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Google Businesses The Internet

Gmail Cracks Down on Third-Party Notifiers 490

Posted by timothy from the their-sandbox-their-rules dept.
crtfdgk writes "Recently, Google's gmail service has attempted to change login protocols to block third-party gmail notifiers that alert you to new email. Google has now taken it one step further and created a word-identification script filter as part of the login process. Personally, I find Google's gmail notifier annoying since it sits in my taskbar and doesn't have popup notification, unlike many other worthy Firefox or Mozilla plugins that feature gmail notification. Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email? Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?"
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Gmail Cracks Down on Third-Party Notifiers More

Gmail Cracks Down on Third-Party Notifiers

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  • Well... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ghettoboy22 ( 723339 ) * <scott.a.johnson@gmail.com> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:05PM (#10098005) Homepage
    Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email? Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?

    My feeling is that if it's a *FREE* service (meaning you don't pay Google anything to use Gmail) then no, you shouldn't be free to use whatever third party software you choose.

    Sorry but when you're not even a paying customer, I feel no love.

    • Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:09PM (#10098049)
      My feeling is that if it's a *FREE* service (meaning you don't pay Google anything to use Gmail) then no, you shouldn't be free to use whatever third party software you choose.

      I share your feeling for the most part but I really don't understand their actions. Why not stop wasting your coding time during a beta program stopping third parties from making their experience better and work on adding the things the users want (ie POP3, Opera support, HTML-only, etc?)

      • Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by mindstrm ( 20013 )
        Because you don't want some third party tool getting a foothold until you have a chance to launch your own production version.

      • Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)

        by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbender@@@gmail...com> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:43PM (#10098299)
        ...Opera support...

        Note that Opera 7.6 [opera.com] (currently in beta/development) has enhanced Gmail support. I just saw there is actually an entire website devoted to Gmail on Opera [scss.com.au].

      • Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by chris_mahan ( 256577 ) <chris.mahan@gmail.com> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:52PM (#10098359) Homepage
        because you want to control the ping to one every ten minutes. Imagine if 3 million people had notifier on and they were pinging your server every ten seconds each. That's 300,000 hits per second. No good.

        • Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)

          by droleary ( 47999 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:17PM (#10098541) Homepage

          because you want to control the ping to one every ten minutes. Imagine if 3 million people had notifier on and they were pinging your server every ten seconds each. That's 300,000 hits per second. No good.

          Gee, if only there were some way to track down those abusers by virtue of their abuse rather than the nature (third-party) of the app doing the checking. You know, some sort of identifier like an email address or something . . .

        • Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Otto ( 17870 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:42PM (#10099748) Homepage Journal
          because you want to control the ping to one every ten minutes.

          Two minutes. GMail's official Notifer checks every 2 minutes.

          The big deal is that they want third party apps to stop actually logging in and pulling the full HTML for the main page, and start copying what the notifier does, which is to pull down something much smaller, simpler, and less CPU intensive for google.

          Also, it prevents their statistics from being skewed by apps acting like actual people. What, you think they're not logging stats on this stuff?

      • Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Arcanix ( 140337 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:56PM (#10098390)
        POP3 support would destroy the entire reason google provides the service, the ads that are displayed. Unless you want the ads embedded in your e-mail which is far worse than seeing them next to your messages on the web site in my opinion...

        • Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)

          by darc ( 532156 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:55PM (#10098774) Journal
          According to Gmail's feature wishlist : (you can get this by going to help and hitting send feedback)

          done! Address book import
          we'll try Opera support
          we'll try Ability to send messages with HTML formatting
          we'll try POP3 access
          working on it Plain HTML version of Gmail
          working on it Ability to save a draft

          So this is not entirely out of the question.
    • There are also some other excellent choices. Hotmail comes to mind.

      Hopefully my sarcasm isn't lost on anyone.

    • Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Devar ( 312672 )
      Free or otherwise I should still be able to have the choice on whether I use a third party plugin for it.

      You don't have to if you dont want to, but if I do and I find that useful than I believe I have every right to.

      Google has every right to try and deny such things, but it is rather silly. Maybe they should also go ahead and deny searches from any third party plugins apart from Google Toolbar, too? No, didn't think so.

      • Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by waynelorentz ( 662271 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:52PM (#10098358) Homepage
        You don't have to if you dont want to, but if I do and I find that useful than I believe I have every right to.

