Google Opens Gmail To All

Reader Russian Art Buyer lets us know that GMail is now open for all ("Google Mail" in the UK). The service is no longer by invitation only. This welcome page shows an ever-increasing amount of storage available per user, currently about 2,815 MB.

Re:Capacity drop?

[THE anonymus coward]

I doubt we will see a drop in capacity at this point. Everyone who wants a gmail account has had it for at least a year now, so I don't think many will come who haven't come yet.

It's about time...

[jsight]

Now if only they would add IMAP support and improve security, they might have a chance of being successful with Google for Domains.

here comes the spam

[superwiz]

By invitation only was a perfect way to protect against spammers signing up quickly. Well, not perfect, but at least you could always know who the root of the spam tree was and could handle the whole tree. Now they (at Google) destroyed the reason for their own success.

Surge in users?

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Great. Now we get to see how Gmail handles thousands of accounts being created just to send out spam.

It's just a publicity stunt

[betterunixthanunix]

Come on. I can't think of anybody who wasn't able to get a GMail account. If a large number of users necessitated a drop in storage, it would have happened a long time ago.

Re:Just checked...

[moranar]

Not for the Italian google mail service: it takes me directly to the signup page.

Re:Surge in users?

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Given that Google so far has done a horrible job at policing their YouTube users (as far as copyrighted + inappropriate/obscene/pr0n content), I'm not quite sure why you think they'd suddenly do an excellent job at policing spammers within Gmail.

Re:Worldwide BETA

[Overzeetop]

And this is different from other large applications like, say, Vista how?

Re:Fastmail

[slumberer]

Yeah I have both and personally I have fastmail set up to just forward my email to gmail. It's a matter of preference but I find the gmail interface a lot easier to use than the fastmail one. As far as spam goes gmail does a great job of stopping it from getting to my inbox.

The reason that I still use the fastmail account is because it still checks my other email accounts - especially my hotmail account - that I have stopped using but still have the odd email sent to. Gmail doesn't offer the same way of checking other email accounts but having fastmail forward to gmail works just as well.

Re:Surge in users?

[daeg]

They have incentive to police spammers that use gmail accounts -- volume reduction. If every spammer that uses a gmail account sends enough e-mail to fill a full 2GB (in the Sent folder), that also nets 2 GB on the receiving end -- removing the spammer's account can reduce storage requirements by up to 4GB per spammer removed.

They also will get a very nice benefit to closing spammer accounts -- their sent folders are 100% spam. What better way to see what tricks spammers are using than have 2GB of sent spam in one easy location? They can easily see what percentage of that spam folder was then in turn delivered as non-spam and how many users read it and marked it as not-spam.

Re:Capacity drop?

[duffbeer703]

The invitations had more to do with mapping social networks than limiting capacity.

a nagging problem about gmail

[supernova87a]

This may be a little off topic, but maybe many others here will benefit from discussing this same concern. I love Gmail, but there is a problem I see that's been slowly nagging me:

I use Gmail to read the messages off my work/academic Pine accounts, and it has rapidly become my main way to check email because it has a great feature set, and Gmail doesn't pull some of the stupid tricks that other free email services do. I also use it to send messages (i.e. the "from:" field pretending as if it is one of the other work/school accounts I have), and rapidly I'm accumulating email on my Gmail account that now doesn't exist elsewhere.

However, sometime in the far off future, Gmail may decide not to work one day, or there may be a new technology to replace it. We can't know for sure. So I would like to be able to have a backup of that mail just in case. As much as I trust Gmail and like Google, I need some way to keep my mail on my own, because if it were all lost, it would be awful.

Couldn't they offer a service, for some reasonable amount of $$, where they would burn my entire Gmailbox onto a DVD and send it to me? With the size of my mailbox, POP downloading is becoming impossible, and this would also be a great way to give users some peace of mind.

or has anyone else felt this worry, and come up with an interesting/workable solution??

