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Google Businesses The Internet

Gmail Goes Public 527

Posted by Zonk from the come-and-get-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Google has apparently given the green light for Google's e-mail (Gmail) to be open to the general public." From the registration page: "As we make room for more Gmail users, we want to first extend invitations to Google users. We're still working to make Gmail better, so for now, we're just inviting a small number at random. Looks like that's you! We're really excited to share Gmail with you and we hope you like it." Observed at the P-I Buzzworthy Blog as well.
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Gmail Goes Public More

Gmail Goes Public

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  • I can't even (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) <bittercode@gmail> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:24PM (#11946340) Homepage Journal
    people to take my gmail invites any more. I think it's a little late to open it to the public-- everybody already has an account.

    • Re:I can't even (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NeoSkandranon ( 515696 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:30PM (#11946412)
      everybody already has an account.

      Everyone who wants one anyway.

      Some of the people I invited promptly followed my lead and abandoned their six or seven hotmail (and ISP-based) email addresses and had everything useful forward to Gmail.

      Others made an account and check it from time to time.

      The bigger group is the last one: The people who really don't care (either through lack of understanding or sheer apathy) about Gmail's advantages.

      These days I can't give away an account, because I've sent them to all my group 1 and 2 friends already. The only ones left are the "Why should i switch from Yahoo/Hotmail/Webmail?" crowd

      • Re:I can't even (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jp10558 ( 748604 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:33PM (#11946438)
        And me, the why should I switch from my own POP3/Imap/Webmail server? I hate webmail !

        • Re:I can't even (Score:5, Informative)

          by Drooling Iguana ( 61479 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:35PM (#11946466)
          Gmail lets you connect via POP3.

          • Re:I can't even (Score:2, Informative)

            by mabinogi ( 74033 )
            your own server lets you do what the hell you want, and POP3 is a horrble mail protocol from a user's point of view. (IMAP is horrible from a developer point of view, but that's beside the point)

            when Gmail does IMAP it'll be interesting to those of us with our own servers, but only a little.

            • Re:I can't even (Score:3, Informative)

              by DigitumDei ( 578031 )
              I have my gmail forwarded to my home account where I access it through my local IMAP server. When at work I use gmail, at home I use thunderbird. And offshore backups of email thrown in for free. ;)

            • Re:I can't even (Score:5, Interesting)

              by kevcol ( 3467 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:55PM (#11946674) Homepage
              You, of course, are speaking only for yourself. :-) I run my own mail and Gmail is still very useful for me, most notably for the very effective search. I have procmail bouncing a copy of inbound mail to gmail that I can access on the road if I am not using my laptop to ssh in my own server (I am not running Squirrelmail or Imp, etc.). I also like sending all my list mail to my gmail account which for me makes it easy to read. I like the 'conversation' method of threading for lists. A year later and I am currently at 29% capacity.

          • Re:I can't even (Score:3, Informative)

            by MightyMartian ( 840721 )
            I think the world might be a tad better place if not everyone runs to GMail. It certainly isn't the be-all and end-all of email, and if you're just going to check via POP3, it loses some advantages. I have my own mail system on my Linux box. At home, I generally use Pine, which works directly with my (rather large) collection of folders. I have IMAP installed so I can use Thunderbird from work. I don't really see any point to GMail. If I have to change addresses, I'll just send out a form message to m

        • Re:I can't even (Score:5, Funny)

          by lucabrasi999 ( 585141 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:36PM (#11946483) Journal
          why should I switch from my own POP3/Imap/Webmail server?

          Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe that I have found and anti-Google Blashphemer in our midst!

        • Re:I can't even (Score:3, Interesting)

          by edesjardins ( 844303 )
          This comment baffles me. Why on EARTH would you still want to use POP3 mail? I manage an Exchange server as well as my own POP3 server and now use neither for my personal email in favor of Gmail. Why? Simply because I have so many computers that I use! With Gmail I have pretty much unlimited space, the ability to SEARCH my email and actually find what I'm looking for (ever tried to find something in Outlook that you've filed away a year ago?), and I always have ALL of my email on any computer I use!