        There's that word right that people keep abusing. "I have the right to this... I have the right to that." Bottom line is -- no, you don't have the right to a lot of things. The rights you have are very clearly spelled out by the laws of your country. In the case of the United States, the Bill of Rights. I don't remember the constitution being ammended to include people having the right to leach off of other people's work.

        Like many people before you, you confuse a "right" with "I really really wanna. Waaah!"

        • Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by belroth ( 103586 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:18PM (#10098546)
          The rights you have are very clearly spelled out by the laws of your country. In the case of the United States, the Bill of Rights.
          That rather depends upon your philosophical outlook to law.

          View 1) everything which is not explicitly allowed is forbidden.
          View 2) everything which is not explicitly forbidden is allowed.

          Your call : does your Bill of Rights define all of the rights which you have?

          • Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Zackbass ( 457384 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:40PM (#10098672)
            It is actually a VERY easy to settle issue. Start by reading it, and when you're doing with that learn some of the history the surrounded its creation. Read the Federalist papers. Read the opinions of the various framers. Many of them were VERY vocal.

            Here's a hint about what they say: view 2 is correct, view 1 was the framers' worst nightmare. One of the major concerns in the adoption of the bill of rights was that people might eventually start to believe view 1.

            • Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)

              by jon787 ( 512497 )
              I would actually say view 1 is correct, but only because the Constitution was written to control the government not the people. So the proper viewpoint for answering the question is the government's not the people's.

          • Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)

            by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:42PM (#10098683)
            Your call : does your Bill of Rights define all of the rights which you have?

            No, it specifically limits the US Government's ability to curtail our rights. Our Constitution specically states that any rights not enumerated in it are reserved to the states or the people.

            As a side note, it applies to our government, not private citizens and contracts that they undertake. Which is why , when people start screaming "Company X violated my 1st amendment rights" I realize they have no idea about what they speak.

          • Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)

            by no soup for you ( 607826 ) <jesse.wolgamott@ ... ail.com minus pi> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @05:02PM (#10098838) Homepage
            Your call : does your Bill of Rights define all of the rights which you have?

            Article IX: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

          • Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)

            by ibbey ( 27873 ) *
            Your call : does your Bill of Rights define all of the rights which you have?

            This is a great philosophy, but utterly irrelevant in this circumstance.

            The bill of rights defines your rights with regard to the government. It has basically nothing to do with your rights when dealing with a private company. For example, Google could institute a new policy saying that they reserve the right to block emails discussing certain topics. The government doing this would probably violate the first amendment, but it w

        • Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by cHiphead ( 17854 )
          You have it backwards on top of it all. We allow the government certain RIGHTS to govern us. Thats the essence of the Declaration of Independence.

        • That's exactly why (Score:4, Interesting)

          by wurp ( 51446 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @09:44PM (#10100367) Homepage
          That's exactly why Patrick Henry, among others, was *opposed* to the Bill of Rights - because people like you would say it was a complete list of rights, rather than a list of minimal guaranteed rights among many other rights.

          What it boils down to is that you have whatever rights you have the ability and willingness to demand. What _that_ generally boils down to is that you have whatever rights your culture grants you. It is a bad, bad move as a culture for us to decide people have some minimal set of rights that can be enumerated somewhere - instead, keep pushing the envelope of your rights until it includes everything that doesn't hurt someone else.

          That said, I don't believe we have a right to force Google to make it easy for 3rd party mail notifiers to work. It did miff me until someone pointed out how their notifier could be much more efficient. I wouldn't be surprised to see them solidify the notifier API and make it a public release after they have tested it for a while.
    • Has anyone considered the possibility that the reason they're blocking these notifiers isn't because they have a problem with the idea, but rather there isn't a standard upon which they've settled on?

      What I mean is, Slashdot bans people when they abusively pull RSS feeds too often, and ask people to only pull RSS once every 30 minutes, and no more often than that. It's possible that these programs are pinging the crap out of the server, essentially DDOS'ing the sytem with mindless queries every few seconds to every few minutes. If the notifiers only queried once every half hour, there would be no issue, but hen people would find it useless since there would be up to a half hour delay on being notified of new mail.

      I think therein lies the crux of the matter.

    • Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by randyest ( 589159 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @05:44PM (#10099101) Homepage
      You are correct.

      Moreover, the only sort of person who could describe Google's changing of a free beta tool's interface as "cracking down" is someone who has never himself been cracked-down upon.

      This isn't "cracking down." But at least it wasn't an YRO [slashdot.org] story.

