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Gmail Adds Features

Posted by timothy on Tue Oct 05, 2004 07:18 PM
from the it-seems-to-work-well dept.
Businesses Google The Internet Communications
tommertron writes "Gmail rolled out a host of new features today. Big improvement in the contacts list, with the ability to search it and organize messages according to contact. Also, you can now forward all incoming gmail to any email account, but, according to Google, this feature is only 'free for now.' Does this mean gmail will start charging for some features? Meanwhile, Internet News is reporting that on Monday, some gmail accounts contained an Atom link for reading your email summaries in a news reader. Also meanwhile, my decrepit Hotmail account still hasn't given me that promised 250 megabytes ..."
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  • Duh! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by (54)T-Dub (642521) * <tpaine@gm a i l . com> on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:20PM (#10446253) Journal
    Of course they are going to charge you to forward your email. Otherwise you could use their great spam filter and bandwidth without having to see their adds. And what do you expect from a Free email service. At least you can have some confidence that they won't sell your email address.

    Queue bitching about targeted advertising.....
    • My friend runs this IMAP [logenv.org] and with the wording "It's free during the test", its given hope that google will implement IMAP(as a pay service) when it launches.

      Brin talked about Imap for gmail in april but after that it seems there has not been talk about it at google. The most important features are in this order- IMAP, folders and retrieval of mail from other accounts to gmail.

      There are other feature requests which you can check here [grytoyr.net]

    • Re:Duh! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gmuslera (3436) <gmuslera@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday October 05 2004, @09:45PM (#10447107) Homepage Journal
      Forwarding all your mail still needs you to have 1gb to store it in somewhere else. You will not have its search engine, its conversation mode, and even its labels (thing you can get thru imap, afaik). Gmail package is not just spam filter, 1gb capacity and so on, is all the features combined. Even the targetted ads is potentially a feature.

      Using gmail just because its spam filter is like buying a Ferrari just because it looks nice. Is the whole engine that worths.

  • Does it work properly/completely with Opera yet? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Propagandhi (570791) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:20PM (#10446254) Journal
    Opera is my browser of choice (I've found it to be more stable than Firefox, if not as full featured) and so far it hasn't been compatible with G-Mail. Does this upgrade improve support for my favorite browser?

  • Oh... (Score:5, Informative)

    by tommertron (640180) * on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:21PM (#10446261) Homepage Journal
    Forgot to mention that they updated the gmail notifier. New icon, and a little better. Updated automatically though, without my permission...

    • Re:Oh... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bricklets (703061)
      Gmail Notifier for my system did not update automatically. Rather, an error message (-1 code) popped up saying it couldn't check my mail. I installed the new version myself. Personally, I'd be a bit scared if it did update itself considering I don't *recall* having that setup.

      Oh, and I hate the new blue icon. I thought the red icon from before stood out more. Personal preference I suppose.

  • don't be greedy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by liquidpele (663430) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:21PM (#10446265) Homepage Journal
    Man, google gives you 1GB of free space, and you want free forwarding too? poor baby.

    gmail is one nice web application... I do some web stuff part time, and I'm currently picking it apart trying to figure out how it works... no luck so far, but I've determined they use a shit-ton of frames ;) Can't wait to check out the new features though.

        • Re:don't be greedy (Score:5, Informative)

          by dragonman97 (185927) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @08:44PM (#10446822)
          I second that. In fact, I sent them a similar message via their suggestion form. I explained that I would pay for the ability to have my old email (in mbox format) imported with the correct dates.

          Have you tried using mutt to bounce the messages to Gmail? Such messages should retain the date attributes, as well as sender, destination, and other such goodies, assuming Gmail doesn't mangle this stuff (and I don't believe it does).

      • Re:don't be greedy (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Yakman (22964) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @10:14PM (#10447300) Homepage Journal
        I would say that with the amount of smart cookies working for Google, someone managed to write a script that takes a nicely commented and well written javascript file and removes whitespace, comments, shortens variable names and spits out the result. This means they can have a smaller download for end users and a maintainable source file for developers.

        It wouldn't take too long for someone who really wanted it to "un-obfuscate" the source. At least the formatting part you could do via a script and then rename variables when you work out what they're for.