          • Re:I can't even (Score:5, Insightful)

            by jp10558 ( 748604 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @04:16PM (#11946907)
            I don't know - I like the lack of ads. I like the speed of Eudora on messages on my local machine. I like being able to look through messages and not have to be online. I like the lack of "tags". I like unlimited attachment size. I like GPG plugins.

            I like e-mail being separate from websites. I like not having my mail processed to show me ads.(wait I already said that didn't I?)

            Oh, wait - I like not getting spam from those people who try every combination of @gmail, @yahoo etc....

            And, I like VNC through Java applet for checking my mail or anything elsewhere! Just me though, I like taking the whole interface if I can(which I can do via broadband).

            I also like not being more beholden to big companies for my communication.

            • Re:I can't even (Score:3, Informative)

              by edesjardins ( 844303 )
              I've never receieved ONE piece of Spam at my Gmail address since I've had it - I got the account in August. Just sayin'.

            • Re:I can't even (Score:3, Informative)

              by ImpTech ( 549794 )
              > I also like not being more beholden to big companies for my communication.

              Of course even when running your own server, your ISP is ultimately in control.

            • Re:I can't even (Score:4, Insightful)

              by willfe ( 6537 ) <willfe@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @08:44PM (#11949424) Homepage

              I don't know - I like the lack of ads. I like the speed of Eudora on messages on my local machine. I like being able to look through messages and not have to be online. I like the lack of "tags". I like unlimited attachment size. I like GPG plugins.

              You can use POP3 to fetch mail to a local mailbox (or another server elsewhere) and send through gmail via SSL+SMTP. Apart from the attachment size limit (not sure if SMTP lets you break it or not), where's the problem? Your local mail client won't offer up ads (and you can keep Eudora). It can use GPG plugins. It can skim through messages without being online. And much to my annoyance, those pesky "tags" you dislike are completely stripped when you pull mail via POP3 (it'd be handy, whether you specifically think so or not).

              I like e-mail being separate from websites. I like not having my mail processed to show me ads.(wait I already said that didn't I?)

              Yes, you did already say that. You repeat yourself a lot in this post, but that's okay. We still love you :) Besides, now I get to repeat myself too. Use POP3+SMTP and you're back on local client, no webmail interface.

              Best I can tell, mail is parsed real-time for ads when you view them on gmail.google.com; presumably if you just POP3 them they're never parsed for ads. Then again, it's not as if Google's the first to do this; Yahoo and friends sometimes shove interstitial ads into their mail interfaces. They want you to pay for POP3 access too.

              Oh, wait - I like not getting spam from those people who try every combination of @gmail, @yahoo etc....

              Sorry, but spam's a problem everywhere, not just gmail.com; the only reason a dictionary spam attack hasn't been launched against your domain is they haven't gotten to it yet.

              And, I like VNC through Java applet for checking my mail or anything elsewhere! Just me though, I like taking the whole interface if I can(which I can do via broadband).

              Wait. So you want to use the VNC Java client, via your @!#$ing web browser, to read your mail on the local machine sitting wherever you're not when you get the burning urge to check your mail? Yet somehow just using the original damned webmail interface is beneath you?

              I also like not being more beholden to big companies for my communication.

              Please, take yourself off the cross. You said you like Eudora, so you're "beholden" to them trusting their stuff isn't spying on you. You use VNC via Java, meaning you're beholden to Sun and their Java implementation (or one of the few other vendors, like IBM and Microsoft, who ship VMs of their own) for the viewer. Then there's the VNC vendors. Then there's the people who wrote the OS you're running.

              I won't make the "if you have nothing to hide, why do you want to hide?" argument because it infuriates me and because I do think privacy is important, but please, please, please stop acting like e-mail is your achilles' heel. For truly secure communication you shouldn't even be using e-mail in the first place, but Gmail provides enough tools to encrypt mail as needed if you plug a mail client into it (like Eudora, which you already use).

