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The Internet Businesses

30Gigs Web Mail Launches Into Beta 320

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the the-who-with-the-what dept.
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".
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30Gigs Web Mail Launches Into Beta More

30Gigs Web Mail Launches Into Beta

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  • Send me an invite? (Score:5, Funny)

    by rdwald ( 831442 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:01AM (#13702331)
    Can someone give me an invite? Oh, and maybe First Post.

  • Malibu (Score:3, Funny)

    by Blimundus ( 909351 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:02AM (#13702337)
    According to their website, they provide you with a "malibox"!

  • 30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Palal ( 836081 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:02AM (#13702339) Homepage
    I can't fill up my 2 gigs on Gmail, nor my gig on Y! mail, why in the world would I need 30 gigs?
    • Agreed, mail servers seem to be trying endlessly to outdo one another on storage, whereas it's the systems which attract most people I know. As argues elsewhere, many Yahoo!ers prefer to stay with Yahoo despite gmail, because they like/are used to the setup.

      • Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Baricom ( 763970 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:14AM (#13702383)
        I agree that competing on storage is kind of pointless now, but when Gmail launched last year offering a gigabyte of space, that was a really big deal. People were used to having to delete their e-mail every so often; now, they didn't have to.

        There's not much difference between 1 gigabyte and 30, but there's a huge difference between 5 MB and 1 GB.
      • The number one GMail feature for me was the free pop access. I used to use Yahoo for that and then they started wanting to charge for it. I haven't looked to see if they've made it free again..

        If only GMail would let you delete messages read by pop instead of just trashing them. Trash uses quota which quickly, for some of us, limits how much mail we can move through GMail.

        I'm cheating and developed a program that reads my incoming mail for attachments, collects the attachments, inserts web links to the atta

    • One Word: Pron. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Famatra ( 669740 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:15AM (#13702386) Journal
      "I can't fill up my 2 gigs on Gmail, nor my gig on Y! mail, why in the world would I need 30 gigs?"

      If you belong to a lot of yahoo [yahoo.com] and google groups [google.com], and the groups you belong to like to send a lot of attachments (porno) you can fill up 2 gigs in a couple of days.

      Not that I know from experience or anything...
    • I get more than a gig of email a day not even counting the couple gigs I get of pics, video, etc (pr0n) a day. I use a gmail account up in about a day and due to their poor design of trash it's a significant pain trying to pipe all that through their service. Luckily I have my own servers so it's not a problem for me. ;)

      • Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone! (Score:5, Funny)

        by pahles ( 701275 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:40AM (#13702456)
        I get more than a gig of email a day not even counting the couple gigs I get of pics, video, etc (pr0n) a day.

        No wonder the internet is slow...

        • Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by MikeFM ( 12491 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:57AM (#13702513) Homepage Journal
          Email is really a horrible bunch of protocols not at all designed for real world use today. It seems crazy to me that we shunt around binaries encoded as text and that we have to pass duplicates along the same path rather than sending a single copy. Not to even get into the mess Email is in other ways. It'd be nice if major email providers at least could arrange a more effecient means of trading mail. I hope Yahoo, Google, etc don't store every single copy of duplicate messages and attachments. That'd just be stupid.
          • What, you mean something like nntp?

          • Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone! (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Total_Wimp ( 564548 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @09:35AM (#13703522)
            It's a testiment to convenience. People use email in the ways they do, and ignore other protocols that are more suitable, becaue it's just easier for them.

            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
      • I understand that some people need to transfer a lot of data between people and groups, but SMTP is not a file transfer protocol. That should be handled by another protocol, such as File Transfer Protocol or a P2P of your choice or perhaps a repository.

        If you transfer that much data you should think about designing a small interface to handle it, to include shortcuts for the functions you use. After all, it has to be a bit cumbersome to work with that much data through a mail client.

        • It may not be but that is how millions of people and companies including Yahoo and Google use it. SMTP is a crappy protocol in general and should be abandoned.

          Actually I've got extensive programs I've written for managing huge volumes of mail and other data I collect. Labeling, sort, browsing, and searching data are things that interest me and which I've spent a lot of years working out good solutions for. I keep trying to refactor my programs into something that retains it's power but is easy enough for no

        • Re:SMTP is not a file transfer protocol! (Score:5, Funny)

          by generic-man ( 33649 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @08:19AM (#13703119) Homepage Journal
          So what? HTTP is a protocol meant to toss hypertext around, and look at all the people carelessly using it to upload files, do their e-mail, and even use so-called "web applications." For shame. I even hear that some people are transmitting XML by HTTP -- the horror!

        • You are right: SMTP is the wrong protocol to send huge attachments. However, people are using it. And worse, business people (e.g. marketing guys) depend on its ability to send large files (e.g. Powerpoint presentations, large PDFs, etc.).