  • Atom (Score:3, Interesting)

    by javabsp (591265) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:21PM (#10446269) Homepage
    I saw the Atom link, but upon clicking on it, only a skeleton atom file is shown. It could be that I didn't have any unread mail...

    • Re:Atom (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Delta-9 (19355) *
      Here is the atom icon: I happened to post to another place about this. I have a screen shot as well, but that's kinda useless:

      http://gmail.google.com/gmail/images/atom-badge. gi f

  • Whither standards? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kgbspy (696931) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:23PM (#10446276)
    I agree with Dave Winer, the author of the RSS format. With RSS feeds becoming more and more popular across a whole raft of different applications (including tasty new integration with Firefox [mozilla.org]), surely combining the two formats (Atom and RSS) would be beneficial, lest we end up with another VHS/Beta or DVD+/-RW/RAM situation... Rather than have the two battle it out to the death, why not get the best of both worlds?
    • With RSS feeds becoming more and more popular across a whole raft of different applications (including tasty new integration with Firefox), surely combining the two formats (Atom and RSS) would be beneficial, lest we end up with another VHS/Beta or DVD+/-RW/RAM situation..

      Why not just have the readers support both? Firefox supports both RSS and Atom feeds. Although there are technically 3 different RSS formats because of the non-backwards compatible changes they keep making.

      I hope they'll stick with RS

    • Re:Whither standards? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Quantum Jim (610382) <jfcst24.yahoo@com> on Wednesday October 06 2004, @01:33AM (#10448230) Homepage Journal

      ...surely combining the two formats (Atom and RSS) would be beneficial, lest we end up with another VHS/Beta or DVD+/-RW/RAM situation...

      That's actually why Atom was first proposed. After Netscape lost control of the standard, RSS spintered into seven incompatible versions [diveintomark.org]! Atom is an attempt to merge and stabilize the best of "Really Simple Syndication", "RDF Site Summary", and everything in between. The reason Google uses Atom, is because Blogger is a major sponser. Personally, I think Atom has an impressive design (although some is still a little clunky). Note that the final draft has yet to be published, as Atom isn't even 1.0 yet!

  • ATOM feed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pridkett (2666) <slashdotNO@SPAMwagstrom.net> on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:23PM (#10446278) Homepage Journal
    So I noticed the big red new features thing yesterday, clicked on it and saw a message saying they were adding new features, but nothing about them. I also had the mysterious ATOM feed as a button on my sidebar. I clicked on it and saw that it was a feed of new messages in my mail box. "This is a cool step in providing cool technology to the masses," I thought to myself.

    Alas, it had one major problem. No API. So there was no way that I could actually subscribe. This is because the URL was non-descript and requires an authentication (as I would hope a feed of my new messages would). Today I went back to take a screenshot of the new sidebar and blog about my adventure in GmailAtom land, and the link was gone. Sad. Here's to hoping that it comes back soon.

  • gmail invites (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rebar (110559) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:24PM (#10446285)
    OK, so who still does NOT have a gmail account? I have two invites left - what goodness will you do to humanity if I give you one?

    AND - if gmail use is growing exponentially (I got 6 invites after 2 weeks use, and of 4 invites sent out, there are 2 new users), how long until eveyone on earth is buried in gmail accounts?

  • Time To Test (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rie Beam (632299) <chargementpas@gmail.com> on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:24PM (#10446286) Journal
    Time to test Google's true capabilities...two GMail accounts fowarding messages to each other...

    "Send"

    • Re:Time To Test (Score:5, Informative)

      by rduke15 (721841) <rduke15@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:29PM (#10446328)
      Won't work. They use a "Delivered-To:" header, like Postfix (and most current mailers?).
        • Still won't work, for the same reason.

          The way "Delivered-To:" works:

          Mailer is about to deliver mail to some_mailbox:

          - searches for a "Delivered-To: some_mailbox" header.

          - if not found: adds it and delivers the mail

          - if found: drops the mail, probably also writing something in the logs.

          Since any forwarding is done after delivery, it won't work.

          Will have to find something else to test their bandwidth. If you come up with something that may really work, maybe you could send them a job application? They

  • I've used GMail for a while now... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sheetrock (152993) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:29PM (#10446322) Homepage Journal
    While its features are more iterative than revolutionary, I believe GMail is the logical next step in how we all do e-mail.

