Google's Gmail Goes Into Beta for Blogger Users

deadpixel writes "Gmail, the 1gb webmail service offered by Google, has gone into beta. Blogger (owned by google) users have first crack at the service. Besides the massive storage, the free service boasts a sophisticated spam filter, no pop-ups/banners, and gives you search results relevant to the emails you receive automatically. Bring on those attachments!"

Details?

Is Google contacting Blogger users, or are all Blogger users eligible to be beta testers? I have a Blogger account and I can't log in to GMail..

Re:Details?

login to the blogger account, and if you are amongst the selected - there will be a message to indicate an 'invite to try gmail' on the right side of the screen.

Not all blogger users have been invited. And people who are joining blogger now after the announcement are not getting accounts.

Re:Details?

Not all blogger users have been invited. And people who are joining blogger now after the announcement are not getting accounts.

As their announcement says:

As an active Blogger user, we would like to invite you to be one of the first to try out Google's new email service, Gmail.

Would you like to give it a whirl? YES / NO

Re:Details?

Alas, as this poor guy [blogspot.com] has discovered....

Re:Details?

You need to have an "active" Blogger account. When I logged in last week, I saw this invitation message [weill.org]. I hadn't used my account in a week or so, but Blogger considered me "active" enough to deserve an invite.

SpyMac: An Alternative free 1 GB e-mail account

Spymac's free membership [spymac.com] includes:

1 GB e-mail account, 350 MB combined storage, personal blog, forum, gallery, auctions and more

Of course, They are primarily mac-oriented, but I can deal with it.

Not for all Blogger users...

Don't get too excited and go run and create a blogger account to get in. It seems that it only works for those that are currently "active" blogger users already. (Though nobody really knows what defines active.)

Re:Not for all Blogger users...

Dammit! what the hell am I supposed to do with this useless Blogger account now?

How the hell should I know?! I'm still trying to work out what I'm going to do with this stupid slashdot account! :P

You need to be an active blogger

You need to be an active blogger to get access to GMail. I have multiple Blogger accounts. But they gave me access only in those accounts where I have been active lately.

Re:say it ain't so!

Well, Gmail works with Mozilla, but it is very Javascript-heavy. Just like Hotmail and Yahoo, actually. If you open Hotmail with IE, you get an (ActiveX, DHTML?) formatting toolbar so that your email can have "cute" stuff like colours and emoticons, this toolbar isn't there with non-IE browsers --typical Microsoft Monopoly.

Actually, the latest versions of browsers can do DHTML quite nicely with similar results. I've been making a small tool using DHTML and the only problem so far has been with IE which always complain "There is a problem loading the page" despite the fact that it loads it successfully.

Re:You need to be an active blogger

I haven't blogged in...wow, 2 months I guess, and I had the ad when I signed in.

Sadly, I've moved to LJ.

But yes, haven't blogged in a while, merely logged in to get a GMail account, and the ad was there.

1gig?

"1 000 megabytes = 0.9765625 gigabytes"

says google. [google.co.uk]

Other way round from google

1 gigabyte = 1 024 megabytes

Bang on and correct :) I suppose its how you ask the question :)

Cheers,
rob.

Re:1gig?

actually the correct term for 1,024 bytes is mebibyte, for 1,048,576 bytes is gibibyte. mega/giga are decimal prefixes, so 1 megabyte = 1000 bytes, and 1000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte. (google calculator is using the old convention)

Re:1gig?

So how many jibibytes I need to fire up the Delorean and go back to 1985?

Re:1gig?

1.21

Re:1gig?

In language, what is correct is a matter of widespread adoption, not what someone says is 'correct'. While it's technically 'incorrect' to use punctuation like ;) in the middle of a sentence, everyone does it, and I would guess that very few people would consider it incorrect these days. Same goes for the widespread (and one might say 'incorrect') use of 'was' instead of 'were' as the English subjunctive, particularly in the US -- eg. If I was a little less fervent about 24 bytes, I wouldn't be posting to slashdot.

Personally, I haven't seen any indication that anyone has adopted 'gibi' and 'mebi' as anything but ridiculous and pedantic terms, but best of luck on your crusade. I agree that it would be nice to see some kind of distiction, but 24 bytes here and there when you're measuring in megs or gigs... not a problem!

Re:1gig?

no jackass --- you can't just make up your own units

Ah, but he's not. Internation System of Units (SI) Binary Prefixes [nist.gov]

Be bold and be proud of your geekdom! Say "mebibytes" and "gibibytes" in public!!