          There are basically two solutions for this problem: Either restrict your users to send only mails with a limited size, or to install an intelligent SMTP server (e.g. Mailonator [mailonator.com]) that will automatically replace the attachments with URLs to a Web server, where the atta

    • Re:30 GB?!?!?! 250K oughta be enough for anyone! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PhotoBoy ( 684898 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:52AM (#13702500)
      I run a few webmail systems myself, you would be amazed at how quickly people manage to eat up space. On one system we have a problem with people who sign up, turn off the spam blocker and then sign up for lots of spam. Their inbox fills up but they never actually use the service, making us wonder what the point to signing up was. We suspect it's just people who have a grudge against the company to whom we are supplying the webmail.
    • I signed onto gmail about 6 months ago, about when they upped their quota to 2 GB. How fine!

      Except since then, I've accumulated 172 MB of mail and the Gmail quota has gone up in steps to 2650 MB.

      I am falling behind by nearly 100 MB a month. Help!

    • Well...one successful way to fill up your multi-gig account on Gmail is to functionally use the tools people have written to use such a site to it's fullest potential.

      I get no kickback for this, and it was a /. post some time ago:

      http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm [viksoe.dk]

      It makes your gmail account a drive on your computer. Great for having access to your own personal sftp anytime you need it.
    • I can't fill up my 2 gigs on Gmail, nor my gig on Y! mail, why in the world would I need 30 gigs?

      Maybe you need to use the Google Filesystem [jones.name] then...

    • You and I may not, but others may feel the need to increase the size of their e-Penis. You know the world has gone downhill when people are getting e-penis enlargement spam through /.

  • Signup requires invite, like Google Mail (Score:3, Interesting)

    by marcello_dl ( 667940 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:02AM (#13702341) Homepage Journal
    I am not sure i like that. I think a playful method like a web based slot machine that lets you win an invitation (ajax based not to hammer the servers) would be nicer. Sigh.

  • phffff.. 30gig, that's amateur mang (Score:5, Informative)

    by porksoda ( 253218 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:06AM (#13702351) Homepage
    1 terabyte, right here [hriders.com].

  • TOS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lussarn ( 105276 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:06AM (#13702352)
    word of caution with regards to their extremely short terms of service and privacy policy, calling them "shady".

    It should be a good thing to not have a long lawyerlike TOS. Terms of service is a way for companies to bypass the laws and shouldn't be needed at all. Period.

    • Re:TOS (Score:5, Informative)

      by XaXXon ( 202882 ) <xaxxon.gmail@com> on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:09AM (#13702364) Homepage
      I just read their terms of service. It's almost all about cookies. They basically say how they use their cookies, that they aren't responsible for the contents of the sites their ads link to, and that you may get cookies from their ad provider.

      While not being a service I would want to use, they don't seem to be "shady" in that they are hiding anything, just that they do things you wish they wouldn't, but they're honest about it.

      This is, of course, assuming their ToS isn't an outright lie.

    • Re:TOS (Score:3, Informative)

      by aussie_a ( 778472 )
      I agree, they're extremely forward with what they do and don't do (and one thing they claim they don't do is sell out your information). If the TOS and Privacy Policy is the only reason people believe they're shady, then I disagree completely. Having said that, reading the comments it appears that some people are wary because 30gigs.com isn't a name they know, so they're wary if they'll be trustworthy or not.

      • Re:TOS (Score:3, Insightful)

        by nacturation ( 646836 )
        I agree, they're extremely forward with what they do and don't do (and one thing they claim they don't do is sell out your information). If the TOS and Privacy Policy is the only reason people believe they're shady, then I disagree completely.

        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.
    • If I don't have a TOS, I can more or less do with your data what I please. There are some limits, but not many. However if I have a TOS that says I won't hand it out, and then I do, you can sue me for it, and get an injunction to stop me from doing it. I can't go back on my word. At the very least I have to change the TOS, and let you know I've changed it first.

      While I agree TOSes shouldn't be unnecessiarly long or hard to understand, a good company will have a TOS and part of it will be what they are givin

  • Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aussie_a ( 778472 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:08AM (#13702358) Journal
    To anyone that thinks this is a serious contender in the Webmail wars, you're missing the point. I doubt very many people use their entire storage, or even come close. It's just used as a marketing point. The reason that any particular mail storage will beat the others is because of it's features. Gmail is popular (well, for starters because it's google and at the moment google is sexy among some geek circles) because of it's interface. Yahoo recently realised this and brought out a new interface of it's own (well, I say new. As in new for a webmail provider. From the articles it's just an Outlook Express clone, although it may be quite useful, I don't know. Like google, Yahoo has decided to not open it's new and improved webmail service to everyone, at least last i heard anyway).

