Groundbreaking new Email Service: Gmail!
 

This came as quite a suprise to me that it was not an April Fool's Joke. For those still in the dark, Gmail is Google's Hotmail/Yahoo!Mail Busting Email Service. This brand spankin new free Email provides the user with a full gigabyte of free email storage, eliminating all need to delete old emails. There are other features that will be included, like a search function for your email, and simple text ads instead of popup ads.
for more info follow the link Gmail

This Email service is so innovative that at first I did not believe it. A full gigabyte for every user is going to take up a lot of space- Their servers will have to be huge to take on the inevitable millions of users that will be signing up for this email. We're talking thousands of terabytes here. Also, there will be problems with people using their google account as storage space for files, or pirating.

All in all though, I am quite excited that this is no april fool's gag and that it will really come into fruition. Your thoughts?

I still think it's a gag.

Only a VERY small fraction of users will use the gigabyte of space. Don't make the assumption that simply because they offer it, people will need it. And when they refer to 1 gigabyte, they may not even be including compression and other optimizations.

I imagine they could save even more if they implemented some sort of spam caching strategy.
j/k

And frankly, even then... A gigabyte isn't that much space. A single google query takes upwards of 100 megabytes of disk I/O, the smallest unit of granularity in the google file system is 64megabytes! (The standard size in most is in the kilobyte range)

I'm inclined to agree. If a million users signed up for a gigabyte of space each, imagine how much it would cost for Google.

If it is true that must be the sound of Bill Gates crying I hear.

Just because you can still navigate to 'Pigeon Rank' doesn't mean it's real.

What motives would google have to continue this gag past April 1st?

Google has officially stated that it was not an April Fool's joke:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15121
http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/01/tech...mail/index.htm

I'm still in shock.

Would we even be talking about this if it weren't a doubled up april fools joke? It's just good marketing. Or not.

I heard the catch was that google will search the emails for certain keywords and insert advertisements into the emails.

knowing alot of Google people, I highly doubt that... Google is known for being anti-spam, and using as little commercial advertisement as possible. I don't see them being the types to do a Microsoft on us...
I'm signing up. I'm so through with my hacked AOL mail account.

well, that's actually part right. Just like when you search for something on google and there are text ads on the side of your search based on the search word, there will be text ads based on key words in your e-mails. I don't think it's particularly low though as from the descriptions I've heard the ads are fairly non-obtrusive. I do plan to read the User Agreement though.

Sounds interesting will definatly have to check it out.

And here I thought it was just another April Fools joke.

If this is real, and it seems like it, I guess i'm going to be switching emails ^_~.

Well, I signed up to be kept informed about future developments.

We'll see if it's bs or not.

I think that this is absolutely genius marketing!

When I first saw it I though:
a)If it's an april fools joke, its a pretty lame one! I even read the gmail.com site, and found nothing at all amusing about it.
or
b)If it is real, then that's pretty amazing, but why april 1st? Surely if they we going to do something this groundbreaking, they wouldn't have done it on the day that's in it?

So, they make you wonder if it's all too good to be true....and then they tell that it is true!

Genius!

Well, it is true. check out the gmail site:

The matching of ads to content is a completely automated process performed by computers using the same technology that powers the Google AdSense program. This technology already places targeted ads on thousands of sites across the web by quickly analyzing the content of pages and determining which ads are most relevant to them.

http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/about.html#ads

Looks like I found a good storage account now.

maybe i just don't see it as that great of a deal, am i missing the special part, i don't have problems with my hotmail, and it seems useless to keep all of your emails, besides the number of emails i get in a week can be counted on 2 hands, do you all get that much email?

yes and no.

The big problem with hotmail is that i can not receive any mpegs, etc. Send a file over 1 meg, forget it.

This is great and I am awaiting its release.

Hmmmmmmmmmm... the possibilities. :D

i never thought of that, yeah, there are a few large files that i wouldn't mind sending to my bro, without having to burn them and snail mail them. good point!

I have a feeling that Gmail are going to put a cap on individual message sizes.

The whole idea of the 1GB is that it is supposed to stop you having to delete messages....just store them away. The 1GB is supposed to be enough for a decade's worth of mail.

If they do put a cap on the amount of space, it would solve many of the problems people have been pointing out;
a) The massive expense of providing 1GB of hard disk for every user. Each user's account is only going to grow reasonably slowly over the years. Plus with storage space falling over time, who knows how much a gig of space will cost (currently about $1)
b) It will stop it being used for Warez, and other general file storage uses.

As far as I know, they have said nothing about such a cap, but I find it very likely that it will be in TOS, when it becomes available.

I don't need that kind of space, or want to keep old emails. I'll stick with what I have.

"I don't need that speed, or want to fill it up. I'll stick with the Horse."

I will try it though yahoo seems to be enough for what I do.

I really don't care about having to delete old emails if its that important i'll print it out.

Something of interest....

Well I trust Google with my crappy mundane information. If I was going to transmit something that I was concerned would get me in trouble with law enforcement, I would be using an anonymous account from a public computer access point.

I'm drunk with storage space!!!!! AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

Okay, not really. But I am LOVING gmail beta and I trust machines more than people under contract to keep my information a secret.

Is anybody else using it yet? They offered it to me because I use Blogger.

Yup, I have an old blogger account that I never use and was very happy to see that I could sign up for gmail. I am not using it as of yet, I am waiting to see if they will give you a way to check it though Outlook, if I can do this I plan on forwarding my other email accounts to Google and use the massive amount of space and the search capability to my advantage.

So one of my friends now has a GMail account.
Yes, she has a 1 Gig. So far, she has not experienced any caps in sending.
She has this account because she's very good friends with one of the lead programmers at Google. She's an anarchist of sorts. He's extremely lefty and anti corperate. They are both very concerned with their privacy, and looked into exactly what Google is doing before going ahead with their accounts. From what they've come to understand of it, Google is doing nothing more than data screening, information held momentarily for ad purposes, then discarded. Google is not in the business of knowing everything about you and narcing you to the feds, as that article would have one believe =P ... so if that bothers you, understandable, I suppose.. but I suggest not using your Windows or Mac OS (probably safest to just get rid of the computer), turn off the TV, and just to be safe, don't leave the house - because you're going to be a target market no matter where you go.