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Technology

World's First 1GB Web Mail May Not Be From Google 537

Posted by timothy from the fancy-that dept.
xPertCodert writes "According to this article, the world's first 1GB web mail is not going to be Google, but from the largest Israeli web portal. With 30Mb per attachment, it seems to be quite useful as well. Looks like an idea of extra-large e-mail storage is becoming really hot these days."
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World's First 1GB Web Mail May Not Be From Google More

World's First 1GB Web Mail May Not Be From Google

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  • Is this a joke submission? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Liselle ( 684663 ) * <slashdot@lisWELTYelle.net minus author> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:12PM (#8930742) Journal
    First 1GB email service? First of all, what is Spymac, [spymac.com] chopped liver? They already have a free email service with 1GB of storage.

    I'm going to issue a press release... I will be the first person to send data over phone lines. Maybe it will be hardware you install in your computer! Buy my stock!

    • Re:Is this a joke submission? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) * on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:17PM (#8930830)
      Yeah, I sent a note to the editor about that before the posting went live, but no correction on it as yet. *shrug* Welcome to Slashdot.
    • I just went to Spymac.com and there is nothing there but a dead server.

    • Re:Is this a joke submission? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bfg9000 ( 726447 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:24PM (#8930940) Homepage Journal
      Can any of you guys get your Spymac mail accounts to work? I can't -- I've been assuming it's been announced, but not functional yet.

    • Spymac is the joke (Score:3, Interesting)

      by medication ( 91890 )
      Spymac hasn't been making a stink about it being the first to offer this service because they're a sham. I see a lot of posts here about not being able to establish an account going back weeks (I remember your post when the gmail article was here).
      Are you using it? If so what's your address? I don't buy that they're actually doing anything but building a db of advertising data.

      • Re:Spymac is the joke (Score:5, Informative)

        by mtnharo ( 523610 ) <greengeek AT earthlink DOT net> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @03:04PM (#8932187) Homepage
        Their service is real and works fine. I have an account: greengeek AT spymac DOT com. However, the problem with their service is due to the fact that they were once a very small mac-users forum/service. When Google made their announcement, spymac gained notoriety for having a 1 gig email service up and running already. Their subscriber base jumped from They got /.ed and farked, as well as having articles in several mac sites and I think zdnet or cnet too. Also, most of the services of the site are still very new, some are still in "beta" and are lacking features. They are deserving of pity for the raping of their bandwidth and servers, but they probably should have expected it too.

    • Re:Is this a joke submission? (Score:5, Informative)

      by dr.badass ( 25287 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:33PM (#8934230) Homepage
      First of all, what is Spymac, chopped liver?

      Yes, actually. Spymac is pretty awful in my experience. The mail service is no exception.

      First, they ask you for about six pages of information vs. Gmail's two fields. Next, their 'activation' mailing takes two weeks Then you find out that you have a 10MB attachment limit on your 1GB mail account. Then you find out that the advertized POP3 access doesn't, you know...work. (It doesn't at this very moment on my account.)

      The end result is a pretty run-of-the-mill webmail service. It made me realize that the promising thing about Gmail isn't the 1GB, it's the features.
      • ...it's the breathtaking amount of bandwidth and huge number of servers vs what appears to be one overloaded machine at the end of a glowing piece of barbed wire.

        It certainly defecates on hotmail from a substantial altitude.

  • I wonder if they filter out... (Score:5, Funny)

    by SCSi ( 17797 ) <(moc.tpedav) (ta) (suvroc)> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:12PM (#8930749) Homepage
    attachments that end in .rar or .r[0-9][0-9] :) I swear, I was only "checking my email".
    • An web e-mail service is not a very useful file sharing platform. Just like any time somebody posts a New York Times username/password on Slashdot, not soon after somebody logs onto said account and resets the password an e-mail address which steals the account and changes the locks on it.
      • well it would be trivial to make a script that could be initiated from anywhere to log on and send a set of files stored in the mailbox to somebody(like a per request emailer - you /msg evilbot !mail me_some_pron_at balblba@bigmailbox_i_just_got_for_free_so_i_dont_ e ven_care_about_spam.com and the evilbot initiates a script that sends you some pron from a mailbox thats on some big free mailbox service). the mailbox being web accessible doesn't really matter, what matters is that you can store some stuff
      • What about chain letters in those servers instead of p2p networks for distributing files? You send something to one of this systems users, that forward the messages to other users of this servers, at almost zero cost of bandwidth for both sides (at least the part of sharing, in some moment that should be downloaded or the mailbox emptied).