Re:1gig?

True, it'd be nice if MiB and GiB became standard. For the record, this link [nist.gov] explains the actual SI standards and binary multiples.

Re:1gig?

This is a piece of distortion introduced by disk drive manufacturers. I think Connor (now expired) first introduced it, at the time that disk drives in the low number of gigabytes were appearing. They started sizing drives with a gigabyte counted as 1000 honest Megabytes. I think Connor needed to do it because with honest gigabytes, their drive (a rotten, unreliable one it turned out to be) would not make the 4 Gigabyte mark, though everybody elses's did. To their shame, the other drive nanufacturers followed. So for all disk drives, a Gigabyte now meant 10^3*2^20, not 2^30. A sad world, my masters.

Privacy is not my main concern with Gmail

This is being blown so far out of proportion. Seriously. As countless others have said, our email is scanned all the time by third parties for spam and viruses.

If you have concerns about Google scanning your email to place unobstrusive, sometimes-actually-useful text advertisements next to your email, then there is a solution. DON'T FLIPPING USE IT! That's all there is too it!

The thing that I'M concerned about is if they pull a similar move that Apple did with mac.com accounts. "Oh yah they'll be free forever", then two years later, once everyone is hooked on free @mac.com email addresses, they turn around and say they're going to charge $99 dollars per year. Excuse me? I dont think so. My mac.com email was my main email for nearly two years and as soon as they pulled that shit, I cancelled my account, bought my own domain, and now have free email for life. Apple was hoping that users would pay because they had been using that email address as their main email and wouldnt want to switch. Well it didnt work on me and yo should have read the mac message boards when this happened. People were pissed!

I do think Gmail is a cool idea. Being able to store a gig of email so you (as an average user anyways) never have to delete email and have the best search engine in the world to search through old emails is awesome. But what if their idea is to get you hooked so you wont ever want to give it up, then start charging a fee for it? Even though it is worth probably $100/year, I would tell them to shove their bill up their ass and move on. This is why I won't use Gmail.

Re:Privacy is not my main concern with Gmail

what if their idea is to get you hooked so you wont ever want to give it up,
>then start charging a fee for it?

Duh. When Google has its IPO it officially becomes evil. Very few corporations adhere to their founding values when they must answer to shareholders. Google should just remain private. After you have 5 to 10 or 20 megs of e-mail stored on Google servers, are you just going to get up and walk away if/when they decide to bill you?

Re:Anti-IPO is trolling now?

Reread my post. I said "IPO" not "money." Being a public company means you answer to shareholders and give up a good measure of your independence. Reread that last sentence. I didn't use the word "money." This is not a new concept, and is a belief held by many people.

So what if moderators are offended by my viewpoint? Disagreement = invalid? It's an abuse of the moderation system to mod people down simply because you disagree.

Re:Privacy is not my main concern with Gmail

This is being blown so far out of proportion. Seriously. As countless others have said, our email is scanned all the time by third parties for spam and viruses.

If you have concerns about Google scanning your email to place unobstrusive, sometimes-actually-useful text advertisements next to your email, then there is a solution. DON'T FLIPPING USE IT! That's all there is too it!

Seriously. A friend of mine went into a rant about this the other day, and I pointed out that he has a hotmail account. It boggles the mind that people would trust Microsoft, which is KNOWN to have questionable (if any) ethics and morals, and yet be suspicious of Google, which is known to have good ethics and morals (ie: refusing to accept payment for search result ranking, and penalizing folks who purposely try to manipulate the results for personal gain).

Re:Privacy is not my main concern with Gmail

Y'know, it's not like it's horribly difficult to block those ads anyway. I use Firefox with the AdBlock extension, and generally speaking those google ads show up in their own iframe ... which AdBlock is smart enough to block. So my systems all have "advertisements.google.com" (or whatever it is -- haven't had to look at it in a long time) in their blacklist. Thus, if I had gmail, my mail would still be scanned, but I wouldn't have to deal with the ads. So while the privacy concerns may still exist, at least the second half of the problem is gone.

And honestly, as my dad was quick to admonish me in my younger days, "email is like a postcard." There's nothing to stop a bazillion people from reading it somewhere between the initial and final servers. So if you don't want your email to be read, you should already be enciphering it. It's that simple. Anything I have to send to someone that I seriously do not want anyone else to read, I encrypt -- and if they don't have PGP, I make 'em get it (generally, the people I truly need security with understand the desire for security and are willing to cooperate).

So am I surprised that Gmail can/will scan your email? No. Does it bother me? No -- because they won't be able to scan my private messages anyway.

