Google Opens Gmail To All 231
Reader Russian Art Buyer lets us know that GMail is now open for all ("Google Mail" in the UK). The service is no longer by invitation only. This welcome page shows an ever-increasing amount of storage available per user, currently about 2,815 MB.
Capacity drop? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, my GMail account still says I only have 73 invites left. If it's open, why don't they drop the limited number of invites?
Re:Capacity drop? (Score:5, Insightful)
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With Google holding the top search engine spot, they need only add a link to GMail to the search page, and they'll get millions more users.
Re:Capacity drop? (Score:5, Funny)
Where do you go? Remind me never to hire any of those uninformed tech grads!
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Re:Capacity drop? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's just a publicity stunt (Score:3, Insightful)
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I would expect there's a large number of people who don't have the option of using gmail. Remember, everyone you know, probably knows you; if they wanted GMail access they would ask you for an invite. What of those slowly-entering-the-technology-age households who don't have anyone they can easily ask? You know, the kind of people you *don't* hang out with? There's got to be a decent number.
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If someone wants a new service (particularly for increased storage), they would likely have heard about the increased storage (compared to what they had in the past, at least) at Yahoo mail and Hotmail as well.
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Google has since requested that those sites cease their operations.
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Re:Capacity drop? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just checked... (Score:5, Informative)
annnd checked again... (Score:5, Informative)
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marked "Sign up for Google Mail"
http://mail.google.com/mail/signup [google.com]
Could maybe be what you are looking for.
How do I receive SMS on a land-line phone? (Score:4, Insightful)
marked "Sign up for Google Mail"
http://mail.google.com/mail/signup [google.com]
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Short of voip services, no land-line carrier is likely to offer sms, since it originated with the cell networks, their main competition.
I thought i saw something on skypes site about it with skype in, but didn't look too close.
One option is to get a free or freeish instant messaging client
I know Yahoo, AOL AIM, and ICQ all let you send a
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Re:Just checked... (Score:4, Informative)
Does it now? I just launched IE to check it (easier than logging out of everything in Firefox) and the text above the login box said "Sign in to Gmail with your Google Account".
So I'd guess that yes, you can log into Gmail with your Google Account username and password.
And it doesn't ask for a cell phone or anything like it, either.
I just wonder if they're going to drop the invites altogether...
But I read somewhere below that the problem may be with you living in North America...
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You get to race the rest of the world for it
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Not really (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)
Give it a day or so, and you should see the non-invitation link.
Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't read the CNN article linked here, but I did read the article on my Wii last night. The long and short of it is that signup is geographically limited. Just about everyone not in North America is now able to sign up without going through the text message routine. The Google spokepeople have promised that North America will follow "soon".
Hope that clarifies things.
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https://www.google.com/accounts/SmsMailSignup1 [google.com]
What if I don't have any intention of giving google my telephone number? Well, I don't want there service anyways.
I signed up for this service sometime around 98 and they only know what I filled out in t
How do I receive SMS on a land-line phone? (Score:2)
You mean like everybody who relies on a land-line phone because they don't want to pay $360 per year extra?
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you've maid about three posts whining about how expensive mobiles are. we get it. you're not fond of mobiles. how about this: get someone to send you an invite if you really want GMail, or just use another mail provider if it's not worth the hassle. Google products are not mandatory on teh internets.
and as the article states, and several other posters have mentioned, the service is now open for the masses. it may just take a while until the changes propagate to all the gajillions of servers.
Fastmail (Score:2)
How does gmail compare to fastmail? I've been using a fastmail account (the kind where you pay once to set it up and it's free thereafter) to consolidate my emails for years and it's ok but it's gradually being overwhelmed by the amount of spam I get. How does gmail stack up, especially in the area of spam killing? Does anyone have both?
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and the spame filter work well, i get some 5K in spam and MAYBE 1 email will get past
Re:Fastmail (Score:5, Informative)
Fastmail lets me use webDAV to access my file storage, and I just love IMAP/IDLE support. With Fastcheck installed that monitors my mailbox with IDLE, the notification often pops up before I get it on my Blackberry (PUSH-based), something Exchange has never managed to do at work.
I get loads of spam in my GMail even though I've never given it to anyone, which I think speaks for itself. 1 or 2 spams a week with Fastmail and I've had it for 8+ years.
