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Gmail Cracks Down on Third-Party Notifiers
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Aug 28, 2004 03:03 PM
from the their-sandbox-their-rules dept.
from the their-sandbox-their-rules dept.
crtfdgk writes "Recently, Google's gmail service has attempted to change login protocols to block third-party gmail notifiers that alert you to new email. Google has now taken it one step further and created a word-identification script filter as part of the login process. Personally, I find Google's gmail notifier annoying since it sits in my taskbar and doesn't have popup notification, unlike many other worthy Firefox or Mozilla plugins that feature gmail notification. Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email? Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?"
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Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
My feeling is that if it's a *FREE* service (meaning you don't pay Google anything to use Gmail) then no, you shouldn't be free to use whatever third party software you choose.
Sorry but when you're not even a paying customer, I feel no love.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
I share your feeling for the most part but I really don't understand their actions. Why not stop wasting your coding time during a beta program stopping third parties from making their experience better and work on adding the things the users want (ie POP3, Opera support, HTML-only, etc?)
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)
Note that Opera 7.6 [opera.com] (currently in beta/development) has enhanced Gmail support. I just saw there is actually an entire website devoted to Gmail on Opera [scss.com.au].
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
because you want to control the ping to one every ten minutes. Imagine if 3 million people had notifier on and they were pinging your server every ten seconds each. That's 300,000 hits per second. No good.
Gee, if only there were some way to track down those abusers by virtue of their abuse rather than the nature (third-party) of the app doing the checking. You know, some sort of identifier like an email address or something . . .
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Two minutes. GMail's official Notifer checks every 2 minutes.
The big deal is that they want third party apps to stop actually logging in and pulling the full HTML for the main page, and start copying what the notifier does, which is to pull down something much smaller, simpler, and less CPU intensive for google.
Also, it prevents their statistics from being skewed by apps acting like actual people. What, you think they're not logging stats on this stuff?
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Google can set it up so that the client establishes a TCP connection and then using periodic keepalives, keeps it up. Then instead of the client polling every X minutes, the server can simply send the client notification (one little packet) when there is new mail. By eliminating polling and TCP handshake overheads, it's a little more server-friendly. It might require a little more RAM to keep track of all those TCP connections, but RAM is cheap and each connection only consumes a few bytes.
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)
> Google can set it up so that the client establishes a TCP connection and then using periodic keepalives, keeps it up.
The official Gmail notifier simply uses standard http/https requests to do its work. The only difference between it and the "unofficial" method is that it retrieves a binary encoded data block and processes that.
See these forum postings for more details I documented:
Official Gmail Notifier protocol documented [outer-court.com]
--Phil.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
done! Address book import
we'll try Opera support
we'll try Ability to send messages with HTML formatting
we'll try POP3 access
working on it Plain HTML version of Gmail
working on it Ability to save a draft
So this is not entirely out of the question.
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
In a public beta like this, PR is still very important. The brand is already at stake. To treat it any other way would be stupid. People won't care about the Beta distinction later.
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Third party notifiers =~ /. effect on gmail server (Score:5, Interesting)
What I mean is, Slashdot bans people when they abusively pull RSS feeds too often, and ask people to only pull RSS once every 30 minutes, and no more often than that. It's possible that these programs are pinging the crap out of the server, essentially DDOS'ing the sytem with mindless queries every few seconds to every few minutes. If the notifiers only queried once every half hour, there would be no issue, but hen people would find it useless since there would be up to a half hour delay on being notified of new mail.
I think therein lies the crux of the matter.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Moreover, the only sort of person who could describe Google's changing of a free beta tool's interface as "cracking down" is someone who has never himself been cracked-down upon.
This isn't "cracking down." But at least it wasn't an YRO [slashdot.org] story.
If google's free gmail broke your favorite notifier plugin and that really upsets you, then you're taking free email far too seriously.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is a for profit corporation who's main source of income is from their advertisers. Totally different
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
(You know I'm right because I used a foreign language phrase...)
Oooooh, you speak Freedom...sorry, couldn't resist
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's that word right that people keep abusing. "I have the right to this... I have the right to that." Bottom line is -- no, you don't have the right to a lot of things. The rights you have are very clearly spelled out by the laws of your country. In the case of the United States, the Bill of Rights. I don't remember the constitution being ammended to include people having the right to leach off of other people's work.
Like many people before you, you confuse a "right" with "I really really wanna. Waaah!"
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
View 1) everything which is not explicitly allowed is forbidden.
View 2) everything which is not explicitly forbidden is allowed.
Your call : does your Bill of Rights define all of the rights which you have?