    We are all inundated with e-mail nowadays. Semantic parsing and bayesian filtering are commonplace, but no conventional e-mail client allows automatic grouping by subject in quite the manner of GMail. I enjoy the ability to search messages rather than arbitrarily tossing them into folders to be forgotten. Indeed, e-mail has called out for intelligent grouping for some time now.

    It opens up some fantastic marketing opportunities as well. Already they exploit this with the excellent GoogleAds along the side of the screen that have relevance to the e-mail one is perusing; however, with the gradual acceptance of commercial e-mail by people and by legislation I believe there is a great deal of future potential in selling/buying general profiles of e-mail accounts using this same data. As search engines and e-mail combine, the quality of the search interface becomes a mute point; the most interesting information is pushed to the user based on relevance to their online lives.

    The only real concern is privacy, but I'll bet it's possible to sell really general-type information without violating any policies -- thus using advertising to continue to deliver the kinds of features users expect without costing them a dime. If only they could do something like this with online backup/recovery as well.

    • Re:I've used GMail for a while now... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by groomed (202061) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:58PM (#10446544)
      Threading of messages has been around for decades. Searching is easy and fast on modern hardware. Storage is perhaps not quite a dime per GB yet but that day is not far off. Spam detection technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years. The only benefit of gmail is that it's accessible anywhere you can access the WWW. That's cool, but personally I much prefer to SSH into my home machine.

      I'm not trying to downplay the significance of gmail. It's a very nice application. Even if it wasn't, new sources of throw-away email accounts are always welcome. And it keeps Hotmail in check. But grandiose proclamations like "I believe GMail is the logical next step in how we all do e-mail", well, that's just liturgical bullshit.

  • Subaddresses (Score:5, Informative)

    by sploo22 (748838) <dwahler.gmail@com> on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:29PM (#10446325)
    One feature that's been there since the beginning, but apparently isn't mentioned anywhere on the site, is unlimited sub-addressing. Say I sign up for foo@gmail.com; I automatically receive mail addressed to foo+work@gmail.com, foo+urgent@gmail.com, foo+slashdot@gmail.com, or whatever I make up. Then I can filter or forward messages based on these criteria. Why isn't this nice feature getting any press?

    • Re:Subaddresses (Score:5, Informative)

      by morkeld (104557) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @08:01PM (#10446557)

      It's a handy feature but it's not just Google, see this FAQ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/mail/addressing/

      Note, from the FAQ, "Recent releases of sendmail come with this working already."

    • Re:Subaddresses (Score:4, Interesting)

      by aussie_a (778472) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @08:01PM (#10446563) Journal
      This can actually be used to have multiple users have multiple accounts (if only during beta). foo+john@gmail.com gets forwarded to boo@hotmail.com while foo+jane@gmail.com gets forwarded to jane@speedmail.net

  • The one feature that I would really like... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Froze (398171) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:33PM (#10446357) Homepage
    I just recently acquired a gmail account and the one feature that I have not been able to find anything on is permenancy(sp?). I would like to use gmail exclusively but without any gaurantee that I will always have my account it is a step that I am not willing to take just yet.

    Get your Free flascreen whatevers here! [freeflatscreens.com]
    • I sent them this question about two months ago. Here is the reply I received:

      Hello Alice,

      Thank you for your message.

      Once you have a Gmail account, it is valid. This means that even after Gmail becomes more widely available, you will be able to keep your account, and your username will remain unchanged. Hopefully, this eases your concern.

      We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email.

      Sincerely,

      The Gmail Team

      • Re:The one feature that I would really like... (Score:5, Funny)

        by ari_j (90255) on Wednesday October 06 2004, @12:59AM (#10448101)
        They must have replied more nicely and quickly due to your gender. It took me almost a year to get this response:

        Dear Ari,

        Once you have a Gmail account, it is valid until we decide to give it to a female requesting the same user ID. As Gmail becomes more widely available, we plan to use this to accomplish several goals.

        1. To ensure a balanced user base, consisting mostly of attractive young geek girls who feel empowered because they stole accounts from men
        2. To deprive you of your ability to communicate with cute young geek girls, as we will also be blocking incoming mail from outside the Gmail system

        In effect, the Gmail staff will be the only men able to communicate with the cute, young geek girls. We wish you luck, and hope that you enjoy using our service for the next several weeks until we can find a suitable female replacement for you.