    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.
    • I'd be impressed if Microsoft responded with a usable interface for any of their products. Yeh, Office has a brilliant interface. Makes me want to kill myself. I think Yahoo must be out of their mind if they're copying Outlook. That's a horrible mail program.

      Google has the right idea. Streamline and make the UI more responsive. Ease of use over feature bloat.

      • Re:Missing the point (Score:2, Insightful)

        by aussie_a ( 778472 )
        Yeh, Office has a brilliant interface. Makes me want to kill myself.

        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).

        • Re:Missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)

          by MikeFM ( 12491 )
          Being copied doesn't mean something is good. It just means the copier has no better ideas of their own or have the mistaken believe that it's more important to copy a bad design to ease user's switching than it is to create a design that is actually good.

          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'
    • is longevity.

      I never heard of 30gigs.com, they have no track record with me, and therefore I don't intend on trusting them with 30 gigs of my email and watching them become another dot com flameout.

      Google, OTOH, is not going anywhere anytime soon. They are big enough that if they start to go under, they'll be bought out by one of the other major players (Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, etc), so even then I don't foresee Gmail disappearing in the next ten years.

  • Huge Uses? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Famatra ( 669740 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:08AM (#13702360) Journal
    With a box that big you could, if you developed a network, work out an eMail p2p system.

    Simply upload the stuff you want to trade and forward it to people who need it. How do you know who would want the stuff you've uploaded? You'd need to develop a network where your node advertises what it has available, and autoforwards the file when someone requests it.

    After the initial uploading there is really no more bandwidth costs for you as you can forward the files for free - the email providers' servers handles the load.
    • Why? Isn't it easier to just use a normal website that lets users post files and share links to them?

      I've got such a site being redesigned from the ground up because unfortunately the bandwidth usage is huge. We're talking 150GB+ (after 3 weeks uptime.. never advertising) a day and growing quickly. I've got that problem solved but it's a serious expense if you haven't got a clever solution. I get 1500GB/mo of bandwidth with my server and I was still running out part way through the month before I found this

  • Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Telvin_3d ( 855514 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:12AM (#13702374)
    See, if you could use it as intentional FTP space or some such, there might be a use, but really, a 30 GB e-mail service is no differnt than a 250 MB e-mail service for 99.9% of people out there, including me. Most mail systems limit attachment size somewhere around the 5 MB mark, so it is not like you can either expect or send large files to use that space. Nice advertising gimic, but no real use.

  • totally shady (Score:5, Insightful)

    by XenonDif ( 670717 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:12AM (#13702376)
    The privacy policy doesn't state that they won't read your data or not give it out to other people. I certainly wouldn't store my tax return on this server.

    • Re:totally shady (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nasarius ( 593729 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:16AM (#13702389)
      The privacy policy doesn't state that they won't read your data or not give it out to other people. I certainly wouldn't store my tax return on this server.

      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.

      • Re:totally shady (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The privacy policy doesn't state that they won't demand my first born!! That proves they are up to something..

    • Re:totally shady (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MikeFM ( 12491 )
      As a web developer I can say that I would never promise not to read any data stored on my machines. It just isn't possible to say that. There is always the chance it could come up in some sort of log or be required for some sort of technical or legal reason. It'd be unwise to make such a promise knowing that you probably can't live up to it.
    • >I certainly wouldn't store my tax return on this server.

      I dont think it's your tax return you need to worry about. Indeed quite the oppostite; It's the stuff that didn't go on the tax return :o)

    • Re:totally shady (Score:2, Insightful)

      by corvair2k1 ( 658439 )
      You should hold an even tighter requirement than that. If there's something you don't want someone to read something, you shouldn't send it via email... This is not a secure medium at all. Things happen in plaintext.

      This rule holds for encryption: If you don't want people reading even the encrypted text, email is the wrong way to do things.
    • Who would want to go through 30 gigs of spam?


  • 30 webdrive? (Score:5, Informative)

    by ZeroExistenZ ( 721849 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:12AM (#13702377)
    If there would be the ability to have a "webdrive [viksoe.dk]" like there's available for google, this might be interesting.

    Otherwise, to keep 30G of chainletters, spam, and the occasional email seems like a waste of space. In the line of google's history, they'd come out with 50G mailboxes in no time to stay current and on top. ;)

  • I tried it, here's my review (Score:5, Insightful)

    by boingyzain ( 739759 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:17AM (#13702391)
    I tried out this thing yesterday for a bit.

    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.
    • > Besides, size isn't everything!

      Ah, one of those again... luckily I've just set up my own dual RAID-5 mailserver for just my own mail, on 2.4TB disk.

