Rediff Joins The 1GB Webmail Club

BGT writes "Gmail has for sure caused a furor by offering announcing 1 GB of space for free. But they are still in the beta stage and you cannot sign up for an account yet. Now India-based Rediff claims to be the first to actually start offering 1GB of space for free, with their Rediffmail service." (Spymac mail users might disagree with the "first free gig" claim.) Signing up for a rediffmail account was straightforward; the site has an intelligent add-a-contact interface when you send email to a new address, but lacks the searchability and multiple-label capability of gmail.

A lot of SPAM comes from there

[Anonymous Coward]

And it is being blocked on several black lists.

Re:SpyMac?

[Anonymous Coward]

Editors already mentioned SpyMac, read the post.

Re:SpyMac?

[LostCluster]

The summary even points that out. This clearly is not the first e-mail project on the Internet to get 1GB storage going. They may have beat Google to the punch, but so have others. The claim of "first" is bogus.

Re:asdf

[Coneasfast]

there is yahoopops [sourceforge.net] for yahoo

and pop goes the gmail [jaybe.org] for gmail (which seems to have dead links on the site)

Re:Me too!.. but not quite.

[System.out.println()]

Don't forget the fact that GMail is *fast* - fast enough that I would almost consider ditching my normal mail program. almost.
I do wish GMail offered IMAP. :D

Re:SpyMac?

[Amiga Lover]

What about spymac? They offer 1GB email and /. has covered them in the past.

Is it that hard for the editors to edit?

Spymac is well worth mentioning as an example of what NOT to do.

"Don't rush in and let a free for all take you down". Spymac may be the first to offer a GB, but it's not yet a "service". It's down far too often to be useful, and when it's up it's often so abysmally slow I just use hotmail instead. In its first days I was lucky to USE my spymac mail account one day out of seven.

Google's invite system looks to be their way of controlling that. They can get a setup working, then increase its size as they want bit by bit, and work out where fixes need to be made.

Re:Me too!.. but not quite.

[aslate]

Will POP [jaybe.org] do?

aventuremail.com ?

[YellowOz]

anyone signup for this free 2gig account? i did about a week ago and starting yesterday they seemed to have disabled alot of accounts for no reason. anyone here anything?

How about a 2GB account?

[lortho]

Some folks have already tried to outdo gmail/spymac et.al. on the 'bigger is better' kick. Aventuremail [aventuremail.com] recently offered 2GB accounts for free (and still appear to if you go to their site), but they apparently bit off more than they could chew and are no longer accepting new registrations (though they will certainly let you try, for marketing purposes - if you try to sign up for one now, they'll take you through the whole process, then tell you you're more than welcome to a 3GB account for $22USD/year).

Better Yet

[andrewlong]

Setup your own mail server and have unlimited storage and no attachment or message size limitations.

Use qmail with vpopmail, spamassassin, clam antivirus and rbl checking with spamhaus. Then setup some webmail client like IlohaMail or oMail.

Now thats geek points.

And of course you'd run this all on your slackware server.

Indie-Mail

[KalvinB]

has been free from the beginning (April) and has never had a limit on the storage. Claiming 1GB is just an oversell. It also features the ability to search e-mails.

It also sports IMAP, POP3, SMTP (with alternate port for those with port 25 blocked), and web-access with SSL. And no ads. It's supported by Icarus Independent which uses AdSense.

Anybody with a weekend to spare, Mercury Mail and some talent can put together a free e-mail service. The web-mail front end uses Apache 1.3.x, PHP, MySQL and OpenSSL. It just parses the files Mercury uses. Simple and secure. Mercury has built in web-mail support but I've never used it. I prefer having the flexibility of writting my own front end.

Ben

Re:and what are the odds...

[ashayh]

Rediffmail isnt all that great. But Rediff is a verypopular site among Indians (= potential 1 billion viewers). Being based in India, Rediffmail servers are faster than Hotmail in India so people like it.

I first heard of Rediff along the same time I got an Inernet connection (96-97). They've done pretty good, considering so many other Indian sites folded up since then. I doubt they wil go bust so soon.

But yea... Gmail is cool. I have a few invites...If anyone still hasnt seen Gmail, mail me.

ashay.humane(AT)gmail

Re:SpyMac?

[WARM3CH]

I wouldn't count SpyMac in. There are many reports of too slow operation, long periods of being down etc. My personal experience? They never sent me any answer when I joined in. I simply filled some forms related to some personal information and then there has never been any answer....