  • The worst part of Slashdot... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gid13 ( 620803 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:13PM (#8930772)
    ...is hearing about these things before they're actually available. Note to Google and Walla!: FINISH THE DAMN BETA ALREADY!!!!!!!

  • Google can do it, but can Walla? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:14PM (#8930784)
    This definitely seems like an attempt to steal Google's thunder, but you have to ask if an Israel-local portal company really has the global reach that Google has to be able to offer high-performance ad-supported e-mail to everybody.

    I'm not quite sure that they're going to have enough non-local ads in order to serve the world in the way that Google now seems pretty confident in its global geotargeting systems.

  • Email courtesy?? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by daveodukeo ( 260037 )
    Sometimes, i check my mail via pop3 on a dial-up connection. If I start getting 30 MB attatchments, I'll be in trouble.

    What happened to e-mail ettiquete??
    • What happened to e-mail ettiquete??

      Email ettiquete gave way to productivity. If I need to get a file to someone quickly I'll usually email it (as long as I know that they have a broadband connection or are willing to wait for the attachment to download). Seems like it is all relative. I wouldn't send a 30Mb attachment to my friend on AOL, but to a friend that has cable/dsl they wouldn't mind it one little bit.

    • Ever heard of the POP3 TOP command?
    • If you're using dialup pop, then you should be retrieving only headers, and your email client should download individual messages for you instead of grabbing all of them up front. This will let you eliminate obvious spams (based on header contents.) The more thoughtful email clients put notes on attachments in the header...

  • ah extra room (Score:5, Funny)

    by jacquesm ( 154384 ) <j AT ww DOT com> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:14PM (#8930791) Homepage
    I really needed that for all that spam...
    (is that kosher food ?)

  • spymac (Score:5, Informative)

    by morcheeba ( 260908 ) * on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:15PM (#8930792) Journal
    Spymac already offers 1Gig Email for free. [spymac.com] Gmail's conversations sound like the most useful feature of their service. beta review [miscoranda.com]
    • GMail's definitely expected to be much more than the storage alone, but also the way they'll be able to sort and search e-mail as threads of information.

      They're out to raise the bar for the existing free mail providers, because it seems like everything from radio stations to comic books have their own free e-mail service these days...

  • Spam (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:15PM (#8930793)
    In other news, world's first 1gbyte spam messages began circulating late yesterday afternoon.

  • Attachments? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by InvaderXimian ( 609659 ) <elvedinNO@SPAMods.org> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:15PM (#8930796)
    Why a 30MB attachment limit? They could just say 50TB attachment limit and nothing would really be changed since most mail servers have a 5MB attachment limit, at most. Very few of them have a bigger limit.

    • Insightful?? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:23PM (#8930925) Homepage Journal
      Why a 30MB attachment limit? They could just say 50TB attachment limit and nothing would really be changed since most mail servers have a 5MB attachment limit, at most. Very few of them have a bigger limit.

      So... if I wanted to make an attachment and my mail server didn't allow anything over 5MB (and under 30MB), I'd be screwed, right?

      Wait! There's a free webbased email service that offers 1GB of space and has a 30MB attachment limit!!

      Welcome to economics 101... encourage everyone to switch to your product...

    • Re:Attachments? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tripster ( 23407 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:49PM (#8931318) Homepage
      So true, I run a couple of mail servers for ISPs and we have 3-5MB limits imposed on incoming file sizes. This is for a couple of reasons, firstly we shouldn't have to load up the virus scanner even more with huge files, as it stands the scanners will skip over files over a certain size, but I'm sure the virus writers are eventually going to note this and start sending multi-megabyte virus files.

      Next is the dialup issue, if any of you have ever done tech support for a dialup pool you will have run across the clueless user who gets some huge attachment that will take at least 30 minutes to download, but clueless user is so used to his mail checks taking 30 seconds or less he never lets it download and at that point his email becomes "stuck" he thinks because everything behind said attachment is never being downloaded, nor is the attachment being deleted as it should.

      Finally let's not forget here that email is one of the worst methods for moving files around, especially largish files, I mean the overhead required to encode the file in text format for sending means you practically double the original size of the attachment to send it. Throw in some bounces and you waste megabytes of bandwidth.
      • scanners will skip over files over a certain size, but I'm sure the virus writers are eventually going to note this and start sending multi-megabyte virus files.