      If google's free gmail broke your favorite notifier plugin and that really upsets you, then you're taking free email far too seriously.

  • It will get better, not worse (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Patik ( 584959 ) * <cpatik@g m a i l . c om> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:05PM (#10098010) Homepage Journal
    Google is already working on support for Opera, POP3 access, a plain HTML version of Gmail, and many other things [google.com]. I think Gmail will continue to add more freedom, not take it away.

    Who says Google is trying to stifle 3rd party apps? It is still beta, they are still fixing things, and nothing has been finalized. Instant Messenger services change their protocols occasionally but they don't block 3rd party apps.

    Either way, if you've got a Gmail account, be sure to give them your two cents [google.com].

    • Re:It will get better, not worse (Score:4, Informative)

      by Lord Jester ( 88423 ) <jeff@@@lordjester...com> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:11PM (#10098065) Homepage
      Instant Messenger services change their protocols occasionally but they don't block 3rd party apps

      Bullshit! Yahoo just did this very thing. They changed thier protocol in their new releasd that broke 3rd party apps. Yahoo, like others, do not publish protcol documentation or supply APIs, it is up to 3rd party programmers to reverse engineer it to get the 3rd party apps to work.

    • Re:It will get better, not worse (Score:5, Informative)

      by gordyf ( 23004 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:13PM (#10098081)
      IM services have tried repeatedly to block third-party apps. Both AIM and Yahoo have tried to block third-party clients.

      Yahoo blocking [earthweb.com]

      AIM blocking [arstechnica.com]

      "AOL made changes to their proprietary protocol (called OSCAR) that would ferret out anyone who wasn't using the official client."
      • Yeah and there was a specific reason for this... Ad revenue. GMail notifiers don't eliminate as much ad revenue, in fact, they probably create more of a reason for people to visit their GMail accounts...

        People don't sit on GMail all day long with it open docked to the corner of their screen like IM clients.
      • The reason they do this, like Google is doing with Gmail, is that when mail / IMs are downloaded / viewed with a third party client, their ads are not shown. However, they also said that they'll be working on allowing POP3 into Gmail. I think it's too early to judge them.

    • Re:It will get better, not worse (Score:5, Insightful)

      by apothegm ( 809113 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:40PM (#10098285)
      People need to realize that Gmail is simply a means for Google to deliver more advertising clicks. Free email is simply the means to an end. They've run the numbers and figured they can build a web-based email client, buy a mess of storage, and create their own click-stream for possibly cheaper than it would be to have an army of business development folks sell AdSense to every crappy website.

      Now, Opera and plain HTML versions of Gmail make sense in this context because it's a relatively easy way to increase the numbers; there's no technical reason they haven't supported that yet. Their engineers just haven't gotten around to it.

      External POP support is a little more dubious: "In the future you will be able to access Gmail messages from non-Gmail accounts for free or at a nominal fee." [google.com] My bet is on the nominal fee. You can be sure they're going to start charging for POP access if they notice a significant drop in ad impressions for web-based Gmail 'cause that's going to mean a big drop in and CPM deals their sales folk are doing.

      And the "beta" program? People, it's viral marketing. It's the ultimate technical shrug, "Meh, it's just a 'beta'" I can guarantee sites like GmailSwap [gmailswap.com] has their business development staff weeping tears of joy; you can't buy marketing like that, but hordes of technorati are creaming their jeans for this email-cum-status-symbol.

  • Why would google do this? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tao_of_biology ( 666898 ) <tao,of,biology&gmail,com> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:05PM (#10098012)
    Forgive any ignorance I display here, as I'm not one of the fortunate few who has gmail (yet).

    I've been trying to imagine why google would do such an un-google thing. Perhaps they're worried about coders going to next level, and coding up entire gmail readers--or incorporating gmail account readers into something like Thunderbird [mozilla.org]. Adding that word-identification script filter to the login process would certainly prevent something like that--but also has the side effect of blowing up the seemingly innocuous gmail email notifier.

    Which leads me to wonder how google's own system tray email notification program can still work. Obviously it's still possible, in theory, to do this same thing in spite of the word-identification script filter. Perhaps google will publish an API that 3rd party developers can use solely for the use of gmail notification abilities in their own programs.

    I can't believe (thought it's definitely possible) that their goal would be to blow up only the 3rd party email notification programs. It seems like 3rd party notification programs would serve to only promote the use of gmail. And, as far as I know, they gain no ad revenue directly from their gmail notification system tray icon.

