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.

Comments

Capacity drop?

[Short Circuit]

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?

Re:Capacity drop?

[THE anonymus coward]

I doubt we will see a drop in capacity at this point. Everyone who wants a gmail account has had it for at least a year now, so I don't think many will come who haven't come yet.

Re:Capacity drop?

[duffbeer703]

The invitations had more to do with mapping social networks than limiting capacity.

Re:Capacity drop?

[mfh]

Most people I meet on campus have never even heard of GMail.

Where do you go? Remind me never to hire any of those uninformed tech grads!

Just checked...

[nathan s]

...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.

annnd checked again...

[nathan s]

If I try to go to gmail.com, I get the old URL (the one with &ltmpl=m_wsad and no way to sign up) but the link in the summary (with &ltmpl=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.

Playing the same game MS played

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

First get all the data of the users into its servers, relatively easily, cheaply and painlessly. Like Word5' importing WordPerfect or Excel importing Lotus123 without any hitch. Once all the data is safely collected MS increased the switching costs and made it nearly impossible to get back to the competitors. Till date it keeps changing file formats, macro language, APIS, look and feel and tries enshrine even the bugs in Word5 as the new "standard" "open" document format!!!

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.

Re:Playing the same game MS played

[thue]

Google is actually "not being evil" here, by making it easy to extract your email.

Just go to "settings"->"forwarding and pop" and select "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)". You can then download a copy of all the mail to your computer using a normal email client (You can choose to keep a copy on gmail). You can also get all mail automatically forwarded to an outside email address.

That makes it easy to switch email provider; I used it the other day to download a copy of all my email, just in case. It seems to me that Google has chosen not to lock in users, but to simply try retain customers by being better. Which is the way it should be, and which makes me more comfortable relying on google services in the future.

Regards, Thue

Re:Fastmail

[Nimloth]

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.

Re:Worldwide BETA

[Overzeetop]

And this is different from other large applications like, say, Vista how?

Re:Not really

[AKAImBatman]

Gmail still requires either an invation or the ability to receive text messages.

I haven't read the CNN article linked here, but I did read the article on my Wii last night. The long and short of it is that signup is geographically limited. Just about everyone not in North America is now able to sign up without going through the text message routine. The Google spokepeople have promised that North America will follow "soon".

Hope that clarifies things.

i love gmail

[teh_chrizzle]

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.

Re:Not really

[montyzooooma]

But if you're signing up for a gmail account you're already trading a certain amount of privacy away anyway.

Re:Not really

[jbarr]

Maybe you should read the FAQ...

Their FAQ pages have not been updated yet. As with almost all previous Gmail enhancementsit takes time to roll things out globally. When I navigate to Gmail.com using IE7 or Firefox, I see a nice "Sign up for Gmail" panel with a link that takes you right to a signup screen--no invitation is necessary. (Now, I'm using a company proxy that hits the Internet in Europe, so YMMV depending on your location.)

Give it a day or so, and you should see the non-invitation link.

a nagging problem about gmail

[supernova87a]

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??

Re:Not really

[jbarr]

Per a user on the "Gmail Users" Google Groups, this may be only for certain non-United States locations. When I connect to Gmail from my home in the USA, I only get the SMS screen, but when I connect through my office (through a company proxy that hits the Internet in France) I get the non-invitation screen.