        I had an idea about this, about making the largest, most comprehensively powerful, dangerous and unstoppable virus ever, giving it an innocuous name and distributing it via Kazaa. Nobody would suspect a 600MB file to be a virus!

        Then I realised Windows had already been invented.

    • is that since now you can send larger attachments, you'll tell your friends to sign up so they can recieve them. It's an easy way to encourage existing users to advertise your service.

      Ben

  • THERE IS NO WAY (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm using an email service hosted in Israel. Might as well paint a big red target on myself.

    • Re:THERE IS NO WAY (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Might as well paint a big red target on myself.

      We won't try to stop you...

  • Cute (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pahalial ( 580781 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:15PM (#8930800)
    But..
    a) Unknown and unheard of company
    b) Physically quite a ways from most wired countries, as opposed to widespread google (Akamai?) servers
    c) Israeli only so far, vs. however many localizations (let alone simple translations) google/gmail has/will have.
    d) None of the advanced searching/sorting features that Gmail has been promising and actually do sound fairly nice.
    • e) Walla [walla.co.il] is in Hebrew.

      Also, from the article link, the free service is for Wallas customers:
      Walla Communications (TASE: WALA) Israel's leading Internet portal with 75,000 customers, reported this morning plans to become the first company in the world to provide one-gigabyte (GB) e-mailboxes to its customers.

      So unless your a Walla customer and can read Hebrew, looks like your out.

  • How can web portals afford this? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KingOfBLASH ( 620432 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:15PM (#8930801) Journal
    1 GB is a lot of information, and it has to cost a decent chunk of money to allocate that much storage for every user, and to pay for bandwidth for 30MB attachments, and for the rack space and electricity. How are web portals like google making back the cost of 1GB email?
    • Just like every other web portal. They'll give it away for awhile, then when people get hooked, they'll jack up the price.

    • Re:How can web portals afford this? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Morgahastu ( 522162 ) <bshel ... fave bands name> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:30PM (#8931016) Journal
      Not only do they have to have 1GB of disk space for each user, but think of the backup system! If they're using RAID they could use up to several gigabytes per user!
    • Anyone Remember Myplay.com? Used to Offer 3gigs of storage for music uploads - get you music online then you can listen to it anywhere you ahve an internet connection.

      Sounds expensive, but since the record biz were so anal about licensing and wanted too much money it turned out to be cheaper to do it this way.

      my.mp3.com used less disk space but ended up paying a lot more than the money they saved in legal judgements against them....

      just an aside - myplay.com launched in 1999, 5 years on the cost of disk


    • Follow the relational database model of data storage... For attachments and messages that are duplicates across many accounts, just store one copy and put pointers to that copy in each person's account. According to that article earlier this week, 30% of all email is spam, so right there, you can save 30% of your disk space by only storing one copy of each spam. And think of all the savings in virus attachments, too!

    • 1GB = $2 if you fill it. Advertising pays (Score:5, Informative)

      by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @04:11PM (#8932867) Journal
      Sergei or Larry said that 1GB costs them $2, and that sounds about right - the cost of disk drives is approaching $0.50 / GB, and you need some duplication for reliability and some computers to drive the disks, and amortize some operations cost, so you could probably do $2 in quantity. That's not $2/month, it's just $2.

      And that's if you fill the space - while some people can do that overnight (:-), it'll take a while before their average user receives enough email to get close to that much, and the cost of disk capacity is still on a deep dive, so by the time the average user fills their 1GB, it'll cost $1 or $0.50 instead of $2.

  • So what? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Seoulstriker ( 748895 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:16PM (#8930804)
    Everyone with a Gmail account, including myself, knows that email storage space is not the only part of an effective email system. The Gmail interface is so simplified, efficient, and intuitive, that there will probably not be anything coming out that can compete with it. (ask people who both have Gmail and Spymac and see what they think)

    Not only that, but the Israeli service requires money whereas Gmail is free. I am confident that Gmail will be the only truly successful free gigabyte email service.

    • Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by glinden ( 56181 ) * on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:53PM (#8931370) Homepage Journal
      Exactly right. GMail asks and answers the question, "What e-mail client would you build if you never had to delete any of your old e-mail?"

      GMail is designed to organize your information for easy access later. Messages are threaded, part of a conversation on a topic. Searching your mail is emphasized. And, because it's web-based, you can access you mail and any information in your mail from any computer.