    They actually publish an API for doing (limited) google searches in 3rd party programs, which seems like a more overt way to avoid ads and avoid google's revenue source. Maybe that'll be history soon, who knows? I hope this isn't an indication of their new corporate policy and philosophy.

    • Re:Why would google do this? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MilenCent ( 219397 ) <johnwh AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:50PM (#10098344) Homepage
      My guess:

      It has nothing to do with adsense: you have to open messages to receive ads, and notifiers don't do that.

      I think it's probably to block other people who aren't yet on our radar, such as spammers automating logins for the purposes of evil, or someone trying to create a shell program around Gmail that blocks ads.

    • Re:Why would google do this? (Score:5, Informative)

      by MrNonchalant ( 767683 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:51PM (#10099475)
      About a week back I downloaded GMail Notifier the official alternative. Then I fired up Ethereal. There is indeed a backdoor protocol. Though from what I can tell from the HTTP GET string it's protected to high hell. GMail notifier sends an HTTP GET query to the GMail server, the GMail server sends back the number (and almost only the number) of messages. Here's the dump:

      GET /gmail?ui=pb&q=label%3A%5Ei%20label%3A%5Eu HTTP/1.1
      User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GNotify 1.0.21.0)
      Host: gmail.google.com
      Cache-Control: no-cache
      Cookie: en_US; GV=fea7b8d648-b9be26d2425258708508713e52327ed1; GMAIL_AT=6d9cba730be1a490-fea7ca187f; SID=AV8H4FYfeDJ-4lwENnL9kzcyiSJshVSKK2xixnjpjWgHsf 5ZeIhRBn0aSXNXqg9mNrvBpyrfx0ImAGmONYgxv0w=; PREF=ID=446f57901cff551a:TM=1093681541:LM=10937355 79:TB=2:S=QbSoqBBCOK7nKj0f; S=gmail=NK86NtM1S-k:gmproxy=rYXDOT5E60U

      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Set-Cookie: SID=AfvmInwaGVRkESW3REmGuiyongiyNzyqguZePHuQUyJ9sf 5ZeIhRBn0aSXNXqg9mNtCkJwBg2BEl1DvtQ6bT250=;Domain= .google.com;Path=/;Expires=Tue, 26-Aug-2014 23:45:55 GMT
      Cache-control: no-cache
      Pragma: no-cache
      Content-Type: application/octet-stream
      Transfer-Encoding: chunked
      Server: GFE/1.3
      Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2004 23:45:55 GMT

      4

      0

      I however absolutely hate the color scheme involved with Notifier, so I will NOT be using it until they improve that. GTray (http://torrez.us/gtray), my app of choice, still works just fine as of about 10 minutes ago. If Google really does close it off at some point, I think we should petition them to open up a version like Google API with similar restrictions.
    • > Perhaps they're worried about coders going to next level,
      > and coding up entire gmail readers--or incorporating gmail account readers
      > into something like Thunderbird.
      That sort of thing has already been done for months--there's POP & SMTP proxies for Gmail already. And if one of them doesn't work on your platform you can use the Gmail Python binding project [sf.net] `libgmail` to write one of your own.

      > Adding that word-identification script filter to the login process
      > would certainly prevent
  • Does it hurt their advertizing revenue stream? It just doesn't make sense to me, but then a lot of things that some companies do don't make sense to me.

    "Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain

  • Browsers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by z0ink ( 572154 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:05PM (#10098016)
    "Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?" Well, there already are restrictions in the way they have the site built. I can't use lynx (or links/elinks) or konqueror to access my GMail as it is.
    • I can't use [...] konqueror to access my GMail as it is.

      I wonder if this will change shortly. I can use GMail fine from Safari, which is basically just Konqueror 'plus'. I wonder if Apple will feed back the updates necessary.

  • i'm logging in and out just fine (Score:3, Informative)

    by Neophytus ( 642863 ) * on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:06PM (#10098018)
    I thought it might be because I had https:// bookmarked, but it's not on either site.

  • really? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:06PM (#10098020)
    I notice no word verification... I like the google gmail notifier it does do pop ups. :) plus you can choose "tell me again" to see the pop up again if you missed it.