Re:It's just a publicity stunt

[harves]

I agree there won't be a large drop in storage space, but...

I would expect there's a large number of people who don't have the option of using gmail. Remember, everyone you know, probably knows you; if they wanted GMail access they would ask you for an invite. What of those slowly-entering-the-technology-age households who don't have anyone they can easily ask? You know, the kind of people you *don't* hang out with? There's got to be a decent number.

Now if only...

[proxy318]

They'd let you use some of that storage for Picasa's web albums. 250MB for pictures, almost 3GB for email? That's kind of ass-backwards.

Re:a nagging problem about gmail

[aug24]

Watch and see.

Only last week, some poster here complained that there was no 'open in docs' link for .doc file attachments in gmail. All of three days later (IIRC) it appeared, and I've been using it with pleasure. I hadn't realised I wanted it till it was pointed out.

So someone there is prolly surfing /. and you may get your wish.

Justin.

illusion of exclusiveness

[mixtape5]

G-mail is hardly exclusive. Anyone that wants a g-mail account can get one. Even if this story is not true, and they have not "opened it for all". I'm sure many of us have gmail accounts with a lot of remaining invites...all anyone who wanted a key has to do is ask around.

Personally I think its a marketing strategy used by gmail to make people feel special by having it "invite only", but by making so many invites they have destroyed the exclusiveness of it :s

How do I receive SMS on a land-line phone?

[tepples]

I noticed a link on mail.google.com
marked "Sign up for Google Mail"
http://mail.google.com/mail/signup [google.com]

Which local telephone companies in the United States allow land-line customers to receive SMS? Or do I have to sign up for a 24-month mobile phone contract at $30 per month?

Re:It's just a publicity stunt

[MMC Monster]

Most people don't ask for invitations to new email systems. They use what they have or try to register a new one. GMail in the U.S. has been open so long as you have a valid (cell?) phone number, which is pretty good penetration.

If someone wants a new service (particularly for increased storage), they would likely have heard about the increased storage (compared to what they had in the past, at least) at Yahoo mail and Hotmail as well.

Re:Capacity drop?

[LoverOfJoy]

Not everyone knows they want one yet. Others want one but aren't sure it's worth the price of dealing with a shift in addresses. My brother just recently accepted my invitation to gmail after getting fed up with all the ads on hotmail. I'd invited him long ago but he didn't want to have to tell everyone of his new email address. He's gotten to the point where it's worth switching and just occasionally checking up on his old address for the few that never got the notice of his change in address.

Re:Capacity drop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, cause it is not like they have any other way of knowing who you send email messages to...

Re:Capacity drop?

[leenks]

Unless this was exactly what they were trying to model. Seeing how a popular service grows, and the type of person involved (geeks, researchers, "real users", etc) could be a very useful thing to do if you plan on giving away services in future and want to see the kind of infrastructure involved (think Google productivity suite or YouTube and modelling what kind of hardware would you need to support those as they grow).

Re:Capacity drop?

[spirit of reason]

Everyone who wanted one and was already looking for an email account has one. However, that doesn't include all the people (particularly teenagers) that decide they need an email account of their own now. They'll probably turn to the place they've grown up using for search, Google. And now it's easy to get an account on a whim.

Re:Capacity drop?

[Mark-Allen]

I've heard of GMail but have no desire to have an account. The idea that all my emails are sitting around on a company's servers that I don't trust sounds like a bad idea. Others may feel differently but Google isn't a company that gives me a high level of confidence.

Their motto (whatever) "Do No Evil" is so lame, I won't even comment.

And for those who believe that for-profit companies won't do "evil", well.... one man's evil is another man's profit.

Re:Capacity drop?

[Short Circuit]

I see my .edu email address as transitory. If I'm not a student there for a semester, it goes away.

Same with work addresses; I doubt I'll be at one company, with a stable email naming system, my entire career. My GMail address, though, will stick with me as long as GMail is around.