          • IMAP solved all these problems years ago, and isn't run by one big corporation in the business of information warehousing and other dubious practices. You can access all your mail from any client anywhere with a network connection and access to your IMAP server, and proper searching is taken care of by competently-programmed clients, anyway.

            I personally have deep reservations about throwing all my personal data into GMail - there's no telling what exactly Google will be doing with that information in the

            • Re:I can't even (Score:5, Insightful)

              by ducman ( 107063 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMreality-based.com> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @06:24PM (#11948125)
              I'm one of those people who are still asking, "why?" I admin my own server and use IMAP. Since I travel regularly, I'm more likely to have my PowerBook than an internet connection. Mail.app lets me have my mail with me, search it, work offline, move things onto and off of the server, if I want to. And of course I can use the web mail client on the server to read mail from any other machine. So why would I let Google search through all my mail and target me with ads?

      • Re:I can't even (Score:5, Interesting)

        by CrankyFool ( 680025 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:46PM (#11946591)
        There are actually valid reasons for some of us to not use gmail for general-purpose emailing.

        Aside from the obvious privacy issues -- any company who has its people put company information on another company's systems is a little nuts -- there's also the power and flexibility of running your own MUA/MTA pair.

        For example, I've got my own wildcard domain -- anything at this domain goes to me. In addition, my MUA (mutt) is configured to automatically make my replies come from the address to which the email had been sent. I consider this useful to me, and a way to give out specific addresses so as to see how spam ends up getting to me.

        gmail actually takes a step in that direction -- they let you use '+' notation (eg 'user+whatever@gmail.com'), but they don't do the next step -- making it so you can automatically respond as 'user+whatever' to emails sent to 'user+whatever'.

        And, frankly, it's just _faster_ for me to use my own CLI MUA to go through a bunch of emails, and more convenient and familiar.

        On the flip side, my dad recently decided he finally wanted to get an email account, so I created a new domain for him and had all mail sent to this domain forwarded to an account I set up for him at gmail. So he'll be using gmail for mail. I really do like gmail -- I use it for some specialized purposes -- but it's not the one-size-fits-all-so-everyone-should-use-it-alread y that you seem to be thinking it is.

        • Re:I can't even (Score:4, Interesting)

          by alanh ( 29068 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @04:59PM (#11947365) Homepage
          >For example, I've got my own wildcard domain -- anything at this domain goes to me.

          I used to do this as well. If I needed to give my address out, I'd come up with a company specific one on the spot. However, I abandoned the "forward all" account when someone started spoofing the From: line of their spams with <random text>@alanhoyle.com addresses. I started getting thousands apon thousands of bounced spam messages showing up in my inbox. My choice was either to train my mail filters to catch these bounces as spams, or quit the forward-all account. I still get more than 100/day, but the load is greatly lessened.

          In my experience, the vast majority of my spam comes from email addresses posted on either my web site or from WHOIS information. Only one of my company-specific addresses ever seems to have made it onto a spam list.

          Until recently, I prefered my tweaked solution with Pine [washington.edu], bogofilter [sourceforge.net], and a modified version of IMAP Spam BeGone [rogerbinns.com]. With an SSH client like PuTTY [greenend.org.uk], I was using the same interface I was used to wherever I went in the world.

          However, I've become hooked on GMail as it's so much more convenient to deal with Spam there. Click, click click, poof! it's gone....
    • Same here..I've had 50 invites for over a month now, just sitting there.

      I don't see how Gmail is "open to the public" or whatever yet though.... there's no link on the main google.com page and when I log into my gmail account it still says BETA in the corner... did someone jump the gun or what?
    • And yet those ipod/mac mini spammers still think they can get people to sign up by offering them gmail invites.
    • I think that that was the point. Google was trying to capitalize on the word-of-mouth thing to build up their user base. By the end, they put a little form field box on my GMail page and told me that I could invite 50 of my closest friends.