  • Get a better account (Score:5, Interesting)

    by g-to-the-o-to-the-g ( 705721 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:07PM (#10098023) Homepage Journal
    I suggest either running your own email server, or getting a decent imap account from your isp. Although webmail services may be convenient at times, you have to come to grips with the fact thats its a webmail service, so you're not going to get all the bells and whistles. Gmail is neato, but I don't think it's good enough for the power user.
    • IMAP rocks, too bad my ISP only gives me 14MB, on the bright side I also have webmail access.
    • Gmail is neato, but I don't think it's good enough for the power user.
      .. because it's still in its beta?
      Anyway, the filters do their job, 'labels' are neat, threading didn't fail me (yet?). The interface is cute :) They're working on mail forwarding and a better contacts list. It's FAST too. I didn't see their spam filters in action, and I hope I won't have to. But it's there. What more would a 'power user' need?

    • Re:Get a better account (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Remus ( 70051 ) *
      I suggest either running your own email server, or getting a decent imap account from your isp. Although webmail services may be convenient at times, you have to come to grips with the fact thats its a webmail service,


      Even better, get an IMAP account from an independent Email provider which also offers Web access. Changing Email addresses whenever you (have to) switch ISPs is just too much.

  • beta (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Metaldsa ( 162825 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:07PM (#10098024)
    This is still a free beta email service. I can't believe I am reading a complaint about a beta service. You are there to fix bugs and offer suggestions.

    "Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?"

    fuckin /. commentary...

  • Notification (Score:3, Insightful)

    by maxarturo ( 71956 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:07PM (#10098026)
    Since when does it not have popup notification?

  • Fair enough. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dthoma ( 593797 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:07PM (#10098028) Journal
    They have a right to do this. I like Google's services as much as the next person, but I think it's a bit silly to unanimously praise GMail. Google is a company like any other, and I hope this little incident reminds the Google fanboys of that. We need to be wary and responsible.

  • Simply put.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by artlu ( 265391 ) <artlu@art[ ]net ['lu.' in gap]> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:07PM (#10098029) Homepage Journal
    Third party notifications will cause Google to loose money on their adsense [google.com] revenue. Simply put, if i was in google's position I would do something similar. Coincidently, some sites, like mine [gshares.net], rely on adsense revenue in order to stay online/stay as a free service. Thankfully, adsense pays well enough by people visiting a site and clicking on a link that it is a viable solution if you have a target audience (like the stock market [groupshares.com] or whatever).

    I've also heard rumors of people making $50/click off of adsense which is absurd! Hence, why Google wants every dime they can get!

  • Well... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:08PM (#10098035)
    If I had to guess, I'd have to say this is the problem with unofficial notifiers.

    Whenever a user logs on, their entire mail spool is loaded into memory for fast access (since hard drive access is so slow.) This is normally not a problem, since only a small percentage of users will be actively online at a time. However, when there is an email notifier logging on every five minutes checking for new emails, this creates increased server load for Google's servers. Google's Notifier doesn't have this problem, since it just waits for a packet to be sent out by Google.

    That's my guess, anyway. I doubt they're doing it just to be annoying.
    • Every five minutes? Likely every 30 seconds. I think you might be right about the reason, though.

    • However, when there is an email notifier logging on every five minutes checking for new emails, this creates increased server load for Google's servers.

      Well, there's a few obvious ways to resolve this.

      1. Gmail could offer a checkbox in the logon screen (a parameter to pass to the input form) that says in effect "show NEW email only".
      2. Alternatively, they could show the list of new emails along with the captcha, so that third-party notifiers would have the info they need without requiring the heavy load

  • This is a rather stupid story. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Radioactive Zorm ( 803479 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:10PM (#10098064)
    "Google has now taken it one step further and created a word-identification script filter as part of the login process." In fact if you go there now you won't see this. This is part of Gmail's anti bruteforcing stuff. If you get a password wrong so many times it starts requiring you to enter a word to try and stop an automated bruteforcing script. GMAIL ISN'T BLOCKING YOUR 3RD PARTY MAIL NOTIFIER JUST YOU FOR BEING STUPID!
  • How do they log into their gmail account?
  • Why is it that companies don't like a third party to add value to the company's product? It's praise, it's free, and it makes your product more useful, for dog's sake!

    • Re:Why?! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Chmarr ( 18662 )
      Oh cool... so... let's extend that to music or other copyright material...

      "Why is it that copyright holders don't like a third party to distribute their music. They're getting free publicity, it's no cost to them, and it makes your product more useful, for dog's sake!"

