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!"

Competitoin?

[adennis]

Hmm... I wonder if this could have anything to do with yahoo and hotmail starting to catch [yahoo.com] up [passport.net] with mail space... One of the many things Google has always been good at was staying ahead.

Drive Extension

[Plazzma]

2 gigabytes of storage might be pointless for just email, but it could be useful if you use a Gmail Drive Extension like http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm [viksoe.dk]

Re:April 1st?

[MPolo]

Just log out of Gmail. Then you will see the "joke" about the Infinity+1 Email account. Then at the end, they say "April Fool" and link to the new features mentioned in this article. Hence, the two GB is real, it will just take until tomorrow until it is there. (Or at least that's my analysis.)

The question remains of whether the submitter saw the joke, realized that it needn't be submitted, given the glut of them, and then found the new features, or just clicked on that glowing red "New Features" link at the top of his logged-in page.

Re:I am sick of this

[FidelCatsro]

Dude this story is true ;) so i think they did what i suspected they would do
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144539&cid=121 10727 [slashdot.org](part of it is a joke though)

Re:I hate April Fools

[DoubleDangerClub]

No joke. If you don't have a gmail account, I can see the skepticism, but it really is true. Going up to 2GB and beyond! The rich text editing is done very well too.

Why can't this be a joke?

[kickabear]

In every email program/service I've ever used, I've always set it to text-only. If I need to set something apart for emphasis, I've used regular punctuation and correct word choice. I've never needed to use large fonts or colored text to get my point across. Instead of useless features like bold and italics, why not work on a feature such as downloading email from my existing POP accounts, so I can consolidate all my email into one service?

Props for the increased space, though.

Re:Schweet

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

It looks like they're going to make it 'infinite' and not just 2 GB.... That means they might be trying to do some sort of file pooling with big files and maybe a bit of filtering for stuff of this large size kind. This is theoretically possible, but it'd take years of engineering work to do, I'd bet. I hope google's got people smarter than I am working to put that together. After storing how a huge portion the data on the internet is sorted, they might be finding out that STORING all the data on the internet is easier than FINDING it......... And gmail could be a bid to try and do that.

Re:How long until 2gb?

[Stalyn]

you sure about that i'm messing with my timezone and it isn't changing...

Re:April 1st?

[DJStealth]

FYI, if you want to know how long it will take to get to 2GB, see the following algorithm from their web page:

var START = 1112331600000;
var END = 1112439600000;

var quota;

function OnLoad() {
el("gaia_loginform").onsubmit = lg;
gaia_setFocus();
LogRoundtripTime();
if (!quota) {
quota = el("quota");
updateQuota();
}
}

function updateQuota() {
if (!quota) {
return;
}

var now = (new Date()).getTime();
if (now < START) {
setTimeout(updateQuota, 1000);
} else if (now > END) {
quota.innerHTML = 'Over 2000';
} else {
quota.innerHTML = format(((now - START)/(END - START)*1025) + 1025);
setTimeout(updateQuota, 50);
}
}

Re:April 1st?

[DJStealth]

Unix Time Conversion [onlineconversion.com]

Copy/paste 1112331600 and 1112439600 into the above site to test. (I guess the last 3 digits are milliseconds)

Apparently, it looks like it depends on your system clock! If you want 2GB now, set your date to the future!

Happy G-day

[p0rnking]

When I first read this, I though for sure it was a April fool's joke ... who would have thunk that Gmail would ever allow rich formatting?

Also, another thing I noticed this morning, after someone told me that they had 1399MBs of space, is that I was at 1400MBs, and now seems to be going up about 1MB per minute.

Now if only Gmail supported a normal list view of all emails, along with grouping conversations.

Re:timer

[Anonymous Coward]

1112439600 (extra 000s?)

Javascript does that. It's a feature. The extra 0's are ms.

Dump this into a page and point your browser of choice at it:

<html>
<body onLoad="doUpdate();">
<span id="curTime">
Foo
</span>

<script language="javascript">
function doUpdate ()
{
var now = new Date();
document.getElementById("curTime").innerHTML = now.getTime();
setTimeout('doUpdate();', 50);
}
</script>
</body>
</html>

And in other news

[emtboy9]

Mozilla 1.7.6 seems to no longer be a "supported" browser... unless they are playing some sort of sick prank...

Yesterday my 1.7.6 install worked fine with gmail, but today I keep getting routed to the "Basic" view with none of the candy that made me like my gmail account in the first place (filters, selections, etc).

I hope this is some sort of practical joke...

Re:Why can't this be a joke?

[jimmyCarter]

..why not work on a feature such as downloading email from my existing POP accounts, so I can consolidate all my email into one service?

Check out GMail Loader (GML). I think this takes care of what you're looking for.
(http://www.marklyon.org/gmail/download.htm [marklyon.org])