ExtremeTech Reviews Google's Gmail Beta

JimLynch writes "Gmail, Gmail, Gmail--how do we love thee? Let us count the ways! We finally had a chance to try Google's new e-mail service and we're happy to say that, for the most part, we love it! In this article, we'll give you an overview of what you can expect from Gmail, as well as what we liked and didn't like about it. We'll also tell you what we think needs to be added to make it even better."

Pretty good timing

[inode_buddha]

What with their upcoming IPO and all.

Yeah, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really need more 60 fps for mail? My computer does 72 fps on Gmail, and compared to my old computer that did 60, I really can't tell any difference.

The review is a bit lacking...

[SeaDour]

I'm glad they covered all the important features and what needs to be added or improved, but I wish they'd spent some time going over the privacy issues and what they think about Google reading our e-mails.

Ah well -- still a decent review overall. Kudos to Mr. Lynch.

Re:We just want it...

[Planesdragon]

All we care about is getting the username we want; the notion of *not* getting an account -- regardless of faults -- isn't even fathomable...

You seem to think that we're ALL mindless fanboys.

I for one won't be getting a GMAIL account. Unless the featureset somehow is worth the upset, which is probably won't be, I'm not going to bother.

Re:why gmail?

[The_Mystic_For_Real]

I have three minor and slightly redundant things to say.

1. People want to be the guy to get "[e-mail]" so they can cease making friends and family remember a 7 digit number when they want to send an e-mail.

2. Others may want to make back-up accounts for files that they need to keep but aren't highly confidential or frequently used. They could also use it to distribute files amongst a group by uploading it and telling people the password. Now they can waste google.com bandwidth instead up their own.

3. If the government began giving free cheese to everyone it would be much more interesting than GMail.

Re:why gmail?

[penguinoid]

there are a million of [email accounts] and I'm sure they'll be just as spammy as hotmail and anyone else

Hell no! I expect Google to be able to clean up spam very, very well, and quickly.

Or do you think that they are bad at finding things?

Can you say: Common storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is everyone missing the biggest point here? Gmail is not about mail, it is about One GigaByte of shared storage! That's how many 6MP pictures? Or how many mp3's? How many accounts will simply be created to just share a gigabyte of stuff?

Yup, I know there are privacy issues, but have you ever heard of encryption?

And finally, am I finisheg asking questions?

GMail woop deeee do

[GoClick]

Yeah yeah it's kinda cool, mostly cause it's free but whatever. Most people probably don't need the search features. To be that detailed, plain text search in any mail client would do. IMAP and a Gig of storage from someone like www.upnix.com shouldn't cost you very much and you can get your own domain. I'm just not that impressed GMail doesn't tickle me pink.

How much space is actually needed?

[FaasNat]

Having 1 gig of space is a lot to fill up for us regalar joes. As hard as that would be for me to fill up, I have heard that Google employees have 1 terrabyte of space. Imagine all the email that would add up to!

I still think its a big liability...

[doormat]

It could easily be a pirates den. If a CD in MP3s is roughly 100MB, users go into some IRC channel, request with an gmail addy and then it magically shows up in their inbox to download and delete. All at google's disk space and bandwidth.

PGP

[lukew]

PGP support would be cool.

Maybe some client-side Java to read in your keys from your drive / USB key to decrypt mail?

Re:We just want it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, you haven't used it yet. The feature set is worth pop up ads.

That's how goddamn awesome it is. It makes Hotmail look as old as terminal access made mailing your punchcards to be processed look. That is:

hotmail : gmail :: punch cards : terminal access

Re:Mothers Day

[logic-gate]

Yes, I agree with you about the limitations of space , etc with the current services. But I don't see all your average "dumb" users queueing up to change their email address.

The biggest impediment for google trying to get customers to change email is the lock-in effect of their current email addresses. How many hotmail/yahoo users will want to let all their friends and family know that they have a new email address when just sending and receiving mail can be daunting to them?

The other problem google faces is how to get the message out. Lots of older people I know don't know what a megabyte or a gigabyte is and their faces glaze over when you try to explain.

Secure email

[penguinoid]

I wonder if we could convince Google to allow PGP signatures. Or rather, to automatically generate one. Then it would be harder for spammers and viruses to pretend to be from somewhere else. And if Gmail starts using PGP, I am sure that several others will follow suit.

Also, I recently received a zipped executable named TextDocument.zip from a gmail account. I wonder, have spammers already started using Gmail? Or perhaps a virus impersonating the address?

Targetted Advertising? IPO Impact?

[MechCow]

Was it just me or was that article fud (pro-google propaganda without really covering the issues). My greatest concern, and I'm sure its one I share with at least one other person, is that I think I may feel quite uncomfortable about targetted advertising. I don't want to get a new girlfriend (lucky I'm reading slashdot :-) and find ads aimed at buying her gifts, nor do I want to write about my ichy balls and have ichy ball remedies on the sidebar. The article did not cover this at all. It will depend on google's implementation, so far we have some reason to trust them but this is a dicey new area.

And the article did not even mention google's IPO. Google is discussed in this article and by some of /.'s readbase as 'the people's company'. Of course, after it floats, it will be the shareholders company. And it will (IANAL) become illegal for them to act not in the interests of those shareholders. Which could mean illegal for them to do some of the 'good' things they have been doing - because they will be spending other people's money/investment.