      </sarcasm>

  • Bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jdog1016 ( 703094 )
    This article appears to be nothing more than speculation on the part of some disgruntled third party app user who, for some reason beyond me, is annoyed that a *BETA* service is changing things up a bit. It doesn't even have a link to a real news story to back it up. Slashdot, you should be ashamed for approving this crap, it does nothing but tarnish your name.
  • Personally, I find Google's gmail notifier annoying since it sits in my taskbar and doesn't have popup notification

    I use Google's official Gmail notifier and I like it alot better than the firefox extension I used to use. It does feature popup notification, so I don't know what they were referring to. The only difference is you dont have to have a browser open and you're not going to get in trouble for using it, which I think is a benefit.

  • Big Deal! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by detritus. ( 46421 ) * on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:15PM (#10098104)
    People shouldn't be too quick to hack up their own solutions to something that is still in BETA.
    There probably is very good reasons for them blocking it.
    I have no doubts they will eventually have a developer API written for Gmail, like they do for other things on their site.
    There's also damn good reasons to word verification filters -- brute force attacks.

  • back in my day we used to have to _dial_ in at 300 baud to a barely graphical service called juno for our email.. we didn't get no fancy browser.. we didn't get the letters up on the screen as we typed it.. and this was an improvement from the BBSs and gopher / telnet logins at teh libraries.. and we LIIIIKEEEED it.. yeah, see?

    pm

  • No. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by McDutchie ( 151611 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:19PM (#10098132) Homepage
    Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email?

    Not if your e-mail is Google's property. Google has every right to do whatever they want with their property. Anybody stupid enough to use a so-called "free" e-mail provider for anything serious deserves what they get.

  • Maybe Pop Goes the GMail worries them? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by enosys ( 705759 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:20PM (#10098145) Homepage
    Maybe they're worried about Pop Goes the GMail [neowin.net], which provides a POP3 interface to a Gmail account. This is a real threat to them because if you use it you don't see any of the ads.
    • What exactly would be the point of having a gmail account if you are only accessing it through a pop3 interface? You would be storing the email on your hard drive so the gig of storage space doesn't matter, and you would be accessing it with a desktop application, so Google's nifty UI wouldn't matter either.

  • It's about getting a hold on the desktop (Score:5, Insightful)

    by r.jimenezz ( 737542 ) <rjimenezh.gmail@com> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:21PM (#10098158)
    Funny, I was just thinking of this a couple of hours ago...

    We all know Google has been deemed to be the best positioned company to compete with Microsoft. The big fear of course is that MS will use their desktop monopoly to blur the barrier between the offline and online worlds and make sure their offerings overtake Google in market share terms.

    Now, take a look at these videos (http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/productinfo/co nceptvid/default.aspx [microsoft.com]) and you'll see that Longhorn will have this standard pop-up notification API that can be used by applications to inform the user of events. It is used prominently in these demos to show email reception.

    Naturally, I would expect this to work with Exchange and possibly Hotmail (but what if Outlook/Outlook Express use it... See below), but not with Gmail.

    Why is this important? Because if Gmail takes over the Web mail market, which could very well happen by 2006 given their good feature set and experience with applications at this scale, users will become accustomed to this functionality. Google will fiercely market the notifier applet to their users and everyone will have it, and they won't care less when the Longhorn applet can't notify them about new messages in their Gmail. And considering how many people I know who only have a Web mail account, I think this would allow Google to prevail by meshing and extending their user experience right into their desktops.

    Then again, given that they're thinking of implementing POP access and that MS mail clients may as well use this feature, this may all be a moot point...

  • What is this fud? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by broothal ( 186066 ) <christian@fabel.dk> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:25PM (#10098182) Homepage Journal
    I don't really get this rant. First of all, there's no word identification filter in the login process. Second, if he doesn't like gmail notifier, don't use it. Thirdly, I highly doubt the changes are solely to disturb the third party tools. More likely, they're working on improvents (which shouldn't come as a surprise since it's still in beta).

  • Legitimate reasons? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mitchell Mebane ( 594797 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:27PM (#10098197) Homepage Journal
    Maybe there are legitimate reasons for doing this. If Google fears that GMail's 1GB storage space could be used as a warez haven, they may have good reason for locking out automated tools.
  • I've only had this image verification thing appear once, and it hasn't appeared since.

    My tutorial on checking gmail status in gkrellm [linuxfordummies.org] still works flawlessly.

