Gmail

I agree - it got a lot of people not only talking about the new service - but debating it.

When the announcements starting hit late on the 31st of March, I was fairly sure it was real. It just makes too much sense given where Google's strong points are (search, and "knowledge management"). Google doesn't have much to bring to a 5 Meg or even 20 Meg web based email service.

They have a lot to bring to the table when you're talking about (up to) 1Gig of email. Very smart move, and I think it'll pay off for them.

 

My real wonder is how they're going to provide that much space. My partner suggested that as of right now, or when they go live with it, that they'll have say, 20-40 terabytes of space (allowing for 20,000 to 40,000 completely filled mailboxes) - but, instead of allocating 1 gig total to each person, most people won't use anywhere near this amount. Then, as time goes on and space gets cheaper, they can upgrade their servers as it gets more popular.

I think this is the only way they can offer something like this, because you figure, (or at least I do), they'll easily have 1 million sign up for this right away, and that's 1,000 terabytes, and that's near unimaginable in today's terms anyways. Any other ideas?

(Also, I do agree on the brilliance of this announcement on April Fools).

-m.

 

I agree that the timing of the GMail announcement was Brilliant. However, this news article makes me want to rethink the "Brilliant" comment. It's stupid maneuvers like this that would keep me from buying Google stock if it ever IPO's. Maybe they should stick with web searching, and outsource the trademark registration. Didn't anyone Google that?

From Yahoo News
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...ternet_gmail_dc


Google's Gmail Headache Grows with Trademark Claim

LONDON (Reuters) - First, it was privacy advocates who vowed to fight Google's proposed e-mail service, Gmail. Now, a small-cap independent investment research firm said it owns the trademark to "Gmail" and it intends to battle to keep it.

London-based The Market Age said it had at its peak a year ago 1,000 customers representing 300 banks signed up for its core "Pronet" Web-based research application service, of which "Gmail" is a primary research product.


"When the news came out about Google's Gmail last week, I went to the U.S. patent and trademark authorities. I thought maybe we were in trouble. But they hadn't (registered)," Shane Smith, group chief executive of Market Age, told Reuters on Wednesday.


He said that on Saturday he paid the $700 in fees to register "Gmail" under the company's name. The Market Age never registered a "Gmail" Web domain, he added.


Google owns http://www.google.com.


Google officials in London could not immediately be reached for comment.


Since announcing last week it plans to launch a Web-based e-mail service for consumers capable of storing a lifetime's worth of e-mails, Google has come under fire from privacy advocates in Europe and the United States.


Google, the world's most popular search engine and a Web surfers favorite, has a squeaky clean reputation.


But Gmail has become a mounting concern with privacy advocates mainly because Gmail users would not be able to permanently delete e-mail messages sent to their account.


Smith said Google has not been in contact with his firm. He declined to say if the company would consider licensing the name to Google.


Shares in The Market Age more than doubled to a high of 27.5 pence on Tuesday after it mentioned its claim on the "Gmail" trademark. The jump was helped by a "buy note" from an analyst at Corporate Synergy.


Shares fell back again on Wednesday, slumping 16 percent to 20 pence.


Tim

 

Well, the trademark is certainly something they should know about - but the privacy BS is just so silly. Simply put, google is forcing no one to sign up for their service without first disclosing exactly what it'll entail. I'll gladly let them have a computer search my emails for keywords to market advertising because #1 it makes advertising better, just as TiVo forces advertisers to become better, and #2 there are so many spyware and cookies and other garbage flowing throughout the internet that are far more malicious than helping me perhaps buy concert tickets or find a cheap flight. Let's focus on pop up ads and spyware before we attack companies who are upfront and legit about how they'll be paying for the service they offer you.

The trademark deal - it brings up an interesting point though - do you think you should be required to own the trademark if you own the web address? I'm not saying Google is right in this case - it's obviously showing on their website that "Gmail" is trademarked by them, and I think it's something they probably messed up on. But, I think the argument needs to go deeper here, and I think there still needs to be a good deal of examination in the legality of all the web related business - squatters, trademarking, etc. Just my 2 cents!

-m.