      The 1G of storage is just a means to the end.

  • Ok... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hookedup ( 630460 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:17PM (#8930827)
    These services offering large attachment sizes, how useful can they really be when the majority of users cant recieve the files due to limits set on their mail server?

    Sending huge attachments is nice and everything, but it's only going to work if your friend has a gmail/spymac acount (or thier own mail server) too..
  • I would like to announce that I am now the very first Slashdot user to point out that Spymac.com offers a 1GB email service. That's right, you heard it here first. (and, uhh, don't scroll up.)

  • Better brush up on your Hebrew! (Score:3, Informative)

    by curtisk ( 191737 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:19PM (#8930859) Homepage Journal
    Walla! [walla.com] As of ten seconds ago, lack an english version of their site. That could make registering a bit problematic for some. Too bad xPertCodert [slashdot.org] didn't have a funny mailto: in their submission pointing to @walla.com :p
  • H0w w0ul|) you leik a bigger àéé÷åðéí åøéðâèåðéí ?!? at least I wont be able to read my new spam

  • Has anyone been to Walla's website? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Bill, Shooter of Bul ( 629286 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:21PM (#8930895) Journal
    If you did then you would understand why they are a non factor. (HINT: if you can't read hebrew, you probley won't find much use from their portal.)
  • I signed up for an account, but now all my messages are showing up written right to left!

  • whats the big deal? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by blanks ( 108019 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:25PM (#8930954) Homepage Journal
    3 years ago I had over 1200 megs of emails, spam, and attachments through my email provider sitting on their server. They never cared, they told me that as long as they have the free space, and that I dont go over 2000 megs, I would be fine. This wasnt a small provider too, it was a company owned by dsl.com.

    Is the big difference here the fact that its offered as a 1000 megs of space? Im sure many providers dont monitor disk usage for email if you go through small isp's, Ive never had a problem with them.
    • I was in the same boat as you for years I had about a gig of mail. Then my provider decided to enforce quota's without telling anytbody. The deleted all the oldest mail till my account was under 100 megs. It was a fight to get them to resore it so i could at least get a more recent backup and move eveything to a different server. To many providers just think it's all spam nobody will notice. I have an inbox full of PDF's and Fax Tiffs.

      I guess it was all for the best I reduced my service to email forw
  • Yes! Lets kill those puny dialup users, let's send them a real attachment. They'll be lining up for broadband. Mail all those live CD linux distros to every single AOL user on the planet! And it will be cheaper that using the post office like AOL does. I can see it now "You've Got" and 6 hours later "Mail!"

  • The real issue is accessiblity (Score:3, Interesting)

    by scorp1us ( 235526 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:28PM (#8930998) Journal
    I have about 7 email accounts. 3 are personal. One .edu, one hotmail and 1 yahoo.The problem is, I use yahoo and hotmail because I can;t get to my mail once netscape pulls it down off the server. On top of that I'm behind a firewall. So anything I need to act on during a work day ends up at a web account.

    Sure I could use IMAP, but I get about 200 spam a day, and a 30 meg limit. It's not practical. I need globally accesible email respitory. That's what it is about - access anywhere to your email, in a manner that won't fill up your account. My mozilla mail file is several hundred megs, dating back years. I save it all, JIC. And it helps. Even one old email can make thouse 100s of megs worth it.

    If we had a way to store the data on our PCs, then retrive it anywhere, in a consisant manner (meaning Mozilla would place nice with it - and it would play nice with Mozilla (like a shared sent folder)) then I think we'd be 99% happy and not need 1gig of email hosting. It's cheapest on my drive. It's a fixed cost, and I've already paid ot off. 1gig is cheap. ($0.50-$1) (Though it may not be safest, I never back that bitch up)

  • Great, a new web-based hard drive for me... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Professr3 ( 670356 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:29PM (#8931006)
    Ok, so how long will it take before someone registers 100 accounts or so, writes a program to break their files into chunks, and stores them as email attachments? It would take me about 2 hours to write a file manager that stores large stuff like my star trek collection or backups on their mail servers...

    When in doubt, mod +1 insightful and pray...

    • Re:Great, a new web-based hard drive for me... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by russx2 ( 572301 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @02:28PM (#8931801)
      Ok, so how long will it take before someone registers 100 accounts or so, writes a program to break their files into chunks, and stores them as email attachments? It would take me about 2 hours to write a file manager that stores large stuff like my star trek collection or backups on their mail servers...

