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.

Crappy

[pcmanjon]

I use to use this server a while back like a couple of years because a friend reccemended it.

It sucks, and is down a lot for "maintainence" (yeah fat guy tripped over the cat5 and pulled it out again I know!) etc...

My advice: wait until gmail's public, but don't register all the good names before I do!

Email me at [e-mail]

What a crappy design

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense, but that site looks like crap. I almost feel like my head will explode just looking at it! Has it been updated since like 1996?

I guess that is part of the draw of gmail - it has a clean up-to-date interface that won't - you know... make your head explode from confusion.

What is the fuss here

[Timesprout]

So what if email accounts are getting bigger, jeez, like giving users more space was something that could never possibly be envisaged before google came up with GMail. Its a natural progression folks and absolutely nothing to get excited about.

use of JavaScript

[Cybersonic]

I can say one thing cool about google mail, the heavy, working use of JavaScript is pretty cool. It works in Safari, Mozilla, and IE the same. Must have been hell to code :)

-Ralph Bonnell [e-mail] [e-mail]

and what are the odds...

[222]

That any of these new 1gb webmail companies will be around in 3 years? Google has proven staying power, and thats where my moneys at. (quite literally, heh. I actually shelled out 25 bucks for 2 gmail accounts.)

All gmail, all the time?

[Frisky070802]

Much as I like the interesting conversations about gmail, isn't there any other news out there?

Google a bit more likely to survive...

[LightwaveNet]

I would estimate at this point Google's given out about half a million invites.

Somehow I don't think smaller free mom and pop sites are going to beable to compete.

Overall, I fail to see how GMail will ever be a profitable enterprise for Google.

I just don't see how the ad revenue would ever surpass the bandwidth costs they incur.

Re:asdf

[Embedded2004]

agreed. Webmail, will never be as good as a pop account for me (which comes from my isp). I leave it open, know instantly when a new email comes. I do not know what the stink about a 1gig spam mail account is.

webmail

[NineNine]

I'm not sure how you work, but webmail, at least for me, is infinately more useful than a regular POP client in some cases. With webmail, I can check my mail anywhere, and I don't have to worry about storage. It's that simple.

Re:amazing

[Synkronos]

I dropped my hotmail account the instant it was bought out by MSN. Sad day, that was *sniff*

Re:webmail

[0racle]

I prefer that my ISP has a webmail front to my POP accounts. I can it anywhere, anytime, and still download it and keep it locally when I get home. I don't really worry about storage, but I don't trust webmail providers to backup the important messages I need to keep.

Re:and what are the odds...

[Anonymous Coward]

You base google's staying power on what?

After they IPO and the smart money cashes out, they'll just be another dotcom with 1500+ bitter employees who worked their asses off for years at low pay and didn't get enough options to make it worth it.

Keep your money out of the market.

Re:amazing

[brainkiller]

ah.. good ol' original hotmail... i still miss it

then one day microsoft buys it and decides to rape it.

does anyone know where I can find screenshots of the first version of hotmail? I've been looking everywhere for them...

Re:asdf

[headisdead]

Well, for people like me, who work between different locations (home, student house, university), that kind of access if pretty important. I mean sure, there's IMAP, but it's not exactly perfect. And of course we can't all have remote logins...

a relief

[Anonymous Coward]

it's nice to see how outsourcing has a positive side to it

Top posting, grrr

[chrysalis]

Just like Gmail, Rediff forces people to copy everything and do top-posting when replying to mails.

This is really anoying.

I wonder what privacy laws are like there?

[Trillan]

If they're fully based in India, I doubt any US laws would apply to them. What can they get away with that a service based in the first world couldn't?

Re:use of JavaScript

[christopherfinke]

I can say one thing cool about google mail, the heavy, working use of JavaScript is pretty cool.

It's also pretty crippling. Google has gone the way of Hotmail (via their recent site redesign) and killed the ability to open any of the navigational links in a new window or tab. In Mozilla, I can normally middle-click to get the link in a new tab. However, in GMail, if I want to open up my "Sent Mail" separate from my main GMail window, I'm out of luck. (The only links in GMail that are actual links are the boilerplate ones, "Sign Out", and "Help.")

If you'd like to see for yourself, e-mail [e-mail] [mailto] for a GMail invite.

Re:Me too!.. but not quite.

[rebelcool]

True that. Google already stores their entire cache and index in RAM, I'm sure the same is true for gmail. Every user's email message being stored in ram makes for fast access.

Re:whoop dee doo

[Junta]

Yes, I love df -h being my 'mail quota'. Also, searching is nice and fast. And the ability to create a number of accounts and implement very effective spam filtering/prevention is nice too.... Total control of how I access my mail and send new mail is good too, Authenticated smtps relay, imaps access, and webmail only for when I'm desparate means a much smoother experience.

I have honestly been surprised why geeks have been so excited over gmail when they often have the resources to give themselves whatever they want. True, it is more work and worry, but the benefits are incredible and the work and worry not significant for people who do or have had to do this sort of thing for a living (and for those who haven't, what better way to develop a more sophisticated skillset).

Re:All gmail, all the time?

[Anonymous Coward]

EXACTLY !

I see more GMail fanatics on slashdot than anywhere else. Just read the responses for the story when Gmail first launced 1Gb mail space. And read the responses to this story.

It is funny that GMail gets such a support on Slashdot when Google heavily supports a "secret everything" policy including their number of servers.

It is high time someone incorporates feedback system for Nutch and make it the most effective search engine. When Nutch has a personal customisable module that people can se to report about each site they visit, it will reduce the need for search engines to be very fast as you need not modify your query and hit the search engine multiple times as with Google.

But from the response on slashdot, it looks like people will gladly give out their feedback about sites to Google itself!
I cant wait to see the day an Open Source engine will dominate the market like Apache or Linux.

Re:Stability

[mabu]

If you sign up for Spymac mail or Rediffmail you don't have the backing of a major corporation that has an infrastructure in place to support future growth, investors looking for the company to *not* fold, and a dedicated staff just for your data. Any fly-by-night place can buy a massive hard drive and start offering 1 free GB of mail, but if they run out of cash and fold then what happens to all of your mail in their old system?

Someone mod this guy funny.

Re:amazing

[Juanvaldes]

probably not what your looking for but it almost feels like google's homepage in the clean department compared to sites today.

http://web.archive.org/web/19971212072422/http:/ /www.hotmail.com/

Re:15M x 1GB

[arivanov]

There will be still 15000000 free inboxes.

Rediff is one the biggest annoyances in terms of keeping spammer accounts active. A year ago it reached the point where I have put SPAM filters that flag as SPAM anything with even a single occurrance of rediff anywhere in the message on all of my accounts (and there have been no false positives so far).

So all it will have to do will be to act on the 15000000 recent SPAM complaints after the "yahoo mailing list" and "bulletproof hosting" peddlers have collected all of their responses of course.

Re:Top posting, grrr

[Shaklee39]

Why? That is the standard way of doing it through email. No one wants to scroll down hundreds of lines to see your message. The only place idiots think that bottom posting is acceptable is usenet and it shouldn't be used there either.

A new method of piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could this be used as a new method of piracy?

What's to prevent me from signing up for a 1GB account, e-mailing a bunch of MP3s to it, and then giving out my username/password to anyone to peruse my inbox?