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Odd, I have two unpublished GMail accounts, and in their seventeen months of life they haven't received over a dozen spams total.
The other reply to your post said that GMail has an undocumented feature where improperly addressed mail is delivered to the "nearest neighbor" - a feature (if true) I find offputting - but assuming it is true pe
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The reason that I still use the fastmail account is because it still checks my other email accounts - especially my hotmail account - that I have stopped using but still have the odd email sent to. Gmail doesn't offer the same way
i love gmail (Score:5, Informative)
i'll be the first to admit that i am a pretty serious google fanboy and i haven't used a fastmail account so proceed with caution.
i have two public access unix accounts, one on SDF [lonestar.org] and one on hobbiton [hobbiton.org] (hobbiton stopped being public access like 6 years ago). two years ago there was a sudden astronomical increase in the amount of spam that i was getting on both accounts. both systems had not yet set up greylisting or some other anti-spam measures and so i was worried that i would have to abandon an email address that i have had for almost 10 years.
i got a gmail invite from a friend and set up my new account, and gmail has an option where you can choose to send mail as another account and make that the default method for sending mail, so i set up my gmail account to send as the two unix accounts and then added the gmail address to a .forward for each shell account.
so now i use gmail as the central store for all of my email. now that both shell accounts have graylisting and other spam filtering i take advantage of that PLUS gmail's ability to bucket spam, so i have not seen a spam email in something like 6 months. i could go back to the old way (i look really oldschool using ssh to check my mail with pine) but i have become so lazy and spoiled thanks to gmail that there is no real reason to go back.
so, if you want to keep your old address and switch to gmail, it is possible, provided your old provider has some means for you to forward your mail.
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I guess being a giant provider of e-mail puts you in a good position to do filtering since you could (in
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From a spam point of view, I find both very effective, but it might be because I use the account where you have to pay $20 every year, which supposely offers enhanced spam protection.
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FM simply offers more flexibility. IMAP lets me access my mail in a variety of email clients, or using the web interface, and always see the same mail in the same folders. I could use POP to access it if I wanted. Same thing with the server-side filtering. I routinely access my mail from Mail.app, Thunderbird, the web interface, and sometimes Outlook, using a variety of computers. For some things the web interface works better. For others a mail client is bet
It's about time... (Score:4, Insightful)
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With regards to SSL, my issues there mostly apply to Google for domains. As far as I know, they don't allow you to mandate SSL for that either, and that is a weakness in an environment where you can't always trust your users to access with optional security every time.
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Surge in users? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Surge in users? (Score:4, Insightful)
They also will get a very nice benefit to closing spammer accounts -- their sent folders are 100% spam. What better way to see what tricks spammers are using than have 2GB of sent spam in one easy location? They can easily see what percentage of that spam folder was then in turn delivered as non-spam and how many users read it and marked it as not-spam.
Playing the same game MS played (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of Google, it will find increasing the switching costs to get out of gmail not very easy. Reason are:
1. It uses a simple browser as its interface and it does not have the same level of control over http protocols and XML protocols MS enjoyed over Windows platform.
2. Users have become more aware of these issues. The resurgence of OpenOffice and fandom of Firefox shows that.
3. Google says its motto is "dont do evil" and atleast part of its fan base is taking it at face value.
Overall, IMHO, if google wrests significant portion of the data from the clutches of MS and shows how advantageous it could be for companies and users to keep their data in a format with eye on the switching costs it would benefit the consumers.
Re:Playing the same game MS played (Score:5, Informative)
Just go to "settings"->"forwarding and pop" and select "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)". You can then download a copy of all the mail to your computer using a normal email client (You can choose to keep a copy on gmail). You can also get all mail automatically forwarded to an outside email address.
That makes it easy to switch email provider; I used it the other day to download a copy of all my email, just in case. It seems to me that Google has chosen not to lock in users, but to simply try retain customers by being better. Which is the way it should be, and which makes me more comfortable relying on google services in the future.
Regards, Thue
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I would like to see an option to have a local backup copy of All Mail, not just the Inbox.