      ... about the same amount of time it'd take Google to implement detection for this sort of behaviour. They're not exactly idiots over at Google and I'm sure they've thought about this. Should be especially easy to detect as well (lots of multiple attachments the same size, lack of normal activity etc.).

      It's a pretty risky endeavour anyway (for backups that is) as you're running the risk everyday of being caught and having your accounts wiped. Not exactly a bullet proof backup solution is it?

  • Lovely! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Eric_Cartman_South_P ( 594330 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:30PM (#8931015)
    Instead of Google reading your e-mail, the Mossad will.

  • The Walla! portal seems to be in hebrew. One of 5000 other languages I don't know...
    • The Walla! portal seems to be in hebrew. One of 5000 other languages I don't know...

      Yet that doesn't stand in the way when they try to write an English-language press release...

      Seems like stock pumping an nothing more... move along...

  • Hmm. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ksilebo ( 134470 )
    Basing this comment on the fact that I have never heard of this company, I wouldn't trust my email to a random company in the middle east to hold any valuable emails. I only see myself using GMail in the future for those newsletter subscriptions, forum email validations, and stuff I want to send home to read later.
  • It seems to me that the usefulness of lots-n-lots of remote storage for email depends on more than just how much you get. In particular, you also need to know:

    How fast you can up/download it

    What you can do to your mail without downloading it

    Did the internet suddenly get a lot faster while I wasn't looking? Even at cable modem speeds, it would take at least an hour to move 1 GB up or down from a remote server.

    • Ugh, it's not about sending 1gb size files.
      It's about having a (in case of most people text emails) an nearly unlimited storage limit so you never have to delete email or get messages bounced back.

      It's not about storing files and downloading them.

      Christ.

  • This will be a boon (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:34PM (#8931098)
    to those to dumb to work a CD-RW. I mean that. I talk to people all the time whose computers are hosed, but they can't format and reinstall because they couldn't figure out how to write their god damned crap to a CD. With this, let'em send an email (they've already figured out email usually) and download the stuff later. Sure, it's a ridiculously dumb, slow way to back up their data. But hey, if they weren't too dumb to figure out thier CD-RW I wouldn't be posting this comment.
  • get sued over privacy concerns. It really helps to not be an American company sometimes.

    Of course, think of all the international "customers" who will deliberately not choose Walla because of its nationality. Now, if they were Indian or Japanese ...
    • Google getting sued over privacy concerns? If you don't agree to their privacy statement, don't apply. I'm sure everyone who signs up must click a checkbox indicating that they read it.

      And it's not like people can't sue other people in isreal.
  • Is what kind of anti-spam system Gmail is going to have. I mean, the moment Gmail goes live (and probably already) spammers are going to be targeting every conciveable email address @gmail.com. Anyone who gets a 'good' name is going to get spammed.

    But you'd think, they're google, they're going to be really good at looking at information and classifying it, they should be able to get some great anti-spam systems setup. I'd figure that anti-spam would be part of the marketing for any email provider thes
  • I mean, come on, guys, it's not that hard to set up a mail server with a web interface that allows anonymous accounts and gives everyone 1 GB of storage.

    Just don't advertise it... and try to keep your number of accounts under about 100, and you're all set. Singlehandedly, you have just defeated both the most successful search engine in history, and the government of Israel.

    Oh, man.. now I've got to do that... I wonder how many people would want an user@youhavenochancetosurvivemakeyourtime.com address..

  • I guess my sentiments are... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:45PM (#8931262)
    who cares?

    This is hardly a big deal. It's merely an imaginary milestone that we think is important, but is really completely relevant. Is this any kind of technical feat? No. Is this even useful? Not for the majority of people.

    And besides, as a number of people have pointed out already, the title of "first 1 GB e-mail service provider" is taken.

  • Size is not all that matters (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:46PM (#8931276) Homepage Journal
    GMail not only will have 1Gb mail capacity, but also (from what i remember from the gmail announcement) spam/virus protection (ok, this company will have it also, but not sure how good/accurate will it be against google, but is something that could mark a clear difference between both), non bloated pages (should check how much weight pages from company, if have graphic ads will be in big disadvantage against google text ads at the very least), multilingual interface, and... well, is google behind, for good or bad (if it was Microsoft, will be a very bad, but still have some trust in google over companies that i simply don't know) and probably future integration with more things from google.