  • Its all about server load. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cyberlotnet ( 182742 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:31PM (#10098223) Homepage Journal
    Gmail has not published a offical api yet to access there webmail.

    Right now these third party apps work by logging into the gmail account and pulling up the records, its just like you going to the webpage and logging in. This requires there system to access and cache every message in your inbox.

    Imaging what would happen to the /. servers if everyone tried to post at the exact same time, They would slow to a crawl..

    This is what they are trying to prevent, thousands of third party checkers slowing down there system. I would be willing to bet once they have there gmail API stablized they will publish something like they have for the google search API, allowing third party programs to PROPERLY check the system without using excess resources.
  • "Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email?"

    Of course you can, get a server, or a traditional POP/IMAP server, and whatever third party software you want to use!

    "Personally, I find Google's gmail notifier annoying since it sits in my taskbar and doesn't have popup notification"

    Mine pops up a little box when there is new e-mail, it gives the subj, from, and a bit of the text too, not in a pop-up, but right on the taskbar, so it's not in the way, but clear and easy to read/

  • Excuse me? (Score:3)

    by nwbvt ( 768631 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:43PM (#10098302)
    Is there evidence this is being done for the purpose of blocking third party notifiers? Is it not possible that they are still working on the service (it is still in Beta after all) and some tweak they did inadvertently broke unsupported applications? I have not seen any official statement from Google saying they do not approve of third party notifiers, and until they release such a statement I am not willing to assume that everything they do has evil hidden purposes.

    Ah, the conspiracy theories that fly around on slashdot.

  • Regarding word identification & shiznit (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:56PM (#10098394) Journal
    Even if google incorporated word identification in their login (and they didn't), that wouldn't block third party email notifiers. Your email notifier has a person to use as a resource. You.

    Your email notifier would just have to ask you to identify the word in the png every so often. Barely even inconvenient.

    But they didn't do that anyway. Whatever.

  • business model (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ryanw ( 131814 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:57PM (#10098397)
    It's all about Google's Business model. They need to show you advertisments to help pay for the storage space, bandwidth, and development. They want you to log in and check your mail manually. Everytime an automated tool checks your mail for you they lose advertising potential and their stats of how many hits they get per second/hour/day are skewed. Being able to reliably tell their customers how many people are seeing their ads probably drove most of that.

  • I heard... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PsiPsiStar ( 95676 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:59PM (#10098411)
    Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email?

    If you don't like their policies, they'll refund your money.

  • Assuming this is to block notifiers... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nwbvt ( 768631 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:07PM (#10098465)
    ...and not a bunch of FUD, here is a legitimate reason for blocking 3rd party notifiers. If everyone is free to develop their own apps, they could run into similar problems as sites serving rss feeds. As it is now, any damn fool can write themself an aggregator, and as a result many do not work as they are supposed to. Instead of only checking for changes every hour or so, some allow the user to check for updates every minute. As a result of that, the aggregators end up forming a DDOS attack on the server hosting the feed. If Google controls the notifiers for gmail, they can ensure that they do not suffer similar problems.

  • This may be a silly question but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gexen ( 123248 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:39PM (#10098662)
    Where on earth did the author get the idea that:

    A) That there IS a word logon system currently implemented.

    B) That said word logon system was to block third party systems from interoperating with Google.

    Finally, why was this put on Slashdot when there is absolutely no link to any article whatsoever to backup the few sentences that make up this story? Since when is some guy's short four sentence oppinion the ENTIRE story, without giving any examples whatsoever?

  • A better solution... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jd0g85 ( 734515 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @05:07PM (#10098879)
    ...to locking out third party apps is to work with those making the apps.

    Third party products likely cause excessive loads: ask people not to check their email too frequently (that's what Northwestern did when I was checking my mail every 5 minutes with Eudora) then ban belligerent accounts.

    Assume that the offical gmail notifier creates less load per request than 3rd parties: open up your API and third party apps will use this too (it's probably easier to program anyway).

    Loss of ad revenue: require third party apps to displace one ad everytime a pop up notification is displayed. This would be no more intrusive than the ads in gmail itself since you'd only see the ad when you do have email (which is consistent).

    Gmail is still in beta: perhaps a lock-out is best until gmail is officially released. Then standards shouldn't change so google could be play "nice".

    That said, Google can do whatever they want. You don't like it, find a better service.

