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This I've heard of and I think it's great! Any idea on when it will be available to the masses??


When it becomes available and someone signs up for it... Can you please offer your thoughts, opinions and/or review of it?
 
Plenty of opinions, hopes, and controversy on this one. There have been concerns though...about privacy. To provide this much storage, Google is going to be using their adwords system to place ads at the end of emails. The concerns and arguments are mainly about that fact, that Google's scanning robot will scan through outgoing email to place relevent text-ads (the same ones that appear at the side of google search results) at the end of emails. Some people feel threatened by this "breach" of privacy. A California legislator is even trying to ban it.

This is a good point to stop blabbing and link to CNet's "Get this Story's Big Picture" summery page.
 
The funny thing is, ISP's are doing this right now. how do you think Spam filters work at a ISP level? They do a word search in ALL of your emails and then decide if its spam or not.
 
HoLoCroN said:
The funny thing is, ISP's are doing this right now. how do you think Spam filters work at a ISP level? They do a word search in ALL of your emails and then decide if its spam or not.

Worse off, banning Gmail by whatever legislation the California polition is trying to use, will also be banning these spam filters. CNet's article mentions that this will be a problem for companies that use email scanning to block out spam.

In my opinion, she should stay out of people's business, and let them have the right to sacrifice a small amount of privacy (not really, anyway...no PERSON reads anything) if they want so much storage. All they should be doing is force them to make a CLEAR warning, so that people will know...and then let people decide.

If you don't want the "privacy breach", then DON'T SIGN UP! SIMPLE! Why block the service for those who might really want that space? That's saying in a way, "I don't like it...I don't want it...so I'm going to make it so that nobody else can have it either". I would hope that things work out.
 
I am in the gmail beta right now.
I can list some stuff for you all:

+ You probably already know this, but your replies are grouped together to form a conversation. It takes some getting used to but it's a neat feature. They also have something called labels to group parts of the conversation (so you don't have 20 different topics in one conversation)
+ You can search through your email, they also have filters where your email will be sorted according to.
Eg: anything that contains Gmail in the subject goes to gmail label under that persons conversation.
+ They have a spam section of your mailbox, however I don't see anywhere to enable or disable it, so I assume it's on and you can't turn it off.
+ Bits of the email conversation are shown before you even open the mail, kinda like google's searches.
+ It is noticably quicker than hotmail, yahoo in changing pages (maybe b/c it's in beta right now)
+ I read the privacy policy and the only thing I could see that violated any kind of privacy is them giving your name/ip info to the FBI if they are subpoena'd for it (but this comes standard with almost anything internet related) granted, I am no lawyer.
+ Some interesting stuff:


-My trash folder reads as follows:
--No conversations in the trash. Who needs to delete when you have 1000 MB of storage?!

-My spam folder reads as follows:
--Hooray, no spam here!

Go figure :p

If you have any other questions I'll try and answer them.
 
My first question would be, how did you become a beta tester? I'd be very happy to get a pre-release account myself. :)

Other questions:

1. How obtrusive are the Google adwords? Are they at all?

2. Are attachment sizes unlimited due to the enourmous amount of space?

3. Is there a POP3 system to get email using a client such as Outlook Express or Apple Mail? If not, are there any plans for such?

4. Does the search function work as promised and is it usable (as in, would you use this as often as you browse through pages of email)?



Thanks for offering to answer our inquiries. I'm sure other people will have questions as well.
 
qiranworms said:
My first question would be, how did you become a beta tester? I'd be very happy to get a pre-release account myself. :)
Well I was fairly lucky, a while ago blogger.com was purchased by google. They started offering accounts to some selected members. I wasn't one but had a friend who was. I signed up hoping to get an invitation but it didn't come so I gave up. Then later he recieved some invitation links to gmail and offered me one which I jumped at. I suggest finding some other stuff google owns and getting highly active in that. Though your chances may be slim, it should still be worth a try :)

qiranworms said:
1. How obtrusive are the Google adwords? Are they at all?
http://home.comcast.net/~modemide/gmailTextAd.gif
I guess the picture is too big to display here .. just click the link :confused:
Also check this out for an explanation:
http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6603&rand=0.16311830068251076

qiranworms said:
3. Is there a POP3 system to get email using a client such as Outlook Express or Apple Mail? If not, are there any plans for such?
I do not see any POP3 access. As far as I can tell, you are sacrificing some more advanced mail features for tons of space. There may be plans later on. I will send a mail to google and ask (however they tend to not answer emails as they recieve so many)

qiranworms said:
4. Does the search function work as promised and is it usable (as in, would you use this as often as you browse through pages of email)?
Search is AWESOME. It reminds me a lot of google search, efficient/quick. Once I get some more contacts emailing me here, I will definately make use of this feature.

Something else I should note, as far as I can tell there is no address book however it does store the address you recieved/sent mail from/to, because when you start to enter either name or email address it starts to autofill so you can just click the button to insert.

Feel free to ask any other questions
 
not to add fuel to the fire or anything but Google also states that they can keep your emails even after you have closed your account. I like the idea of that much storage, but don't care for my emails being held against my will.
 
I see that, however, I trust google and they do say in their defence that it is sorted and it used to provide ads based on emails. It is possible other webmail companies may be doing something similar without informing.
 
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