier to login but also to track all the users...
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
Yes there is (a link to a sign up form), try viewing the page via a non-North American proxy (I guess that should work anyway).
As I understand it, it's not just Google Mail here in the UK, but throughout all of the EU, since it's actually a German company that owns the Gmail trademark here.
Funny, I handed out my first invitation to another prospective user (my wife) just three days ago. I have 99 left, and don't need them.
I tried to create a new gmail account yesterday but discovered that you can now only create an account if you have a cell phone! This sucks for those of us that can't afford a cell phone. Luckily I got one account long ago when such a thing wasn't required.
My biggest gripe is Gmail doesn't work with tabs. When using webmail, I open email into tabs I want to read, and by the time I've finished clicking say 5 or so emails, they have finished loading into my browser and I can switch tabs to view them. Gmail doesn't allow tabbed browsing. Also I find Gmail's interface a bit clunky and limiting, much like Microsoft's products are.
Here in the US I was able to get my first GMail account without an invite or use of mobile phone. Right after Google announced GMail they let people request an account. There were certain Google services that automatically qualified one immediately for GMail ( I forget which one(s)), but I didn't have one of those, so I waited.
Finally, about 10 months later I received an invite directly from Google, not from any third party.
So now we can go about the business of signing up without pretending there's something in the way, eh? Should have been done a while ago I think, around the time people started having 90+ unused invites in their accounts. Maybe it's that google is getting more confident about their storage capability, but I doubt it.
if friends*1000 invites_available_per_capita
open_it_up_for_gods_sake()
marked "Sign up for Google Mail"
http://mail.google.com/mail/signup Which local telephone companies in the United States allow land-line customers to receive SMS? Or do I have to sign up for a 24-month mobile phone contract at $30 per month?
You mean like everybody who relies on a land-line phone because they don't want to pay $360 per year extra?
I seem to remember Google shutting down the spoolers over a year ago. Now how can people with a land-line phone get an account?
For people who currently rely on a land-line phone, is a subscription to a reliable non-North American proxy cheaper than a subscription to mobile phone service?
If there were hoops to jump through before, they were so negligible that I don't even remember jumping through them.
Joe Mainusch http://www.weber-amps.com
Gmail has ads, and from all I've read, they use the same contextual algorithm as AdSense. The AdSense engine can't look for keywords in your pictures.
I use Gmail extensively, and it does a remarkable job of identifying spam and automatically putting it into the correct spam folder, where you can zap the entire contents of that folder with a single click. Once every few days, one or two new individual spams might occasionally fool the spam detection filters and sneak past and get into the main inbox folder, and that's not too bad at all. But what's disturbing me the most, is that I also set up a brand new Gmail account with a non-dictionary, oddball random string of characters for the username, and never ever sent any mail to it, or never ever gave that address out to anyone, as a test account to see if spammers would discover that address. Within a month, that account started accumulating spams at about the same rate as my main Gmail account. That proves that somebody is either handing out Gmail address lists to spammers, or spammers are able to extract email addresses out of the Gmail system somehow.
In which country? When will the invitation be extended to people with land-line telephone service? Why should I have to spend $100 for a prepaid phone and a month of service just to set it up, get a Gmail invite, and cancel my mobile phone account?
If you need a mobile phone, do you perhaps only need an SMS client? I couldn't find any documentation on how to send to AIM or ICQ without just replying, but in theory, could you enter something into the google reg page so it messages your AIM account rather than a phone?
http://www.physorg.com/news90096289.html
Now this article was posted 18 hours ago so unless that's "very soon", invitations still seem to be required.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In Nelson's voice: Ha ha!
So say we all
All I get is the standard invitation-only page, with no sign-up links. I realize from reading other posts that North America isn't included in the non-invitation sign-ups yet, but I don't even have the option to use a mobile phone either. At least the page doesn't allow for my carrier (Rogers) and I don't see 'Canada' as an option under the mobile sign-up page. It's a pity, really, because I've been waiting for a long time to get a gmail account and dump my hotmail account forever. Guess I have to be patient...
Google is offering a lot of storage for free, which doesn't seem economical. But the company hopes to make money off of e-mail by serving up ads tied to the content of e-mail in your box.
Just post your login and password here... and your address.