 

I certainly don't pretend to be the Trademark expert on the board, but with domain registration and Trademark registrations being done by two totally different entities, I think it would be hard to enforce. This company is in London, so they are not going to register their trademark in the U.S., but very easily could have registered www.gmail.com for only $6.95 (or whatever the Euro/Pound conversion is!) at godaddy.com. Sure, Google dropped the ball on trademarking GMail, but then again, had this Market Age company in London registerered gmail.com, Google never would have persued that name.

Maybe what we need, with this world-wide economy and the evolution of the Internet to create simple communication across the world, is a world Trademark and Patent Authority. I'm not sure how that would work either, but it is almost as if someone should be watching over all this.

My guess: Google will pay this Market Age company thousands of dollars to turn over the U.S. Trademark on Gmail, and the email plan will continue. It's yet another version of cybersquatting.

I agree about the privacy issues, especially when it will make ads more relevant. I personally am fine with standard advertising (not pop-ups, pop-unders, or spyware). I know it pays the bills, and allows me to check the weather, the news, and send my friends a note without having to pay a dime. I click on the ads occationally when something seems appropriate or interesting, knowing that it helps pay for the site.

Since Double-Click apparently hasn't succeeded in using cookies to make the ads more relevant to what I'm doing online, hopefully Google can. And if so, they can scan my emails all they want. I know better than to send personal data about myself through non-secure emails or web sites.

End of sermon (I'm a 7th grade social studies teacher on Spring Break, so I'm missing out on preaching to my students...you all get it instead!)

Tim

 

I for one would love Gmail.

I dont use POP3 mail for security reasons, so i am stuck with the severely limited storage capacities of internet based mail.

As for privacy, all the emails i save have are either jokes or computer tips. if anyone wants to read any of it, have at it!!

but because of storage limitations, i am forced to save my emails as text. but no matter how well i organize the emails or how well i title them, i still spend huge amounts of time searching for some little procedure that i need when working on a customers computer.

now to have a searchable database that i can access off the internet would be a dream come true.

Does anyone know of anyone who has it yet? i signed up with 3 different e-mail accounts on the first day and still have not received anything yet.

 

I'd understand the whole privacy argument if google was forcing everyone to have an account. Otherwise, I see no argument. Google is just (smartly, I might add) making it worthwhile for them to give you 1 gig of email space. Hey, you want to give me 1 gig of space and want to show me non-intrusive ads where I view my email. I already have very intrusive ads, which aren't directly marketed to me meaning they piss me off more, when checking my yahoo mail, and that's only 4 megs of space. If google wants to keep showing me Prius ads when I talk prius in my email, I won't complain a bit. I welcome it.

-m.

 

rflagg:

i agree with you 100%, google is just trying to pay the bills. well if they can pay the bills and offer a fabulous service for free, then i am all for it.

as it is, several free services are far from even being fair so i look at google as bringing a great marketing concept to the masses that will be as successful as everything else they have done.

 

I've got 5 Gmail accounts to give away. Please PM me with your email address if you would like one.

 

just an update here, i also have 6 gmail accounts to pass out to anyone who pms me their email addy.

i have now had gmail for nearly 2 months or so and i love it. its full text search capabilities are fabulous and i truly wish i could use the google search engine to search my entire hard drive. that would be a dream come true.

as it is, i will probably end up testing the limits of the gmail box size limit as i have been devoting spare time (when im motivated to do so) emailing my gmail account, varies items i want to be able to search through at a seconds notice from my yahoo account.

i simply cannot get over how fast the google search capabilities are. and for all people out there, the longhorn 64 bit version of Windows will have a search engine that will search your hard drive with a method like what google uses. so it will be no more of the 15 minute searches that cant find nothing anyway like what windows does now.

 

So let me see if I've got this right: They give you a GB of storage, but you can't erase anything, and they can search through all your email looking for keywords to send you spam?

No thanks!

What's the point? I get email from my ISP. It doesn't cost me anything extra. My computer downloads it automatically, and I delete when I'm done with it. I also have a Yahoo account for signing up for chat boards, and a godisdead account for when I really don't trust someone. What do I need more for? And what's this with folks signing up for half a dozen Gmail accounts and offering to give them away? If I did want one, why wouldn't I sign up for one myself?

