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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?
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...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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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.
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!
as you can tell i show my email address on /.
and the spame filter work well, i get some 5K in spam and MAYBE 1 email will get past
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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
I do have both except I pay for the Enhanced account at Fastmail. GMail doesn't compare in terms of features, with Fastmail offering full Sieve scripting, I've got my domain hosted and sieve lets me do pretty much everything I ever wanted to do with email. It's also great for managing spam.
Fastmail lets me use webDAV to access my file storage, and I just love IMAP/IDLE support. With Fastcheck installed that monitors my mailbox with IDLE, the notification often pops up before I get it on my Blackberry (PUSH-based), something Exchange has never managed to do at work.
I get loads of spam in my GMail even though I've never given it to anyone, which I think speaks for itself. 1 or 2 spams a week with Fastmail and I've had it for 8+ years.
Open to the world, yet it's still a "Beta" application. Huh.
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=
Yeah I have both and personally I have fastmail set up to just forward my email to gmail. It's a matter of preference but I find the gmail interface a lot easier to use than the fastmail one. As far as spam goes gmail does a great job of stopping it from getting to my inbox.
The reason that I still use the fastmail account is because it still checks my other email accounts - especially my hotmail account - that I have stopped using but still have the odd email sent to. Gmail doesn't offer the same way of checking other email accounts but having fastmail forward to gmail works just as well.
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.
Since I can't seem to find a way to contact you in your profile, here: http://mail.google.com/mail/a-918525b4ed-0d5b5e7fa 7-d5b4b8634a
:)
You get to race the rest of the world for it
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??
GMail seems to do a pretty good job of spam filtering - I can't recall getting any spam that wasn't detected and put into my spam folder, although I have to say that Optimum Online (having been though a couple of spam filtering revisions) now do a very good job also. The worst spam filter is Mozilla mail, which despite my "training" it daily since day one still lets large volumes of spam though every day.
I guess being a giant provider of e-mail puts you in a good position to do filtering since you could (in theory at least - don't know if Google is doing it) simply see if the same mail/mail template is being sent to very many accounts and reasonably classify it as spam based purely on that.
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.
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
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.
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?
By the way: It's Google Mail in germany too because some other company holds the rights on a "G-Mail" brand.