I'll send you your DVD full of eMails...
Don't worry... cost is free the for 1st one.
Wow, only one "funny" rated comment until now!
Thats really funny!
I know it is over the subject, and it is not funny, please move along.
If you have it, you don't need it. If you need it, you don't have it. If you have it you need more of it. If you have more of it, you don't need less of it. You need it to get it. And you certainly need it to get more of it. But if you don't already have any of it to begin with, you can't get any of it to get started, which means you really have no idea how to get it in the first place. Do you? You can share it, sure. You can even stock pile it if you'd like. But you can't fake it. Wanting it. Needing it. Wishing for it. The point is, if you've never had any of it, ever, people just seem to know.
By the way: It's Google Mail in germany too because some other company holds the rights on a "G-Mail" brand.
I made the switch from hotmail to gmail a few years ago, mid 2004, and I've never been happier! Each to their own.
In Soviet Russia Art Buys You!!!
That's funny, I was able to sign my dad up for gmail with no invite on December 25th. Hrm.
"E Pluribus Unix"
Getting rid of spam sent to Slashdot users is no big deal. There are many Slashdot users with Gmail accounts, so Gmail's filters should have no problem learning to recognize spam sent to mailing lists compiled from addresses harvested from Slashdot. So you don't see much spam except in the spam "folder". Your private email is a different story. I often see non-spam that Gmail puts in the spam folder, and I see lots of spam there despite the fact that my gmail address had very little circulation (it was only seen by very few people I sent invitation to. Otherwise it is only used by me to forward mail for backup in the Gmail account).
Besides, I have no idea how Gmail filters spam. I know quite well how FastMail filters spam: the processes are public, the blocklists and policies used in the SMTP gateway are known, and the filtering process is open (Spamassassin - an open source project, and the use of spamassassin scoring is completely customizable by the user).
The way I see it, Google will soon have to do in mainland Europe what it had to do in the UK - block users from registering @gmail.com addresses because someone else owns the trademark. So right now it allows Europeans to register @gmail addresses while they still can...
The difference between Fastmail and Gmail is that Gmail is run by a billion dollars corporation with huge infrastructure and has about 30,000,000 subscribers and FastMail.FM is run by a few developers on two racks with open source software and has only a 1,000,000 subscribers (perhaps a bit less).
And the main difference is that if you contact Gmail with a question or suggestion you get a form reply (to their credit they never called back but they did implement some of the suggestions I made). When you contact FastMail you usually get a reply from a developer and often the reply is something like ,"login to /beta/ and see if it works now". There are advantages and disadvantages to this.
There are people using both FastMail and Gmail (like I do) and enjoy both worlds. Both allow forwarding (free FastMail accounts require a little hacking that is documented in the FastMail wiki to do it) and cross-forwarding works great (both have duplicate suppression. In FastMail it is a documented fact. In Gmail it seems to work). There are people who like Gmail's interface better, and there are people who like FastMail's interface better, and of course FastMail has IMAP functionality on all membership levels including free accounts, so you can choose your interface. FastMail's interface is much geekier, but I guess for many Slashdotters this is an advantage.
I think Fastmail is worth checking out by Slashdotters at least to see how much functinality can be crammed into one webmail client. So go to Fastmail.FM and try it . Even if you don't adopt it as your main account you'd probably enjoy the experience and find some uses for it. (And if you don't want them to know I sent you remove the STKI parameter from the URL. Unlike Gmail, FastMail would not disclose to me who used my referal but only how many people used it).
There's hardly any Spam going out of Hotmail. Spam with a Hotmail return address usually is not sent by Hotmail. I have reported thousands of spam messages through SpamCop and have seen very few spam messages that were really sent from Hotmail's servers.
Email protocols are open standards. Anyone can use any address to identify with, and it is much easier for spammers to to pump out their spam with their own software that they run on the huge networks of computers they form from computers they hijack by infecting them with malware (botnets).
Webmail providers have tools to detect multiple signups and catch spammers, and Google's invitation system already let a spammer send himself (or herself?) 100 invitations (and then 10000 etc.) and yet there was very little spam coming out of Gmail, so they must have their spammer detection tools working OK, just like Hotmail and Yahoo do.
It is also GMail in the UK
MK