--0x4A6D74

1GB of porn ads?

> search results relevant to the emails

So Google is going to show me penis enlargement and nude cheerleader search links every time I receive spam?

Re:1GB of porn ads?

Google's just trying to help. I mean, how else are you going to know when new porn sites open

Got this yesterday

Yesterday I signed in to BlogSpot just to check for this, and when you log in to the main page, on the right hand side there is a GMail ad.

Click yes, answer yes to all of the questions that follow, and you have your very own GMail account.

I have had this for what, 24 hours now I guess, and GMail is the best webmail interface I've ever seen.

The one thing I don't like so far is that links, elinks, or links2 don't work with it. They do support javascript AFAIK which is what GMail is basically comprised of, but that's my only gripe.

Can't wait for POP or, preferably, IMAP access. Even more preferably, IMAP over SSL.

What's in a name?

Gmail really hits the Gspot. All you virgins can just look confused and mod me down.

Re:What's in a name?

Gspot? Is that anywhere near the Gstring?

Possibilities

Can a beta tester please tell if the sending of very large attachments from one Gmail account to another is reasonably fast? Also, what is the maximum attachment size?

I don't think anyone knows yet what Google does with a new account that holds a single mail with a very large, PGP-encrypted attachment that curiously is accessed and downloaded from a wide range of different IPs, but if so, please tell.

Re:Possibilities

Based upon some initial testing, outgoing attachments are capped somewhere between 5.5 and 7.5 megs. Which is making capacity testing a PIA.

How about those ad?

How to get them?

I've got a gmail account (thanks to Blogger), and also have a Google AdWords account.

I've been sending mail to my gmail account from another account, and including things that I thought *should* trigger a Google text ad - one of mine, no less and keywords that certainly do trigger a text ad from the main Google search page - dont. I haven't seen one yet.

During the Beta are they inhibiting the textads?

Anyone see an ad in the wild yet?

They're there

but not on every message. Interestingly, messages that once have had ads usually always will so its not like they come and go. But other messages don't trigger them.

Using the text of an entire message for ads requires a bit more computing than just a search query, so maybe they're trying to keep those down while in beta.

They're about as good as the ones for the regular search engine. I'm looking at a conversation i'd been having about jobs and internships and the ads it displayed were related to those.

Gmail vs. Spymac

I set up one Gig accounts on both Gmail and SpyMac that I've had people sending attachments and emails to to see how they hadnle reaching a GIG. so far, Gmail is only up to 127MB and SpyMac is only at 27MB (but their servers would seem to be a day behind on listing my new email). So far, I have discovered that Gmail's spam filter has caught one actual spam message, and suddenly blocked 5 of 15 messages from one person with no clear reason why. Also, the ad bots only scan the body text of the emails, as all attachment only emails have been ad free. [e-mail] and [e-mail] if you are interested in contributing to the experiment.

Re:Gmail (legit) vs. Spymac (illegit)

SpyMac is an embarassment of flim flam artistry. It is one of the greatest rabbit tricks ever pulled out of a Mac hat.

People think there's concerns with Gmail and privacy - yet YOU would trust your email to a site that HAS NEVER backed away from the iWalk PDA being a fake, that consistently breaks MUG rules (they claim to be a MUG, yet moderators post rumors - a no no).

THERE IS NO WAY I WOULD TRUST SPYMAC with any password, email address, home address or any other information

SpyMac is just the shiniest car in the parking lot. Be careful though, there may be flood damage under the hood.

The other thing that bothers me about SpyMac is that their moderators troll the web and forums looking for ANYONE that says something bad about the site.

The ad

For those who haven't seen it, I'll just show the ad here -

There's an image header - http://blogger.com/g-logo.gif

As an active Blogger user, we would like to invite you to be one of the first to try out Google's new email service, Gmail [google.com].

Would you like to give it a whirl? YES / NO

The YES link opens up this page [blogspot.com]

The NO links pops an alert box saying 'Okay, this notice will be here for a few more days, should you change your mind.' or similar.

I signed up and read the TOS

And while it states that they will can your account for sending and using your address to receive illicit information in one form or another, I'm tempted to push the envelope (since I dont need the account, I've got an edu account which is better for me).

As much as P2P has been demonized, there is one content that I can think of that is legal, and distrabution is encouraged, and thats concert recordings of bands that allow taping (see etree.org for more info). Each show typically runs between 700MB-> 1.5GB since its done in a lossless compressiong scheme.