Paul
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Most business models involve making it easy for people to adopt your product at some point. That doesn't mean t
Let the Spamming Begin (Score:2)
Kinda irrelevant (Score:2)
Worldwide BETA (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Worldwide BETA (Score:5, Insightful)
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old article (2004) and you need a cell phone.... (Score:3, Informative)
This is what Gmail says about signing up currently:
Can I sign up without the invitation code? Or without a mobile phone?
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=
bummer (Score:2)
a nagging problem about gmail (Score:5, Insightful)
I use Gmail to read the messages off my work/academic Pine accounts, and it has rapidly become my main way to check email because it has a great feature set, and Gmail doesn't pull some of the stupid tricks that other free email services do. I also use it to send messages (i.e. the "from:" field pretending as if it is one of the other work/school accounts I have), and rapidly I'm accumulating email on my Gmail account that now doesn't exist elsewhere.
However, sometime in the far off future, Gmail may decide not to work one day, or there may be a new technology to replace it. We can't know for sure. So I would like to be able to have a backup of that mail just in case. As much as I trust Gmail and like Google, I need some way to keep my mail on my own, because if it were all lost, it would be awful.
Couldn't they offer a service, for some reasonable amount of $$, where they would burn my entire Gmailbox onto a DVD and send it to me? With the size of my mailbox, POP downloading is becoming impossible, and this would also be a great way to give users some peace of mind.
or has anyone else felt this worry, and come up with an interesting/workable solution??
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Only last week, some poster here complained that there was no 'open in docs' link for
So someone there is prolly surfing
Justin.
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You never know... they may already be willing to do that for a fee if you ask.
Though, don't you only pop download new messages? Why not setup another mailbox somewhere, pop everything off, then setup a filter rule that sends a copy of each message off to the other mailbox. That way you have a real auto-updating archive.
Then just BCC that mailbox on everything you send too.
-Steve
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I just set up POP on Gmail, and use Thunderbird to do the backup. Yes, the first time, it will have to download EVERYTHING, but once that is done, it's very simple on an ongoing basis.
Some tips:
1. Initial Transfer
For some reason, Thunderbird wouldn't download ALL my emails at once (I had over 3000 messages at the time.) It seemed to pull them in in blocks of a few hundred at a time. It took a number of repeated download sessions to complete the entire download. Yes, it was a bit tedious, but it
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Why? You only have to download all your messages once, then from there on you only download new ones as they come in. Thousands of people, including me, using a POP3 client for their gmail and have local copies of all their emails.
two problems with this:
1. Since I haven't used POP ever with the account, on that first download it is going to try to download about 1GB of messages. And in some tests so far, Gmail is not reliable about how far it gets done. It will stop at some arbitrary message and say it's finished, but it's not.
2. This doesn't cover messages sent *from* the Gmail account, that are not cc:ed/copied to the other accounts. Outgoing mail sent via Gmail will not be POP downloaded because they are not "recei
Now if only... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Yahoo Mail Beta blocks Linux (Score:2, Informative)
illusion of exclusiveness (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I think its a marketing strategy used by gmail to make people feel special by having it "invite only", but by making so many invites they have destroyed the exclusiveness of it
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in that case it make sense to give lots of invites.
Whatever google does, their final purpose always seems to be to get more data from you.
UK? All of Europe (Score:2)
As I understand it, it's not just Google Mail here in the UK, but throughout all of the EU, since it's actually a German company that owns the Gmail trademark here.
Funny, I handed out my first invitation to another prospective user (my wife) just three days ago. I have 99 left, and don't need them.
Gmail doesn't work with tabs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gmail doesn't work with tabs (Score:4, Informative)
SMS w/ ICQ or AIM (Score:2)
GMail is popular (Score:2, Informative)
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Spamming is when you *send* UCE. Signing up to gmail allows you to *receive* mail.
Unless you think the spammers have *so many* people they could actually poison the filters by clicking on the "no, this viagra email ISN'T spam button"
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And it is a shame, usually warning signs would go up when I got an email from yahoo (or less often hotmail). Hopefully they will all still stay at yahoo.
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Hmm, see that actually suprises me. I've been using gmail for quite a while - its perfect for webmail and I forward my homepage's mail to it. I got my invite by going to one of those sites that banks invites from people and will send you one if you request it.
That said, am I the only one who was taken aback by the saved searches feature? I don't care that google has it, I DO care very much that it was enabled by default and I had a bunch of sav
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