      Ummm... yeah.

      That's like when you see those cubic zirconium rings advertised on TV, and they say, "There's a strict limit of five per caller!" (It always makes me want to call and order six, just to see if they'd do it. They probably would.)

  • the link is one-time (Score:5, Informative)

    by eobanb ( 823187 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:25PM (#11946344) Homepage
    the link that appears on the front page of google for certain people only works that one time. There is no universal link for creating a gmail account right now. You need to just go to google.com and it may or may not show up.

  • Thanks, but no thanks... (Score:5, Funny)

    by lucabrasi999 ( 585141 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:25PM (#11946347) Journal
    we want to first extend invitations to Google users

    Thanks, but I've already received about 1,000 invitations.

  • Open to everyone? Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by filmmaker ( 850359 ) * on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:25PM (#11946351) Homepage
    There goes my best pick up line.

  • Google Section (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dadybeef ( 732455 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:26PM (#11946361)
    1st Post Recommendation - Google Section!

  • Just refresh... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mobiux ( 118006 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:26PM (#11946366)
    if you don't get it the first time, just keep refreshing.
    It took me 3 times to get the invite on the screen.

  • Bad Gmail link. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Osty ( 16825 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:26PM (#11946371)

    The link to Gmail in the story goes to a page that says:

    Account Already Created


    The link you followed to this page has already been used to create your Gmail account. To access your account visit http://gmail.google.com and log in with the username and password you chose during registration. To create another Gmail account, you'll need a shiny new account creation link. We apologize for the inconvenience.
    Here's a better link [google.com] for Gmail.

  • I don't see any way to create an account yet. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Behrooz ( 302401 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:26PM (#11946374)
    2. How do I sign up? When can I get a Gmail account?

    We're currently only offering Gmail as part of a preview release and limited test. We don't have details on when Gmail will be made more widely available, as that depends in part on the results of the test.

    Uh. Without a way to create public accounts, this is just another form of beta. Looking on the main gmail page, it sure looks like there's no way to create an account for someone who doesn't have a google account yet.

    Beta? Yes. Public? About as much as it was before.

    On the other side, I've got about 50 invites left.
    • Well, that's the thing, they haven't gone public yet. The original poster merely gave Google his/her (what am I saying, it's /., his) email address back when the GMail debuted. I did the same thing and last week I received a similar email. Of course, I've had a GMail account a long time now so I don't need it, but that's what's really going on. So, to recap, GMail is still beta, they're just sending out invitations to those people who signed up when GMail debuted.

    • Re:I don't see any way to create an account yet. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nuclear_Physicist ( 794448 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:46PM (#11946592)
      On the other side, I've got about 50 invites left.

      Everyone in gmail has 50 invites left. They currently replenish your used invites daily. I've handed out a few gmail accounts in the past few weeks and my number of invites continues to peg at 50.

      As a result, gmail was effectively completely open quite a while ago.

  • which was hen I got an email from Google inviting me to sign up. I had filled out that "Yes, I'm interested" form back when GMail first became public knowledge and I assumed this contact by Google was a result of that registration.

    That would mean the GMail has been public for nearly a month. Which would mean that Slashdot has been tardy reporting something. Say it isn't so!!!
  • Gmail is great but there is one thing that I hate about it. Whenever I'm sent an attachment, I can't just forward it on to someone else. Has anyone figured out how to do this? I'd rather not have to download the attachment and then make an entirely new email with it attached.

  • Google: Fix the top post reply method (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Neil Watson ( 60859 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:32PM (#11946434) Homepage
    Please fix the interface so that replies do not top post. (Yes, I did submit this to Google when I first discovered it).

    • Re:Google: Fix the top post reply method (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Please fix the interface so that replies do not top post. (Yes, I did submit this to Google when I first discovered it).

      Bottom posting is for grizzled usenet hippies.

