The title says it all
Google mail.
To elaborate a bit, it’s web-based free email from Google that gives the user a gigabyte of space to store mail. It’s still in beta, so one can only get an account by being invited.
So how does g-mail work? I haven’t heard of a free email account with more than 40 or 50 MB of space- 1 GB is insane.
Some further questions:
Are there known plans to limit the types of files that can be uploaded and stored?
Any word on bandwidth? 1Gb is great but less so if a user is limited to 3kb/sec.
I have read that the project will involve targetted advertizing based on the text of the users’ emails…Can anyone elaborate?
Yahoo just upped their paltry 4 mb (6 if you’ve been around for a while…) to a full 100 mb…
Well, remember that Google keeps a cached copy of just about every web page in their search index. They have tons of disk space, and they’ve put a lot of time into developing software to manage it.
Also, most people won’t come close to using a whole gigabyte of email storage.
It is an awful lot of space to be giving out for free, and I’m surprised they’re doing it… but if anyone has access to a lot of cheap storage, it’s Google.
Not that I know of. I’ve heard that attachments are limited to 10 MB each, but it isn’t hard to split a large file into chunks that size.
I haven’t uploaded or downloaded any attachments with Gmail, but browsing and reading emails is pretty fast. The site uses a lot of dynamic HTML trickery so it doesn’t have to reload the entire page when you go from a message back to the inbox, or when you move from one message to another inside a “conversation”, etc.
Conversations are another feature that makes Gmail stand out. Email messages are sorted into threads, so you don’t see a dozen messages with the same subject in your inbox, and when you open a conversation, you can see all the replies together. This is very handy for mailing lists and forum notifications.
When you look at a message, you see a bar with ads along the right side of the page, just like you see ads when you do a Google web search. The ads are selected by matching keywords in the messages you’re looking at.
I don’t get it. It’s just email, why are people so excited about this? Do people really get that much email?
I have many email addresses, either work ones or home ones. I even have several I don’t use because I have plenty. Surely most other people have a similar situation.
Don’t they?
- It’s a full gig of memory - that’s a lot.
- It’s by one of the foremost names on the web.
- Getting in early helps ensure you get your first choice of e-mail name - on the biggest free e-mail provider on the web.
Personally, I love the idea of getting my full name for an address. However, after using it for about a week, I have to say I’m less than impressed with the “conversation” set up. It’s pretty much a deal breaker for me.
Maybe but do people really need it?
I paid for Yahoo! Plus and was happy to get 25Mb disk space. I now find that I have a 2Gb limit but can’t say I feel all that excited about it.
One thing to keep in mind is that once a resource becomes available, demand increases to overwhelm it. 1 gig won’t be enough for many people in the near future.
Say I had a CD worth of Perfectly Legal Data (PLD) I wanted to distribute, such as a basic Linux distro. I could upload the PLD to gmail by emailing it from my computer to my gmail account. Then whenever a buddy wanted a copy, I’d email the buddy’s gmail account from my gmail account. Pretty much no work there. Later, my buddy could download the PLD to his own computer. So some of the major headaches of P2P could be avoided. gmail hosts the storage and handles the within-network bandwidth.
Given the rapid rate at which gmail 2nd party apps are being written, it’s only a matter of time before a ersatz P2P gmail addon is written. (Which means Google has a very short time frame to figure out how to stop it, nevermind how much of it is PLD.)
As to "why “Google?” Google has an excellent rep for doing most things right. Other free webhost email services don’t have such a rep. Hotmail is run by MS and we all know how evil and incompetent those folks are. Yahoo! still doesn’t “get it” in terms of web portal design. It’s a huge junky overloaded start page.
Most other services are not considered reliable now and possibly may not last for much longer. I want one email address for the rest of my life. I’ve had at least 6 different ISP email addresses in the last few years. Forget that.
Searching for stuff is going to be a major need in a lot of areas. Google already dominates in web searching. They are developing a “search your PC” app that I think a lot of people will find helpful. Now they’re doing a “better way” to organize and search email.
One of the key things to search for in email is for spam-ness. They are still in beta and just starting to get real data from real users, but many of us think there’s an excellent chance they’ll figure out how to id spam better than most other services.