      Whaddayamean, compensating?
    • Multiple labels per mail, set by filters?

      And here it goes once again. Some company competes with a Google product, and then a Slashdotter asks if the competitor's product has feature X, which is a feature pioneered by Google. And so often it's not something you absolutely need. Sure, Gmail's labels are nice, but they're not something you that can't be lived without. That is how the fanboys make it sound tough. If you see labels that work like Gmail's as a basic requirement of an email system, you'll be hard
    • Way to copy and paste my post from yesterday [neowin.net]. Nothing quite like stealing other people's posts and claiming them as your own.
  • Seriously, I have used my Gmail account for at least a year, and it uses about 16 MB. Let's say I was a quite heavy mail user and used 40 MB per year... That's 0.04 GB, or 62 years to fill 2.5 GB.

    When mail space pass about 1 GB, it's simply not an issue for me anymore. We'll probably use mail in a totally different way than now in 30 years anyway. Maybe we won't even use much e-mail then. It's eons in computer technology.

    What matters more to me are the other features. Does this service provide free POP3 ser

  • 1 TeraByte FREE WEBMAIL (Score:5, Funny)

    by linumax ( 910946 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:38AM (#13702452)
    Hey folks!
    I'm planning to unveil my ONE Terabyte Free webmail service by the next couple of weeks and all people on slashdot will receive invitations ASAP.

    PS: Anybody got old HDD?! wish to get rid of em? Don't hesitate to contact me
  • Perhaps if voice or video mail became very commonplace to exchange through internet email, even 30gigs might begin to seem small, though people would expect to stream it then if its being held on a remote site. Or, finally, an email service with enough space to hold the all the world's spam in one mailbox!

  • I was talking to a friend the other day and we were laughing about our old systems. I remember having a conversation where we said "What on earth would you do with a 1GHz processor?" or "I got this new 1GB HDD and it should last me a couple years at least!" 30GB email boxes seem rediculous now but don't discount them. It's hard to imagine now but someday in the not too far future we will be laughing about how we somehow managed to get by with our 500MB hotmail account or our tiny 2GB GMail accounts!

  • Can't miss moneymaking opportunity! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Squonk ( 128339 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @04:51AM (#13702496) Journal
    The domain 700petabytes.com is still available!
  • 30gigs.com page is kind of a mess. Nice.

  • Leading the way in privacy policies. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by samj ( 115984 ) * <samj@samj.net> on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:10AM (#13702548) Homepage
    So a long privacy policy is a good privacy policy? I think not. 30 pages of lawyerspeak is for the birds - all privacy policies (at least the ones you have to click through to obtain some service) should fit on a page or less, else they aren't generally read.
  • What I'm waiting for is someone that offers a PAID service, say around $5-10 a month.

    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-li

  • Runbox.com (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Powertrip ( 702807 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @08:48AM (#13703248) Homepage Journal
    And alternative that is not free, but very full featured is RUNBOX (www.runbox.com). Runbox offers 10GB email, and 1GB of file storage. They also offer POP, IMAP, Webmail, WAP and Mobile access. They even provide SSL access to boot. Pretty great service for a small fee. You can also host your own domains email on their server, thus giving you the ability to keep your johndoe@mymail.xxx accounts if you desire. Check it out, I've been using it for several years and love it.

  • SMTP banner (Score:2, Informative)

    by gumbo ( 88087 )
    Note their SMTP banner:

    220-server.solostar.ca ESMTP Exim 4.52 #1 Mon, 03 Oct 2005 09:23:15 -0400

    It doesn't even have their domain name in there, which is a good sign that they don't have their own server but are using shared web hosting or bought a dedicated server from a host. I doubt there's more than one server available.

    Then note the occasional MySQL errors trying to get to their home page.

    Then look at solostar.ca, the domain in the SMTP greeting, and all the weird spammy links on their home page.

    My gu

  • GD2? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mike Hicks ( 244 ) * <hick0088@tc.umn.edu> on Monday October 03, 2005 @09:35AM (#13703507) Homepage Journal
    What's a GD2 signature? A quick search only brings up material related to the GD graphics library, plus a handful of articles related to this webmail site.
  • With our storage space in our email inboxes getting larger and larger, and as companies increase the maximum size of file attachments that can be sent thru email, I predict that eventually email will become just "another P2P" to a point. Sure, it'll still be used for sending emails, but now, instead of spam, we'll be seeing huge full-length movies dropping into our inbox, waiting for us to download.

    I wonder how long it'll take the **AA to sink their claws into that one?

  • How much does it cost to get a blatant ad like this posted as a story? Because I'd sure love to post a few ad^H^Hstories myself.

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