Re:use of JavaScript

[Anonymous Coward]

check the source of the main page, scroll to the end until you see something like src=/gmail?view=page&name=js&ver=adsgdfbnhdfbf bfd

Enter this URL into your browser, http://gmail.google.com/gmail?view=page&name=js&ve r=adsgdfbnhdfbfbfd and then view the source of this page.

Presto.

Innovate, don't imitate... :-P

[Jugalator]

This just goes to show that Google is once again leading when it comes to innovation, by offering a free mail service where you don't have to delete mail. Then other services follow... Say, why didn't they do this before Google?

But I guess it's good with competition. I don't know how this compares with Gmail though, since there's of course much more to a mail service than how much mail you can store. Uptime and speed for example, and this is another area I believe Google can be trusted in, since I rarely see their services getting overloaded or being down temporarily.

I also noticed Gmail has a "report as spam" feature so the users will build a massive spam database. Many mail services simply provide some unknown filters that catches maybe 60% of all spam. It's good to know that Gmail does this, since I don't doubt they'll have a problem building their spam database with all their potential users.

Try again

[xX_sticky_Xx]

6 billion*1000MB= 6 trillionMB. That's not a 6TB array, it's a 6exabyte array. Hardly feasible.

Re:asdf

[PhoenixFlare]

GMail refreshes every 2 minutes or so, so unless you absolutely must have instant notification, I think it will serve well.

Customizable filters and (as far as I know) decent spam-blocking as well. Time will tell, I suppose.

How about some reliability?

[fishrokka]

10 MB, 100 MB, 1GB, 3GB -- I really could care less about the storage space. What I want is reliable webmail.

Yahoo Mail has been out since this morning -- by my account it's been down for at least 8 hours now. This is not the only outage in the past few weeks either.

Maybe I should head over to ebay and bid on a gmail invitation.

Re:Crappy

[pathloss]

i disagree having used rediffmail for over 2 years now i can vouch for its stability. and man ... just look at whats on offer here. its actually 1GB for free accounts. i was a premium member (just 600 rupees that is $10 a year ) and earlier it was for 10MB+POP access, now these guys upgraded all premium members to 2GB.. nothing extra . so for us its now 2GB+POP+fntastic spam protection. compared to others for those in india rediffmail just wins hands dowm, no not because of the 2GB (which is great !) but also for 2 other reasons : 1. its the fastest compared... to yahoo, even gmail (from india ) 2. CASH collected from doorstep. here in india ecommerce , well its not really safe as there are no real enforcement if somone uses your card number.. a DONT BE A BLIND GMAIL fanboy... for indian users its CHEAPEST POP access and certinly the FASTEST

What gmail needs

[sjbe]

Others have mentioned some of this but there are a few things gmail needs (IMO) before it is something I'll use full time. Your needs may be different from mine. In my case I'm looking for a good web interface to consolidate emails from several addresses. I also want access via a client (mozilla or thunderbird in my case) as well, for offline access and backup.

In no particular order I'd like to see:
1) POP/IMAP access to account
2) Easy address book importing (and for more than just Outlook & Lotus Notes - I need Mozilla dammit)
3) Enhanced contact management
4) Mail backup/upload mechanism - If something does go wrong I want to be able to recover and quickly repopulate my account.
5) More filters & categories

I understand that Google is working on at least some of these. What they've got so far works brilliantly for what it is. It's just feature incomplete for me to use full time. The ads are much less obnoxious than I feared and I've even see one or two actually useful ones, which surprised me. Your milage may vary...

Re:Top posting, grrr

[chrysalis]

No, that's the Microsoft way. Nobody did this and people were civilized enough until Outlook came out.

Sorry, but Microsoft is not a synonym for "standard". RFC1855 looks more like a standard to me, moreover people respected this years before Microsoft released any TCP/IP software.

http://00f.net/item/27/

If you like to quote 1 Mb of previous replies just to add your own 2 words, that's your choice.

But at least, a webmail software should give the choice to the sender.

Spymac bites it hard

[penginkun]

Spymac may claim to be the first to offer 1gb email, but it was only in reaction to Google's announcement.

In any event, Spymac's servers are tremendously overloaded and are therfore sluggish. I've also had problems with Spymac email never arriving, whether incoming or outgoing. Probably something to do with how overloaded they are. I've got a couple addys there, as backup, but I don't (can't?) actually use them at the moment.

I'm looking forward to Gmail. If it's as good as it's claimed to be, I'll probably switch to using that for my primary email, and use my ISP-provided address as a spamcatcher.