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!"

Re:Schweet

[diegocgteleline.es]

This is frikkin' awesome!I only got 1406MB

Apparently it increases at the same rate than the javascript counter they put in the main page

Re:Schweet

[Richardsonke1]

Take a look at the main gmail [gmail.com] page. You can see the counter slowly increasing your space allotment throughout the day.

Re:Haha! April fools!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironically, this is probably the only non-April-Fools joke story we'll see today...

Richemail formatting in PURE JS

[MyIS]

I for one don't care about the whole increased storage cap. But the new rich-text formatting feature makes me glad and upset at the same time.

For a long time now I've been thinking of making a rich-text editor in pure Javascript, so that it works in any browser, unlike past offerings from Hotmail. And now, it looks like that idea wasn't that crazy after all. Of course, I missed the boat to fame, pretty badly, now that Google made it so public. Yeah, I know, someone else probably did it before, but those efforts were obviously pretty obscure.

Most importantly, though, I think this shows the tidings of the new application: built entirely using the browser as a client interface, and the server as the app-logic/storage. Don't buy Microsoft Office, get a free consumer version from Google. Of course, business-features are also rentable, for a small pay-as-you-go rate of $.05 per minute. The customer is happy - all they need is a browser on ANY PC with teh intarweb; the vendor is happy - no more piracy issues, EVER. Plus, the software "seller" doesn't need to bother with tech support nearly as much - only need to answer the occasional "my JavaScript is turned off/I use Lynx" call.

I'd like to hear what you folks think of this vision of the future. And of course, links to existing examples that prove that these sentiments are soooo 1999.

Re:Schweet

[cayenne8]

"...and users now have the ability to use some new snazzy rich text formatting features including fonts, bullets, colors, and highlighting. "

Geez...just what we need. Email should be plain text...you are just wasting bandwith with all the rich text crap.

Geez...thought it was bad enough with trying to get idiots using MS Outlook to quit putting crappy wallpaper on their emails...not to mention the other stuff. You get a 2 line email, that is like 1.5MB+ in size with all the formatting crap, dancing images....etc.

Yet still no calendar...

[Astryk]

I'd love to ditch my local mail apps altogether and all that's holding me back is the lack of a calendar in gmail. It doesn't seem like it would be a difficult feature to add, and the combination of mail, contact and calendar management is largely what has made Outlook so successful. Yahoo's implementation is adequate but their mail interface is nothing compared to gmail's.

Re:April 1st?

[GTRacer]

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.

Funny, that's the mentality broadband ISPs used when pricing their plans...then when everyone had a killer app that actually used what they were sold, backpedaling and AUP-juggling ensued.

I don't think the Google will do this, but FWIW.

GTRacer
- Has ONE message in GMail inbox

Re:Schweet

[utexaspunk]

It doesn't do backgrounds or any of that crap. it just gives the basics- size, color, alignment, block quotes, a few fonts... the cool thing is that they've again incorporated the appropriate keyboard shortcuts ctrl-B turns on Bold, ctrl-I Italic, etc...

That doesn't add a significant amount of size, particularly in light of the 2GB you get for mail. Even slashdot supports some level of message formatting. It makes it much easier to add emphasis. If someone overuses it, blame the writer, not the application...

Re:Schweet

[Anonymous Coward]

the key word is choice
if you want to live in a world of black and white courier text, thats your choice
if others want to use modern technology and features to enhance their visual impact of their communication, now they can with GMail

im suprised at the anti-technology luddites of half the idiots on this site, wether they are screaming about they want cellphones without cameras and mp3 players to others who wonder why GUI's are preffered over typing 200line crptic command lines

its all down to choice

dont like it then choose something else, we in the UK have a word for people who get all huffy and bigoted when presented with differing opinions, they are called wankers

enjoy

--AJS

The Rich Text Formatting is Nice....BUT....

[dbzero]

It would be even better if images could be embedded within the email as well ... rather than attachments.

If that is your opinion, you're entitled to it.

[mmell]

But, ah, if that's the case, you should stick to the 'mailx' command. Y'know, Google isn't forcing people to use these new features (or GMail at all, for that matter), they're merely making them available.

<blink>Lots of things are available, but that doesn't mean we should use them</blink>.

Re:Schweet

[TeknoHog]

In any case, formatting breaks the standard/idea of email as plain text. It assumes that the recipient is using a graphical/HTML client. It's the same kind of thinking that everyone is using MS Word, so it's ok to send information in the form of .DOCuments. Which is fine if you absolutely know how your recipient is going to read the message, but not a nice assumption to make in general.

Re:Schweet

[Eric S. Smith]

its not the same thing at all; html is an open format

The format is irrelevant; the point is that you're sending something that's not plain text. As the person to whom you responded points out, this is only okay "...if you absolutely know how your recipient is going to read the message...".

More specifically related to Gmail:

• The HTML produced by the Gmail editor is rather hard to read, especially since it lacks whitespace.
• It may also be more likely to trigger anti-spam rules, just by nature of being HTML.

Re:Schweet

[ashot]

The format is irrelevant; the point is that you're sending something that's not plain text.

You contradicted yourself in that sentence =]

Besides, thats a straw man: all I said its not really comparable to sending doc attachments, which it isn't.

And, btw, you never "absolutely know how the recipient is going to read the message."
ASCII and Unicode are agreed upon formats, just like HTML. The important thing is that they are open and standards based.

I'm not sure what the big deal is anyway, I use Opera mail and its never had a problem decoding HTML messages, including Gmail (I just tried).

Re:Schweet

[RevDobbs]

Unfortunatly, you can't rely on ASCII art 'cause retarded MUAs (like gmail) won't display messages in a mono-spaced font. That is a feature I've been requesting for ages.

And your argument of using style for structured communication is bunk. What does colors and fonts have to do with your message, and how are they going to render in pine [washington.edu]? Bullet points? What's wrong with an asterik?

If you want to sell me something, send me the URL of a webpage. If you want to effectivly communcate with me, send me a plain ASCII email. If you need back up images, send links to web page, but for the love of god don't email them to me.

... And partial string searches still don't work.

[limber]

What bugs me is that for a search company, they have certainly implemented search within gmail oddly.

You can't do partial text searches (i.e. search for 'vacation*' (or variations thereof) to return e-mails with 'vacations'). It's highly vexing to be trying to find an e-mail that you KNOW exists, only to discover in the end that it wasn't getting returned because your search string was incomplete!

Why store all your e-mails if you can't search for them easily/intuitively? Very odd. Does anyone know why this is the case? Performance?

This design choice is acknowledged in the help (it's one of their FAQs), but they don't give a reason for why they made that choice.