Gmail's Birthday Presents

Jicksta writes "Since today marks the first birthday of Google's online email service, Gmail, the Gmail team is rolling out some great new features. Every user's email account storage has been doubled to an astounding 2GB and users now have the ability to use some new snazzy rich text formatting features including fonts, bullets, colors, and highlighting. Happy birthday, Gmail!"

April 1st?

[maotx]

In light of April 1st I have to say I'm not sure if this is legit or not.
My gmail account has slowly been growing today (it's at 1440MB capacity now) and have noticed the rainbow features being integrated.

Will this last till tomorrow? Who knows. I'm liking it as is. I wouldn't think that Google would offer a service only to rip it away. If I had to speculate I would say that this is their answer to Yahoo!'s recent 1GB offer of e-mail. And as for those of you who keep complaining about gmail being in Beta still, I think Google answered it best regarding their "Gulp" product in their FAQ: [google.com]

11. When will you take Google Gulp out of beta?

Man, if you pressure us, you just drive us away. We'll commit when we're ready, okay? Besides, what's so great about taking things out of beta? It ruins all the romance, the challenge, the possibilities, the right to explore. Carpe diem, ya know? Maybe we're jaded, but we've seen all these other companies leap headlong into 1.0, thinking their product is exactly what they've been dreaming of all their lives, that everything is perfect and hunky-dory - and the next thing you know some vanilla copycat release from Redmond is kicking their butt, the Board is holding emergency meetings and the CEO is on CNBC blathering sweatily about "a new direction" and "getting back to basics." No thanks, man. We like our freedom.

No Joke

[JuliusRV]

And this isn't even an April Fool's joke, it's for real! :)

Re:April 1st?

[two_stripe]

Considering GMail was launched on April 1st last year, id say you'd be pretty safe in assuming that it isnt actually a joke.

timer

[ice-nine]

The disk space is going up gradually over the course of the day (I'm guessing, from the counter on the gmail front page (viewable when you're logged out)). When I checked early this morning I had 1128 MB, then 1129 MB, and when I set my system clock ahead, it jumped up (then back down when I set it back).

ag

Anyone noticed...

[(Jehuty)]

... That the counter on the Gmail page shows how much storage you have, and it keeps on increacing, u need to sign out of your Gmail account to view it

Re:Schweet

[pasokon]

Well... apparantly, they want to keep giving storage beyond 2GB. See here [google.com]. Also see the home page (where you sign in)... http://gmail.google.com/ [google.com]

Re:Competitoin?

[xtracto]

Well, it could be but, since i started to read about the Hotmail's 250 MB offer I got a bit happy, but, nope, i still had those miserable 4 MB... now I know why:

"
250MB inbox available only in the 50 United States, District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Eligible Hotmail users will first receive 25MB at sign-up. Please allow at least 30 days for activation of your 250MB storage to verify your e-mail account and help prevent abuse. Microsoft Corporation reserves the right to provide 250MB inbox to free Hotmail accounts at its discretion"

So ... nope Hotmail service is FAAAR faaaar FAAAAAAAAAR from getting my attention again...
as I have the fortune not to live in the USed

opera support!

[froggero1]

and now g-mail considers opera a fully supported browser, as the automatic contacts, and all the java script funness works again!

Re:April 1st?

[Will2k_is_here]

Read the link:

But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able

They discovered that a gigabyte is great, but 99% of all users aren't using more than a megabyte a year. Therefore, they really don't need to worry about limits. They just add on more disk space for the few users who actually need it.

Re:Oh yeah? Infinity plus 1!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the URL of the drawing [google.com] so you can see it without logging out.

Re:timer

[Malicious]

If you set the date on your comp to Apr 2nd, you will see 2GB.

Re:timer

[vikramrn]

Changing the system clock only changes the counter on the main page...it is done in javascript using a function of the system time.

Whereas the disk space is actually increasing gradually, independent of the display, but matching very closely (only by 2 or 3 MB)

Re:Schweet

[Da Fokka]

Notice that neither of the mentioned functions contain any images. The extra bandwidth required by colors, bullets and fonts is negligible [1]. Since e-mail is used for a lot of structured communication these days, it's good to see there's a little more than ASCII art to rely on.

[1] You can only select sans-serif, serif and monospace fonts.

A hidden bonus to Rich formatting...

[jbarr]

I realize that many /.ers have no problem with plain text, but the important thing to understand about the new Rich formatting feature is that it goes much farther than just making your messages look pretty. If you enable Rich formatting, when you reply to or forward a rich formatted message that you received, it now retains all the formatting. Before, everything was converted to plain text. Gmail finally allows you to manage messages unaltered. This is good news for both personal and business users.

This potentially positions Gmail to be a WebMail client for the masses, because what you receive is what you will reply to or forward. This was a hugely lacking feature that has now been added.

Kuddos to the Gmail developers!

-Jim
GmailTips.com [gmailtips.com]

Re:timer

[Stalyn]

actually look at the page's source

var START = 1112331600000;
var END = 1112439600000;

1112439600 (extra 000s?) is Sat, 02 Apr 2005 11:00:00 GMT

Re:Schweet

[ip_fired]

Most good mail clients should provide both the nicely formatted html and the text in 2 different MIME blocks. I just tested gmail, and it does this.

So what are you really complaining about, the extra 1k that the e-mail has because it has good formatting?

Re:Schweet

[shayne321]

It assumes that the recipient is using a graphical/HTML client.

Yes, it assumes the recipient is participating in 2005 with the rest of us, not stuck in 1994 with you. For $DIETY's sake, even pine will read HTML email these days.

Re:Why can't this be a joke?

[fraudrogic]

Back in my day, we used plain text and used punctuation if we needed to emphasize a word. All these fancy colors and fonts. FLIM FLAM! All we really need is PINE and thats all there is to it!

Sincerely,
Grumpy Old Geek