      • Re:Google: Fix the top post reply method (Score:5, Funny)

        by CanSpice ( 300894 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:43PM (#11946559) Homepage
        Yes it is.

        Bottom posting is for grizzled usenet hippies.

      • Re:Google: Fix the top post reply method (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jonadab ( 583620 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @04:24PM (#11946987) Homepage Journal
        > Bottom posting is for grizzled usenet hippies.

        Bottom-posting (quoting the whole message and then putting your reply at the bottom) and top-posting (quoting the whole original message below your reply) are both cretinous and bad. The correct way to quote is interleaved, i.e., you quote a relevant excerpt, reply to it, then if necessary quote another relevant excerpt, reply to it, and so forth.

        Gnus gets this right: it quotes the whole message (depending on how you have it set up) (except the signature (if it can tell where the signature starts)), but if you go to any point in the message and start typing, it breaks there and rewraps the quoted portions above and below, and your reply gets inserted at the proper place, unquoted, as a separate paragraph. Any parts of the quoted message you don't need to reply to, you're supposed to delete before sending. Gnus warns you if you try to send a message that's mostly quoted material and very little original response (though it'll let you do it if you insist).

        But I don't suppose it's reasonable to hold a webmail interface to the standard of functionality set by Gnus.

      • Top-Posting, Email Heresy (Score:5, Funny)

        by Catiline ( 186878 ) <akrumbach@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @05:23PM (#11947628) Homepage Journal
        YES!!! > Is it really all that irritating? >> It reverses the flow of conversation and makes relating >> parts of the message to the reply difficult. >>> Why? Outlook and most other email clients top post. >>>> Top posting. >>>>> What is the biggest email sin/heresy/faux pas?
    • I believe you mean, make that an option that we can turn off at will. I, personally, like the top post method of replies.
    • Not universal bottom post...please no!

      Public forums, discussions, etc. bottom post and quote the relevant parts, or mix replies with the quotes. You rarely need to quote more than two replies behind.

      Lengthy individual replies mix replies conversation-style with the quote: > Can you do this? / No. / > What about this? / Yes.

      Normal/short individual replies (read: most e-mail) top post. The person who sent you the e-mail wrote the letter; don't you think he knows what he wrote already? An additional b

  • Bit late (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Turn-X Alphonse ( 789240 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:33PM (#11946446) Journal
    After the 50 invites each of us have on Gmail run out I suspect there won't be many peopleleft on Earth without a Gmail account.

    Hell I've got half a mind to go and make 50 Gmail accounts with the invites purely to use them up..
    • Umm, that won't work so well. Bastards will just refill you. These days, I get refilled to 50 within about a day of giving out an invite and having it used.

      Face it -- we're stuck with having 50+ gmail invites until they finally open up the service. :)

  • when will they change the 6 character minimum for user names. I can see 4 characters maybe (dont know why they would do this in either case) besides planning on "saving" the 6 character accounts for some type of paid user.
  • Gmail was cooler when nobody had it yet.

  • I've been getting Server Busy errors (Score:3, Funny)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:34PM (#11946457)
    For the past few days while using my GMail account, I've been getting Server Busy errors. This has been happening both when logging into my account as well as actions within the account (sending email for instance).

    Nothing anywhere near the frequency as my old Hotmail account, but I guess they're still ramping up their userbase slowly so as to avoid this type of thing.

    As a side note, I have 49 Vintage GMail invites currently and will sell them for $1,000 each.

  • POP3 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FiReaNGeL ( 312636 ) <.moc.liamtoh. .ta. .l3gnaerif.> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:34PM (#11946459) Homepage
    I just hope that the best feature of Gmail will remain free now that they've gone public.

    POP3 access, no strings attached (read, stupid Hotmail requiring Outlook). Gotta love that.

  • Direct link (Score:3, Informative)

    by turtled ( 845180 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:36PM (#11946482)
    Here:
    https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
    Just truncated from the paragraph. The posted link was the result of someone singing up already. I also have 50 invites... but, with the link I posted, everyone is ready...