I do everything I can to avoid getting more spam. Why would I sign up for Gmail and get more spam? I don't see how it's any better than Yahoo, which already provides more storage than any normal person could want.

 

i have never received a single letter of spam in my gmail account...

i have also deleted several hundred emails.

how this "cant delete mail" thing started i dont know... but i do know that is wasnt started by someone who has an account.

gmail doesnt use spam anyway. they use "content adds" and they appear in the margins of your email...that is the same thing that msn, yahoo, aol, etc uses.

keep in mind that they mail services also use popups.
gmail does not.

and we dont have the option to sign up for more than one gmail account.

after a few weeks, there was a link that said "invite up to 6 friends to join gmail"...

since it wasnt in the body of the email, i dont know how long it was there. in fact if someone hadnt told me that it was there, i may still have never noticed it. just as i do with all my email accounts, if it aint in the body of the email, i ignore it. too busy to read the adds.

also another unrelated topic:

i dont use POP3/IMAP email services. they are too vunerable and insecure and uses up space on my hard drive.

IF putting them on my hard drive (something ive been doing for years anyway) would help me find emails or enable me to search through them faster, or do ANYTHING better, then i might consider a decent POP3 mail client... but they dont.

i have a SOHO network with 5 computers sharing a single 56 K dialup (nocharge.com totally free, unrestricted...great service!! if you have it in your area i highly recommend it if you are on a budget.) so internet access is slow for everything except gmail.

how they manage to speed up even my computer is a HUGE testament to the dedication and quality of the Google people.

i have every confidence that gmail will rule the internet just as the google search engine does now. yahoo's pitiful attempts to keep pace by increasing their free mailbox to 100MB will fail as they have done nothing to upgrade their infrastructure to deal with the additional load.

and for anyone who is still not convinced gmail is good for them ( and NOTHING is good for everyone) dont worry... i do not spam either and will not send you an unrequested invitation.

 

DaveinOlyWA - I couldn't have said it better. I haven't received any spam as a result of my Gmail account, once an email is deleted it is gone. In fact, when an email is sent it to the trash it is automatically deleted in 30 days if I forget to empty the trash.

Though I have anti-virus software and am meticulous about what I open and what I automatically delete, a virus came through that totally wiped out my hard drive - including Windows and the "hidden" partition that was my computer's back up. When that happened I vowed, no more emails on my hard drive. It just happened that someone here was offering free Gmail accounts, I took them up on it and couldn't be happier - or feel safer.

As for privacy, as far as I'm concerned, little emperor Shrub's "Patriot" Act officially wiped that out.

Go Google!

 

my company processes $30 million a day in credit card transactions and security is obviously #1 concern.

we do not use POP3 mail because of security concerns. we (believe it or not) use yahoo mail for emails outside the company's intranet and ccmail inside the internet with no outside ports allowed (110,25 etc)

we also use yahoo messenger (special intranet version that does not allow anything outside our intranet... well it will if you can figure out how to get out of our triple firewalled system...we do have people who's sole job is to try though if you are interested.)

 

I use broadband because I don't like waiting 2 or 3 minutes for web pages to load. And I use my ISP's email because the mail is fetched automatically and on my HD whenever I want to look at it (or open an old one again).

I don't open emails from people I don't know, and I don't open attachments from anyone unless the text of the email is clearly personal, and even then I only open non-executable file types (jpg, gif, pdf, etc.)

My backup is on an external usb HD that is physically disconnected from the computer except when I am actually making a backup, and then the modem is off. For a virus to get my backup it would have to sit on my computer, hidden from Norton, until the next time I made a backup.

So I have little interest in web-based email. But from what you say, the descriptions of Gmail earlier in this thread, on which I based my comments, were erroneous. Still, who needs a GB of email storage? Who even needs Yahoo's 100 MB?

 

Danny doesnt work that way... google handles the invite process so would need her email address directly as she can only sign up via the invite that would be sent to her email addy...

 

Actually that's not true. The email that Gmail sends just contains a URL. That's is all you need to activate a new account.

I've just sent you an invite, Danny.

 

You mean they won't even let you sign up for it unless someone with special status sends you an invitation? Weird.