        Sincerely,

        The Gmail Team

        It's really not fair.

  • Konqueror (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cranx (456394) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:51PM (#10446495)
    When do you think gmail will support Konqueror?

  • Gmail doesn't let you sort! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ccnull (607939) <null@@@filmcritic...com> on Tuesday October 05 2004, @08:28PM (#10446731) Homepage
    Gmail's biggest flaw is that you can't sort your messages by anything (i.e. there's no heading bar at the top of the mail listing that you can click, a la Subject, Sender, or Date). Yahoo Mail is seamless at this. With Gmail you get sorted by date, that's it.

    Now you might say I could just search my inbox, but that's no good either. Why? The search results suck. I have 171 emails with the exact same subject line right now (running a promotion), and searching for that exact string gets me 68 results. Great... You also can't sort those results, either.

    Love the interface otherwise, but the technology needs work and the interface needs sorting!

  • How to make your own Gmail Atom feed (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2004, @10:08PM (#10447253)
    There's been a lot of discussion on the Atom feed at InsideGoogle [blogspot.com], including a link to make your own Gmail Atom feed if your account doesn't have a link yet. Also, some stuff here [blogspot.com] and here [blogspot.com]

  • Choice of language? (Score:4, Funny)

    by A Guy From Ottawa (599281) on Wednesday October 06 2004, @06:50AM (#10449073)

    Gmail rolled out a host of new features today.

    Is anyone else disapointed that the submitter didn't slip a vulgarity or two when describing the new features?

    If I had submitted it I would have at least worked in one... like:
    Gmail rolled out a fuck-ton of new features today.

    Like at work yesterday, this newbie kid was like:
    "How come we don't make a linux version of our software?" My reply was something like
    "Because that would take a fuck-ton of money. Dumbass."

    Anyways... I digress.

  • Forwarding is actually quite flexible! (Score:4, Informative)

    by jbarr (2233) on Wednesday October 06 2004, @08:22AM (#10449606) Homepage
    The forwarding feature is also more extended than I expected. In the "Settings", click on the "Forward" tab and you can enable a "Global" forwarding where EVERY received message gets forwarded to another email address. You can also further configure what to do with the received message. But did you know that "Filters" now have a Forwarding option? You can optionally have a Filter forward a message to any email address based on the filtering criteria. This gives you a lot more flexibility

    • Re:Too much fuss over gmail (Score:5, Insightful)

      by StevenHenderson (806391) <stevehenderson@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday October 05 2004, @07:34PM (#10446369)
      so what does GMail have to offer others don't?

      No new features?!?! How bout these:

      1. Text-based ads instead of graphics or flash.
      2. No taglines. Very nice if you want to send out professional emails.
      3. Excellent spam filter.
      4. FAST CSS (might be wrong about that) interface.
      5. Google search built right into your email inbox, archive, etc.

      I can go on if need be. You're nuts.

        • Re:Too much fuss over gmail (Score:4, Funny)

          by Zangief (461457) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @08:39PM (#10446799) Homepage Journal
          Yes, these are all advantages of gmail over Yahoo mail or Hotmail. But not over locally running email clients. Why use gmail if there are apps which are completely ad-free, work with any number of great spam filters, are faster than gmail, and work without a network connection?

          I'd like to see you send email WITHOUT A NETWORK CONNECTION! It would be a technical breakthrough, but probably you would be sued out of existance by isps.

          Seriously, web-based email is good for this simple reason: if you connect from more than one computer to the internet, is a hassle to go around installing whatever client you have in mind. If your are planning on connecting to a remote server, lets say, via ssh, you still have to download putty, etc (if you are on windows).

    • Re:Say it with me now: H T M L (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dragonman97 (185927) on Tuesday October 05 2004, @09:08PM (#10446949)
      No one should advocate HTML mail - this is just crap, and the best way to inject all sorts of junk into e-mail. If a message isn't getting to you clearly in plain text e-mail, then the sender really needs to take a writing class. I think this .sig sums it up: (credit: Matthew Keller) "No one ever says, 'I can't read that ASCII E-mail you sent me.'"

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