30Gigs Web Mail Launches Into Beta 320
gaanagaa writes "Neowin reports, that a new web mail service launched today is promising to bring users an email inbox of 30gb." The original intent of 30gigs.com was apparently to create an "'All in one' site for the webmaster and avid computer users. According to the sites 'about us' page, combining personal file storage, GD2 signatures and anonymous email all in one service, which would be free." In their brief review of the service a Neowin user also offers a word of caution with regards to their extremely short terms of service and privacy policy, calling them "shady".
Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Having said that, I doubt anyone is going to win the Webmail wars. All that will happen is they'll fight amongst each other to get more of a customer share by adding more features. Which is great for us. But 30gigs isn't going to be a contender anytime soon (if ever).
I remember when everyone used hotmail, back when it used to be usable. Then Microsoft screwed over its users with more and more intrusive ads, shitty interface and more. I'm just waiting for Microsofts response to Yahoo and Google's improved webmail interface.
Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
totally shady (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone! (Score:5, Insightful)
There's not much difference between 1 gigabyte and 30, but there's a huge difference between 5 MB and 1 GB.
Re:totally shady (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, your data is worthless to them if you encrypt it first. Of course, I wouldn't really trust these people to keep backups, not go bankrupt, etc.
I tried it, here's my review (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the problems:
1) The domain name sucks. Who wants to be john@30gigs.com
2) The interface sucks. Hard. It's about as plain as it can get (it looks like they're just using Squirrelmail with their own stylesheet).
3) Their privacy policy is vague on what kind of information they share
4) There doesn't seem to be any reputable parent company behind it meaning it's chances of survival are questionable.
Overall rating: THUMBS DOWN.
Besides, size isn't everything!
- Do anyone know how much spam you get with this service?
- How does it handle attachements and their sizes?
- How fast does mail travel through their servers?
- How high uptime do their servers have?
- Customizable mail filters to manage mail?
- Multiple labels per mail, set by filters?
- POP3 forwarding/servers?
- Address books?
- Antivirus checks?
- Do they backup?
I mean, if you have 1 GB+, why in the world would you want more?
My over-a-year-old Gmail account use 16 MB now. 0.016 GB. It can fit about 150x more mail. Now, how many years is that?
To me, it's just not a valid selling argument anymore.
Re:Missing the point (Score:2, Insightful)
It's good enough for OSS to copy (Open Office).
Outlook. That's a horrible mail program.
Once again, good enough for OSS to copy (Thunderbird).
Soon it will be too small (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
OpenOffice's UI is almost as horrible as Office itself. Thunderbird is clunky for managing large numbers of emails but is nowhere near the mess that Outlook is (and really doesn't look much like it.. if you're actually familiar with both).
Although you didn't mention it I'll take this time to say I hate how KDE and Gnome both copy way to much from Windows and OS X. They'll never get a good user-interface that way. Windows is just a mess that seems to have been made by a drunker marketing department. OS X is made to impress with eye candy and to be easy for newbies. Neither is designed to make experienced users more productive. Because of copying KDE and Gnome are really no more easy to use or productive than Windows and OS X.
Re:I tried it, here's my review (Score:1, Insightful)
Reminds me of a certain company from Mountain View.
"- Do anyone know how much spam you get with this service?
- How does it handle attachements and their sizes?
- How fast does mail travel through their servers?
- How high uptime do their servers have?
- Customizable mail filters to manage mail?
- Multiple labels per mail, set by filters?
- POP3 forwarding/servers?
- Address books?
- Antivirus checks?
- Do they backup?"
You mean you knew all this when you signed up for gmail?
How can you type with google's dick in your hands?
Leading the way in privacy policies. (Score:4, Insightful)
With free webmail being all the rage these days... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not only would this eliminate any and all advertising in the interface and your outgoing mail, but it would invariably come with guaranteed availability. Y! and Gmail make no promises whatsoever that the mail stored on their servers won't get wiped due to a failure, upgrade or whatever.
Such a service would also probably include features that you'll never see from the free ones, like telnet/SSH access (perhaps with a pine-like interface), access via POP, IMAP and maybe even certain groupware suites (GMail has POP, but the terms suggest they might do away with it in the future), ability to use your own domain, and high-security storage (encrypted disks and such).
Re:totally shady (Score:2, Insightful)
This rule holds for encryption: If you don't want people reading even the encrypted text, email is the wrong way to do things.
Re:TOS (Score:3, Insightful)
Extremely forward isn't a phrase I would use. Sure, they tell you all about cookies... but what about your actual privacy? Nobody these days cares about cookies anymore. How about the contents of the email I send and receive? Oh... nothing at all to say about that. How about any personally identifying information? Suspiciously absent from their privacy policy. What if I'm under the age of 13? Who cares! Their privacy policy should state how they are protecting my privacy, not how I'm going to get bombarded by cookies from all manners of ad companies they've signed up with.
Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone! (Score:4, Insightful)
At the company I work for I constantly get requests to let larger and larger attachments through. The reason? We make it hard for them to get data out any other way. Our bosses are (somewhat justifiably) paranoid about opening up easy access to our file system from outside the company so the users use the one method that's relatively open, email.
You see this all over the place. Would you tell your aunt that it's ok to open a share to the outside on her Windows computer? Heck no. What's her alternative? Email. Can you name a service tha lets her upload a couple of gigs of non-specialized files that she could then share with her friends and family? No such service exists, unless you consider Gmail to be such a service.
The only way you'll ever get people to use the proper protocol, meaning one that's designed for the purpose it's being used for, is to make that protocol ubiquitus, easy and cheap. As long as you make the proper way hard, even if it's for a good reason like security, people will find other ways to route their data, even if those ways are a horrible kludge.
TW
Re:phffff.. 30gig, that's amateur mang (Score:3, Insightful)
why do they need to give you 1tb of space?