    • Re:Direct link (Score:3, Informative)

      by ral315 ( 741081 )
      Er...that's a link for a GOOGLE account. It's not the same as a Gmail account.

      Once again, Gmail accounts are NOT available to the general public, just a random sampling of the population.

  • gmail is still buggy (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:36PM (#11946485)
    Frankly, I'm surprised. Google has introduced a few bugs in its latest release of gmail.

    For example, the "mail forwarding" feature cannot be disabled once it has been enabled. Any change to it does not not save.

  • Remeber the Gmail announcement was on April Fools Day last year. Many thought it was a joke. One Gig, sure! Congrats to Google for not rushing it out the door.

  • theory (Score:2, Insightful)

    by genomicon ( 578786 )
    It's not so weird that Google has waited almost a year to go public with Gmail. Clearly it's the finale of a very large marketing experiment. First, Google develops an initial core of beta users, who upon registering for the email system get to invite more beta users. Then Google gets to sit back, watch the whole thing percolate, and collect valuable data on how long it takes for word-of-mouth to translate to market saturation, or how often free invites turn into new users, etc. From a research point of
  • I've been using GMail as my primary email since it first came out into beta. I love it. I just hope now that it's opening to the general public, they don't take away features (such as POP3, forwarding, etc.)!
  • I'd like to note that I pointed this out on March 05 and only got to +2. link [slashdot.org].
  • What happens if everyone that wants an email account already has one? What if they are all "good enough". What if email is just more trouble then it's worth now that many cellphones have unlimited minutes.

    Will the free email bubble burst? Do we care anymore? Can google's 1000 PhD's come up with something that hasn't already been done?

  • What gmail needs to do (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Monkelectric ( 546685 ) <slashdot AT monkelectric DOT com> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:44PM (#11946569)
    host MX! I'd be glad to pay money for to host my domains email accounts!

    They're missing a huge revenue stream IMHO. How many small and medium sized companies systems admins could get BACK to work (instead of writing spam rules).

    • Oh yeah man. It would kick some posterior to be able to use the Gmail interface with my own domains.

    • I accomplish this somewhat, but it doesn't work in the webmail interface.

      first, i went to zoneedit.com [zoneedit.com] and set up my account so my domain uses their nameservers. then i configured a lot else, but what's relevant here is their mailforwards. I set up one private and one catchall address to send to my private and spamdump gmail addresses, respectively.

      The biggest lacking is that you'll need your own SMTP server, as using gmail's will force the return address to be your gmail address, whereas you'll want to u
  • Is this just about the registration link that sometimes shows up on Google.com? If so, I posted an article about that about a week ago, it was rejected!
  • Isn't this old news? I've seen the gmail links on google search a while ago. It's not something new to me. They've been sneaking in gmail invites into their popular Blogger [blogger.com] service for a while as a way to slowly increase their user base while they probably sit back and build the infrastructure to hold more users. Yeah, gmail's been boosting the amount of invites lately, but I still don't see a signu form on their gmail page. I think this is all just more invite leaking. It's not public until their sig

  • Should still be Beta (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    GMail definitely needs to stay in Beta. It has a long way to go before it is as good as my hotmail.

    With hotmail, I got hundreds of fantastic e-mails offering me all sorts of fantastic merchandise EVERY DAY. With GMail I only get a few, they need to work on that.

    Also, their ads aren't nearly as effective as they could be. They need big flashing banners that just implore you to click on them like hotmail. I can hardly even notice GMails ads. They have a lot of work to do
  • Remember way back when, when GMail had a way to opt in to be notified when it became public? You entered your e-mail address.

    Anyone wonder what they're going to do with that list after all this is done?

  • Spammers? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mecro ( 597901 )
    Its too bad its beginning to go public. As of right now, pretty much anyone who wants a gmail account has one, with isnoop.net's Gmail Spooler at something around 500,000 invites. I just hope people don't start signing up for mass accounts and spamming everyone with 1 GB worth of junk.