    Disclaimer: I don't have gmail and am relying on my intuition. If you think I should, send an invite to: jd0g85 at yahoo dot com

  • Um, I think this article is just plain wrong (Score:3, Insightful)

    by siliconjunkie ( 413706 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:48PM (#10099457)
    Google has now taken it one step further and created a word-identification script filter as part of the login process.

    This is true, if you consider mis-typing your password 5 times part of your normal "login process", otherwise, it still works like it always did, as the word identification script does not kick in until after you have mis-typed your password 5 times (seriously! go try!)

    Personally, I find Google's gmail notifier annoying since it sits in my taskbar and doesn't have popup notification

    Thats great and all except it DOES have pop up notification (not only does it popup, but you can right click the google icon on your tray and have it "tell you again")

    Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email?

    YES, you should be free to use whatever third party software to check YOUR (POP3/hosted/payed for) email. However, Google is also free to NOT allow you to do so with your free gmail account. There's nothing to argue about, if you don't like it, dont use it.

    Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?

    yes [mozillazine.org]

    Why was this article even posted to slashdot? There werent even links to outside sources (besides Gmail itself). This is just one guy writing up some stupid (wrong) comments, and it's on the freekin /. homepage.

  • The reason for this is simple... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Otto ( 17870 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:38PM (#10099727) Homepage Journal
    What they really want is for third party clients to change the way they check for new messages.

    Look, the original thing that they had offered no easy way for a client to check for messages. So they created the Gmail notifier. Along with it, they created a low bandwidth simple way to check for messages. The Gmail notifier doesn't actually check the HTML version of the page. It pulls something down that is much simpler and less bandwidth/CPU intensive on their end.

    By breaking the old way of doing it, they're forcing these apps to change what they do in order to work. Most likely, these apps will *copy* what the gmail notifier program does to check mail. And that's likely fine with Google. Hurts them no more than if the person was using the real notifier, in that case.

  • Google: Counter Culture Flop (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mulletproof ( 513805 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:59PM (#10099839) Homepage Journal
    "Recently, Google's gmail service has attempted to change login protocols to block third-party gmail notifiers that alert you to new email."

    So, the two million byte question is when will people accept the fact that Google is just as "evil" as half the other companies out there despite its professed black sheep good-guy policy? Right here, we have Google striving to lock 3rd parties out of its email client, something universally hated when it come to MSN and Yahoo IM's, while Google itself is happily absorbing as many 3rd party features into it's core service as possible ala Windows. Hell, Google is a quasi-dictionary [google.com] now as well as advertising service and potentially an online store front for ecommerce in the near future. Even there IPO was rigged in order to put them in the best position possible by feeding off wildly speculatory and inflated stock... At least until they realized the market wasn't going to play that game.

    Personally I have no problem with this. Business is business. But I'm just wondering when people will take the blinders off and realize Google is just another MSN, Yahoo or Windows, and not the cool counter e-culture phenomenom masses worship.
  • to check my Gmail and then I found I was locked out of my account, and I tried the forgot password option and it told me I did not have a secondary email set (but I did, my Yahoo one).

    I emailed Google's Gmail abuse address to ask them if my account was hijacked and if I can get back in, but they have not yet responded.

    I had set my Yahoo Groups to send messages to my Gmail account. So I can better read and search the messages. Is this some sort of violation of the ToS, because if it is, I've missed that.

    Google still has not contacted me back, and I find that very rude.

  • What a stupid question... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Moofie ( 22272 ) <.moc.nrutasfognir. .ta. .eel.> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @10:45PM (#10100627) Homepage
    "Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email?"

    Sure. You're free to use any software you want. And Google is free to not allow you to use any software with their service that you don't want. And since you're not paying them anything, you don't have much leverage to get them to change their policy, do you?

    It's a free service. Take it or leave it.

  • next...? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ltwally ( 313043 ) on Sunday August 29, 2004 @01:33AM (#10101128) Homepage Journal
    "Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?"


    Gmail already does this. Try using opera to view your Gmail account. And no, Google is not doing this because Opera doesn't work with the site... If you use Opera and switch its user-agent line to IE or Nutscrape, Opera will be able to access your Gmail account just fine.

    I'm not saying that Google doesn't have reasons for doing this.. maybe they do. But at this point in time they're actively stopping perfectly good "alternative" browsers from getting to your Gmail.

    Would this be tolerated if it weren't Google? Would Microsoft get away with this? .... Just a thought.

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