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a hint about what they say: view 2 is correct, view 1 was the framers' worst nightmare. One of the major concerns in the adoption of the bill of rights was that people might eventually start to believe view 1.
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)
No, it specifically limits the US Government's ability to curtail our rights. Our Constitution specically states that any rights not enumerated in it are reserved to the states or the people.
As a side note, it applies to our government, not private citizens and contracts that they undertake. Which is why , when people start screaming "Company X violated my 1st amendment rights" I realize they have no idea about what they speak.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Article IX: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
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That's exactly why (Score:4, Interesting)
What it boils down to is that you have whatever rights you have the ability and willingness to demand. What _that_ generally boils down to is that you have whatever rights your culture grants you. It is a bad, bad move as a culture for us to decide people have some minimal set of rights that can be enumerated somewhere - instead, keep pushing the envelope of your rights until it includes everything that doesn't hurt someone else.
That said, I don't believe we have a right to force Google to make it easy for 3rd party mail notifiers to work. It did miff me until someone pointed out how their notifier could be much more efficient. I wouldn't be surprised to see them solidify the notifier API and make it a public release after they have tested it for a while.
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It will get better, not worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Who says Google is trying to stifle 3rd party apps? It is still beta, they are still fixing things, and nothing has been finalized. Instant Messenger services change their protocols occasionally but they don't block 3rd party apps.
Either way, if you've got a Gmail account, be sure to give them your two cents [google.com].
Re:It will get better, not worse (Score:4, Informative)
Bullshit! Yahoo just did this very thing. They changed thier protocol in their new releasd that broke 3rd party apps. Yahoo, like others, do not publish protcol documentation or supply APIs, it is up to 3rd party programmers to reverse engineer it to get the 3rd party apps to work.
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Re:It will get better, not worse (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:It will get better, not worse (Score:5, Informative)
Yahoo blocking [earthweb.com]
AIM blocking [arstechnica.com]
"AOL made changes to their proprietary protocol (called OSCAR) that would ferret out anyone who wasn't using the official client."
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Re:It will get better, not worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, Opera and plain HTML versions of Gmail make sense in this context because it's a relatively easy way to increase the numbers; there's no technical reason they haven't supported that yet. Their engineers just haven't gotten around to it.
External POP support is a little more dubious: "In the future you will be able to access Gmail messages from non-Gmail accounts for free or at a nominal fee." [google.com] My bet is on the nominal fee. You can be sure they're going to start charging for POP access if they notice a significant drop in ad impressions for web-based Gmail 'cause that's going to mean a big drop in and CPM deals their sales folk are doing.
And the "beta" program? People, it's viral marketing. It's the ultimate technical shrug, "Meh, it's just a 'beta'" I can guarantee sites like GmailSwap [gmailswap.com] has their business development staff weeping tears of joy; you can't buy marketing like that, but hordes of technorati are creaming their jeans for this email-cum-status-symbol.
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Why would google do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been trying to imagine why google would do such an un-google thing. Perhaps they're worried about coders going to next level, and coding up entire gmail readers--or incorporating gmail account readers into something like Thunderbird [mozilla.org]. Adding that word-identification script filter to the login process would certainly prevent something like that--but also has the side effect of blowing up the seemingly innocuous gmail email notifier.
Which leads me to wonder how google's own system tray email notification program can still work. Obviously it's still possible, in theory, to do this same thing in spite of the word-identification script filter. Perhaps google will publish an API that 3rd party developers can use solely for the use of gmail notification abilities in their own programs.
I can't believe (thought it's definitely possible) that their goal would be to blow up only the 3rd party email notification programs. It seems like 3rd party notification programs would serve to only promote the use of gmail. And, as far as I know, they gain no ad revenue directly from their gmail notification system tray icon.
They actually publish an API for doing (limited) google searches in 3rd party programs, which seems like a more overt way to avoid ads and avoid google's revenue source. Maybe that'll be history soon, who knows? I hope this isn't an indication of their new corporate policy and philosophy.
Re:Why would google do this? (Score:4, Interesting)
It has nothing to do with adsense: you have to open messages to receive ads, and notifiers don't do that.
I think it's probably to block other people who aren't yet on our radar, such as spammers automating logins for the purposes of evil, or someone trying to create a shell program around Gmail that blocks ads.