  • Google Mail now blocks all RAR files! (Score:3, Informative)

    by jbridges ( 70118 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @05:00PM (#11947378)
    As of last week, in the name of "security", Google Mail now blocks all RAR attachments, even a tiny test one with just a text file in it will bounce.

    Google Mail does not block all ZIP files, only ones with Executable files.

    Google Mail doesn't block TAR (or other archive) formats at all.

    The supposed danger in RAR files is someone will have WinRAR installed and open a executable attachment inside the RAR. Yet there is the exact same danger in TAR files. In fact more danger since more archiving programs (like WinZIP) support TAR files!

  • the googlenet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mapmaker ( 140036 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @05:01PM (#11947391)
    Google
    Google News
    Google Maps
    Gmail
    Froogle

    Google's services now comprise something like 40% of my online activity. How much longer till they take over the world?

    • Re:the googlenet (Score:4, Funny)

      by panck ( 69848 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @06:49PM (#11948370)
      yes, indeed.

      as i posted on my blog [vario.us] after Google Maps came out, here's my Google world takeover timeline:

      • present: images.google.com, local.google.com, gmail.google.com, maps.google.com [google.com], news.google.com, blogger.com, et al

      • 2006-2007: dating.google.com, jobs.google.com, groceries.google.com, voice.google.com, tv.google.com

      • 2008-2009: dna.google.com, wherearemykeys.google.com, INeedToPerformAnEmergencyTracheotomyOnMyselfHowDoI DoThat.google.com

      • 2010-2011: brain.google.com, LSD-over-IP.google.com, RealPhysicalSexSomehowContainedEntirelyInAURL.goog le.com, peaceOnEarth.google.com

      • 2012-END: maps.hyperspace.google.com, quarks.google.com, beamMeUp.google.com, tomorrow.news.google.com, singularity.google.com

  • Craig Shergold is dying of cancer and wants gmail (Score:4, Interesting)

    by infonography ( 566403 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @05:06PM (#11947440) Homepage
    Disclaimer, Craig Shergold [google.com]was a kid with cancer who became a internet hoax [about.com]. Please take this as a joke and don't bother him.

  • Best thing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jozer99 ( 693146 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @06:07PM (#11947984)
    Probably the best thing about GMail going public is the fact that it puts even more pressure on other free E-Email providers to improve their services. Anyone remember the pre-GMail days? Hotmail and Yahoo both charged to get you over 10 MB, POP3 access was almost NEVER free, and quite often you had to put up with tons of banner adds, popups, end-of-E-Mail footnote adds, and spam kindly sent by your E-Mail provider.

  • GMail as the Notepad of the Web (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jon_Aquino ( 672820 ) <jonathan.aquino@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @10:24PM (#11950181) Homepage
    Today I realized that GMail's latest features make it an excellent replacement for Notepad and other basic desktop text editors. (Use its Save Draft feature so that you can edit your text whenever you want.)

    GMail has a number of powerful advantages over Notepad:
    • Filename is optional. No need to think of a unique filename to save under -- just enter your content and go.
    • Search all your past files at once. Try that, Notepad!
    • Spell-checking on demand
    • Load/save your text files from any computer in the world
    • Cross-platform
    • Undo Discard. Ever wish you could retrieve your file after closing it without saving? Now you can!
    This is incredibly cool - a viable web-based replacement for basic desktop text editors. Yes, the Web OS [kottke.org] is slowly coming together!

  • Is this a hoax? (Score:3, Informative)

    by adeydas ( 837049 ) <`moc.xobni' `ta' `sadyeda'> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @10:58PM (#11950374) Homepage Journal
    For some reason I don't see a 'Sign up' button. Also it is mentioned here [google.com] that "We're currently only offering Gmail as part of a preview release and limited test. We don't have details on when Gmail will be made more widely available, as that depends in part on the results of the test."

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