    Not have big problems against the origin of the company, but maybe things could be slower for US residents or countries that have to connect thru US to reach it, or if it have some kind of success, if their (and maybe their country) bandwidth could handle the load that handles google already.

    • Virus protection (Score:3, Informative)

      by KalvinB ( 205500 )
      Hotmail has McAfee, Indie-Mail has McAfee. GMail will no doubt have something similar. However when MyDoom came out my e-mail server was deleting those virus e-mails before the virus scanner was. If you look in the filter list on the Indie-Mail web-site one of the entries is a long string of letters and numbers. That's the signiture I found and used to kill off MyDoom before the VirusScan was updated and took care of it, itself.

      The problem with spam protection is that you can't be overly agressive when

  • Few thoughts (Score:2, Interesting)

    by xPertCodert ( 596934 )
    As a guy who had originally submitted the story, I must say, that I have never heard of SpyMac service before... I, also, think that in a next couple of month we'll see an explosion in web-based large data storage offerings from both global and local portals and providers. This will signify a huge change in their business models and offerings and we'll see how people will move not only e-mails but other useful information as well, for example - true world-wide collaboration tools, calendars, phone direct
  • Bring out your warez! *dong*

    Can you take it?

    But it hasn't even been cracked yet.

    I have product activation...I'll be reporting you soon.

    *pulls out a hex editor.....CRACK*

    *Loads it into the cart*

    Bring out your warez! *dong*

  • The battle has begun (Score:4, Interesting)

    by KalvinB ( 205500 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @01:55PM (#8931387) Homepage
    Except this isn't really a battle. The Iraqi web-portal isn't giving people an @google.com or @gmail.com account. Much of the reason people sign up for an e-mail service is the domain name. It really doesn't matter how great the offering is, not too many people are going to get an @goat[...].cx e-mail account.

    When Google announced its GMail on April 1st I took it seriously and decided to improve my e-mail service offering. It's now accessible over the web, SSL secured, fully text searchable and free. Before it was POP3 only, not secured and not free. I'm going to look into adding IMAP access as well. 15,000KB attachment limit and no storage limits as long as you don't try to use it as a remote harddrive.

    You also don't need an existing e-mail account to sign up. Which is nice if you need to sign up for a service and really don't care to give them any real information.

    Also, when you delete a message, it's gone.

    Ben
  • email attachments, especially binary attachments, don't need to increase in size. they need to be reduced. use something intended to be a File Transfer Protocol.

  • Did EVERYBODY miss the train on this? (Score:5, Informative)

    by CrystalFalcon ( 233559 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @02:17PM (#8931684) Homepage
    Now, listen. Google's email service is not about the one-gigabyte limit.

    Ok, so it's a huge number, and so everybody seems to have stared themselves blind at it, and missed the print underneath.

    Google's email service is about having your email searchable. About retrieving old email by searching for a part of it. About eliminating the need for folders, dates, keywords to remember your mail. About a all-in-one-bucket, always-available mail store, that's accessed by searching rather than sorting and browsing.

    Forget about the one-gigabyte limit. That's just tweaking parameters that others already have. It's nothing really innovative.

    What's really new is their entire approach.

    • Hear hear (Score:3, Insightful)

      by apankrat ( 314147 )

      Search feature sounds pretty much like what M2 client [opera.com] has:

      Search your M2 e-mails for almost anything. A search "sticks" and becomes an access point, so that you can easily refer to it in the future.
      I realize that M2 is not free and not web-based, but still it makes Gmail's searching much less of a novelty than someone ;) may want it to appear.

      The point is that GMail is unique due to the combination of features it has to offer, which among other things include kick-ass UI, search and storage space.

  • BZZZZT WRONG (Score:5, Insightful)

    by devphaeton ( 695736 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @03:32PM (#8932460)
    30mb attachments? 1GB storage?

    NO NO NO NO!!! Email was not designed for this.

    furthermore, many email clients are not equipped to deal with attachments to the tune of 30mb. Most notable examples are Outhouse/Outhouse Express. Their attachment limit is somewhere near 1.7mb (for a 36.6Kbps dialup connection) and around 5.4mb for most broadband (most mailservers capped at 128Kbps).

    There is a hardcoded timeout interval in there that causes retrieval and sending of a message of that size to fail if it doesn't see EOF go by in a certain amount of time.

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