Finally... how is google going to stop this service being used for W@r3z? I forsee a situation where an unscrupulous individual logs in, uploads a new game or movie, then writes a perl script that can send it to whoever they want. Google can shut down the account but the game/movie could easily have been sent to hundreds or thousands of people at considerable bandwidth cost. Surely they have thought of this I wonder how they will stop it? Will they tolerate this sort of thing on the small scale - I mean they will have to won't they?

Current services are better for many users

[Anonymous Coward]

Gmail is completely useless to me, and many other users who are willing to pay a bit per year to not have to sacrifice our privacy.

Of all the things I could spend a few dollars per month on, there isn't much that I would consider more practical than centralized imap access to my email at my own domain.

Services such as fastmail.fm (I won't link it) already provide for $50 per year:
- ssl pop3 and proxy
- ssl imap and proxy
- ssl smtp and proxy
- webmail
- full server-side custom sieve rules
- spam filtering
- virus filtering
- checking free yahoo and hotmail boxes
- aliases
- hosting mail for your own domain
- payment via payapl

All with 150 MB of storage base, file storage and transfer, and 750MB bandwidth per month base.

I'm sorry Google, but you're going to have to do a lot better than this if you want my permission to keep tabs on my life.

Beware

[dude127]

No matter how cool gmail looks (and it does look cool), you are asking for trouble when you agree to route all of your e-mail through a free corporate account.

After you begin to rely upon their service, you could be at their mercy if you use them as your primary account. They could choose to take away features at a whim (or not provide them as technology advances) or outright discontinue you at will. I don't know about the rest of you, but its a real pain to to switch e-mail (especially if you have a gig of stuff on their servers).

Not don't get me wrong, by all accounts, Google is a great company. However, like all corportations, Google needs to make $$$. They will start off with innocent banners in your e-mail, but as the company matures they will begin to look at their bottom line more and more (especially if the founders retire) and you'll be at their mercy.

This is going to sound insane, but I'm hoping that Microsoft builds up a distributed 100K server cluster (or equivalent) to compete against them. Someone needs to keep Google honest :)

Selling GMail Accounts?

[tisme]

My gmail account works perfectly fine, in fact Google is letting current email users pick two "friends" to join. After seeing this post and the interest, I thought that maybe I should sell my two accounts on eBay... I loaded up eBay and did a search for gMail and to my amazement, dozens of people are already selling them and getting up to $50 for each!

Wow... $100 USD or making two friends happy? Tough choice... btw popular ones like thunder@gmail are gone already but [e-mail] is still available... hmmm $$$ or friends? grrr....

Global Vagabonds and Gypsies

[Beautyon]

Thats what Gmail is for. Its for all those people who DONT have a computer themselves and who only use terminals in airports and internet cafes all over the world. They are legion, and previously, had to check their mail regularly or see their unique accounts deactivated. Even if they did check their mail regularly, The amount of space they were given was so small as to be almost useless.

With Gmail, all of this changes. And there is no barrier to switching, save changing your email address and informaing everyone, this price is very affordable; there are not thousands of legacy emails and family photo attachments that cannot be transfered over to the Gmail - the artificailly low storage limits on the other free systems have seen to that. Once they, the Hotmail legions understand what Gmail is, all the other free services will see users desert them like rats fleeing a sin...well, very fast.

The only way that the other services can possibly hope to stem this flow is to immediately duplicate the storage and permanency of account features of Gmail. Only then will the price of leaving become too great.

And that is not going to happen.

Re:Reading through this

[Trejkaz]

If it really does show nothing but JavaScript, with no HTML other than that required to launch the JavaScript, then what you're looking at isn't a stylesheet, but some method of obfuscating the information on the page to guarantee that your browser doesn't cache your email in plain text. (Nevertheless Google _are_ the sort to use stylesheets, so they probably use those too.)

This is a cool idea which I have seen used at one of my previous employers, though in that case we used an applet on the client side to do "proper" decryption of the pages.

Re:We just want it...

[Lord Kano]

The cost of billion bytes of storage is next to nothing. So, as the grandparent post said, why bother?

For the benefit of those among us who rode the short bus to school, I'll say it this way.

Free billion bytes that you can access from anywhere you can get an internet connection.

LK

Speed issues with Gmail

[dunelin]

I don't know if anybody else has the same problem, but incoming mail takes forever to get into my Gmail inbox. It's on the order of 5-10 minutes, as compared to Hotmail and Yahoo, which are almost instantaneous. If I want something from somebody right away, I've already learned not to give them my Gmail address.

Re:We just want it...

[danielrm26]

"I for one won't be getting a GMAIL account. Unless the featureset somehow is worth the upset, which is probably won't be, I'm not going to bother."

If Gmail upsets you, then you shouldn't use it. I was making a light joke about how this is a "must have" novelty, but I *do* think it's a better webmail account than what is currently out there.

I don't use webmail myself, but I like having a constantly running, huge storage vault of mail that I don't want going to my main address. Gmail seems to be able to do this better than its competitors.

But yeah, as far as me saying that we geeks would use it regardless of faults -- that's a bit of an exaggeration. I was just putting this in the category of "geek toy", which most geeks jump on without thinking.

You seem to be an exception.

gmail can't subscribe yahoogroups!!!

[rahard]

Am I the only person having a problem subscribing to yahoogroups mailing list with my gmail account?

I am able to send a subscribe message, but when I tried to reply to the confirmation email it's just gone. Or at least never heard since...

-- br