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Re:Why would google do this? (Score:5, Informative)
GET
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GNotify 1.0.21.0)
Host: gmail.google.com
Cache-Control: no-cache
Cookie: en_US; GV=fea7b8d648-b9be26d2425258708508713e52327ed1; GMAIL_AT=6d9cba730be1a490-fea7ca187f; SID=AV8H4FYfeDJ-4lwENnL9kzcyiSJshVSKK2xixnjpjWgHs
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Set-Cookie: SID=AfvmInwaGVRkESW3REmGuiyongiyNzyqguZePHuQUyJ9s
Cache-control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Server: GFE/1.3
Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2004 23:45:55 GMT
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I however absolutely hate the color scheme involved with Notifier, so I will NOT be using it until they improve that. GTray (http://torrez.us/gtray), my app of choice, still works just fine as of about 10 minutes ago. If Google really does close it off at some point, I think we should petition them to open up a version like Google API with similar restrictions.
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really? (Score:5, Informative)
Get a better account (Score:5, Interesting)
beta (Score:4, Insightful)
"Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?"
fuckin
Fair enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a rather stupid story. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is a rather stupid story. (Score:4, Informative)
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Maybe Pop Goes the GMail worries them? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's about getting a hold on the desktop (Score:5, Insightful)
We all know Google has been deemed to be the best positioned company to compete with Microsoft. The big fear of course is that MS will use their desktop monopoly to blur the barrier between the offline and online worlds and make sure their offerings overtake Google in market share terms.
Now, take a look at these videos (http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/productinfo/co nceptvid/default.aspx [microsoft.com]) and you'll see that Longhorn will have this standard pop-up notification API that can be used by applications to inform the user of events. It is used prominently in these demos to show email reception.
Naturally, I would expect this to work with Exchange and possibly Hotmail (but what if Outlook/Outlook Express use it... See below), but not with Gmail.
Why is this important? Because if Gmail takes over the Web mail market, which could very well happen by 2006 given their good feature set and experience with applications at this scale, users will become accustomed to this functionality. Google will fiercely market the notifier applet to their users and everyone will have it, and they won't care less when the Longhorn applet can't notify them about new messages in their Gmail. And considering how many people I know who only have a Web mail account, I think this would allow Google to prevail by meshing and extending their user experience right into their desktops.
Then again, given that they're thinking of implementing POP access and that MS mail clients may as well use this feature, this may all be a moot point...
Re:welcome to crazyworld (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, not only is the Google Office Suite better and more stable than MS Office; the GoogleOS is finally ready for prime time
And this may as well be why Google actually represents more than a threat to Microsoft. It is not about the desktop operating system anymore; a new breed of software companies is out there using the Internet as their distribution channel. Google, Amazon, eBay, etc., are all software companies in disguise. Typically, you don't pay to use their software; advertisement and special services takes care of that. But still, you access their servers to use their software in order to get your information processed.
As broadband becomes ubiquitous, we should expect more and more innovative uses of the Internet (note I said the Internet, not necessarily the Web...) As for MS, how much more can they really grow? New machines cannot sustain their level of growth forever, and the users will not migrate to their next version of Windows or Office suite just because; they are now finding themselves diverting towards new initiatives and into new markets where they actually have to (gasp!) compete, lest they lose relevance in the larger scheme.
I don't see MS disappering anytime soon, but certainly it is not the good ol' times where they could just crush away their competition, and they are worried about that. Whether they have reason enough to be worried or not is up for debate, but just like with people, stress can be more harmful to companies that the actual situation they're stressing about.
Most of these ideas have been said before many times, and that includes several Slashdotters. You can go look for the posts yourself.
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What is this fud? (Score:5, Insightful)
Legitimate reasons? (Score:5, Interesting)
Its all about server load. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now these third party apps work by logging into the gmail account and pulling up the records, its just like you going to the webpage and logging in. This requires there system to access and cache every message in your inbox.
Imaging what would happen to the
This is what they are trying to prevent, thousands of third party checkers slowing down there system. I would be willing to bet once they have there gmail API stablized they will publish something like they have for the google search API, allowing third party programs to PROPERLY check the system without using excess resources.
I heard... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't like their policies, they'll refund your money.
Assuming this is to block notifiers... (Score:5, Insightful)
This may be a silly question but... (Score:5, Insightful)
A) That there IS a word logon system currently implemented.
B) That said word logon system was to block third party systems from interoperating with Google.
Finally, why was this put on Slashdot when there is absolutely no link to any article whatsoever to backup the few sentences that make up this story? Since when is some guy's short four sentence oppinion the ENTIRE story, without giving any examples whatsoever?
What a stupid question... (Score:4, Informative)
Sure. You're free to use any software you want. And Google is free to not allow you to use any software with their service that you don't want. And since you're not paying them anything, you don't have much leverage to get them to change their policy, do you?
It's a free service. Take it or leave it.
Re:Gmail Notifier is NOT complete (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Gmail Notifier is NOT complete (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Simply put.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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