So whats stopping me from having people get GMail accounts and then doing a CC to everyone who wants a show and doing a mass mailing (even if its broken into chunks).

I'm not looking for a technical answer, I'm curious about a legal one. (and thus, /. is the wrong place to ask. ;-p) The reason is, whats stopping people from using this for legal functions, but not the intended storage purpose as originally "intended".

The Gmail scanner...

doesnt present any ads to you if the content of your email is a PGP encrypted message.

Re:The Gmail scanner...

But it does present ads:

Sponsored Links

Open PGP Command Line
FileCrypt eBusiness secures data with strong PGP encryption.
www.veridis.com/filecrypt

Free PGP Disk Encryption
Completely supported Free Simple, Secure, Secure E-mail too.
encryption.cypherix.com/pgp_disc
About these links

If a PGP encrypted message is sent with a PGP encrypted attchment bearing the file extension .pgp

In both cases, the subject was a line cut from the ciphertext in the body of the message.

Does this mean that Gmail scans attachments as well as the body of an email?

Safari not supported?

Interesting, GMail currently does not support Safari. https://gmail.google.com/gmail/browser_requirement s.html You get a message on the sign in box saying that you can log in anyway, but your browser is not supported.

First impressions

My impression thus far: very sweet.

I tried registering some short usernames, the username has to be 6 characters or longer.

So I have a leet 6-character [e-mail].

Transit time for sent and recived mail is near-instantaneous.

The interface is trademark google utilitarian. Two thumbs up.

I sent some test spam from my spam folder, they got into my inbox (and not to my 'spam'
folder on gmail). So they have some tweaking to do there.

For those who are curious...

...as to what the actual mail interface looks like I took a few screenshots for ya:

Inbox [citking.net]

Example message w/ text ads present [citking.net]

The only thing different is the "@gmail.com" e-mail addy at the top...I cut mine out just to avoid any potential issues...sorry.

nope

they don't do that. At least not now, i suppose its possible once gmail goes open to the public it could though.

Smart approach by Google

By choosing bloggers to help beta test GMail, Google gets:

1. Users who are interested in new technology/new features/computers/etc.
2. Users who are influencers: those who share their opinions with others.

In essence, they have an ideal test base - testers who will give great feedback, and testers who will plug GMail to those who read their blogs. Great word of mouth advertising...

Expectation of Privacy

What privacy advocates have objected to about Gmail is that, by scanning mail and displaying an ad next to it, the service reduces the "expectation of privacy".

"Reasonable expectation of privacy" is a legal term which, among other things, influences what the courts allow the government to do when snooping on people without a warrent.

For examples of this, look for instance at the case law surrounding trash [floridadetectives.com].

The courts have ruled that it's perfectly OK for law enforcement agencies to pick through your trash because people do not have an "expectation of privacy" when they throw things away.

The danger with Gmail is that it starts to erode the generally-held idea that it is wrong for anyone to read someone else's email. Sure, it's just software and sure, no one is actually reading it. But the contextual ads may give the impression that the mail is read, therefore allowing the courts to rule later that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in email, and allowing the government to snoop through your mail at will.

This isn't coming tomorrow, but it's one of the main objections privacy advocates have to Gmail. Similar sentiments from other privacy advocacy groups are expressed in this article [msn.com]

Just signed up

I've had a blogger account for almost 2 years now, so I got selected for the Gmail beta. I just signed up about 10 minutes ago. First problem I had was that your username has to be at least 6 characters long. As you can see from my username here, it is less than 6 characters. Not that big of a deal I guess. Besides that it looks awesome, I haven't done much with it beside set up the account and send a few test emails but the display looks really clean, reminds me a little of YahooMail. The textads on the side aren't intrusive at all, especially compared to every other free webmail I've ever seen. Load times are impressive, could just be that they have a huge amount of bandwidth and server-power allocated at the moment, but it's faster than any other webmail. I'll have to see how it responds once I have a bunch of messages in it to load. So my first impression is that it is better than any other webmail - if their UI innovation (i.e. emails organized as conversations, searching, etc.) actually works (or isn't annoying) I would definitely switch to using it as my primary webmail account. 1gig of storage space is definitely awesome, I lost a bunch of relatively important email from my stupid hotmail account (I signed up long before MS bought them and ruined everything) when I was out of country and couldn't access it - I came back to an account overflowing with spam and all my old emails auto-deleted. Yeah, I should of kept them somewhere else - but the account wasn't near full and until then I was only getting a a few spam emails per day. Regardless, it's not likely to happen when you have a gig of space to play with.