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Gmail Cracks Down on Third-Party Notifiers
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Aug 28, 2004 03:03 PM
from the their-sandbox-their-rules dept.
from the their-sandbox-their-rules dept.
crtfdgk writes "Recently, Google's gmail service has attempted to change login protocols to block third-party gmail notifiers that alert you to new email. Google has now taken it one step further and created a word-identification script filter as part of the login process. Personally, I find Google's gmail notifier annoying since it sits in my taskbar and doesn't have popup notification, unlike many other worthy Firefox or Mozilla plugins that feature gmail notification. Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email? Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?"
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Gmail Cracks Down on Third-Party Notifiers
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Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://akghetto.com/)
My feeling is that if it's a *FREE* service (meaning you don't pay Google anything to use Gmail) then no, you shouldn't be free to use whatever third party software you choose.
Sorry but when you're not even a paying customer, I feel no love.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.lazylightning.org/)
I share your feeling for the most part but I really don't understand their actions. Why not stop wasting your coding time during a beta program stopping third parties from making their experience better and work on adding the things the users want (ie POP3, Opera support, HTML-only, etc?)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
In a public beta like this, PR is still very important. The brand is already at stake. To treat it any other way would be stupid. People won't care about the Beta distinction later.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)
Note that Opera 7.6 [opera.com] (currently in beta/development) has enhanced Gmail support. I just saw there is actually an entire website devoted to Gmail on Opera [scss.com.au].
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.christophermahan.com/)
Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://droleary.subsume.com/)
because you want to control the ping to one every ten minutes. Imagine if 3 million people had notifier on and they were pinging your server every ten seconds each. That's 300,000 hits per second. No good.
Gee, if only there were some way to track down those abusers by virtue of their abuse rather than the nature (third-party) of the app doing the checking. You know, some sort of identifier like an email address or something . . .
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Google can set it up so that the client establishes a TCP connection and then using periodic keepalives, keeps it up. Then instead of the client polling every X minutes, the server can simply send the client notification (one little packet) when there is new mail. By eliminating polling and TCP handshake overheads, it's a little more server-friendly. It might require a little more RAM to keep track of all those TCP connections, but RAM is cheap and each connection only consumes a few bytes.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday May 08 2007, @05:37PM)
Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Saturday August 18 2001, @12:43AM)
> Google can set it up so that the client establishes a TCP connection and then using periodic keepalives, keeps it up.
The official Gmail notifier simply uses standard http/https requests to do its work. The only difference between it and the "unofficial" method is that it retrieves a binary encoded data block and processes that.
See these forum postings for more details I documented:
Official Gmail Notifier protocol documented [outer-court.com]
--Phil.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://ottodestruct.com/)
Two minutes. GMail's official Notifer checks every 2 minutes.
The big deal is that they want third party apps to stop actually logging in and pulling the full HTML for the main page, and start copying what the notifier does, which is to pull down something much smaller, simpler, and less CPU intensive for google.
Also, it prevents their statistics from being skewed by apps acting like actual people. What, you think they're not logging stats on this stuff?
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.rage.ws/)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Friday August 29 2003, @06:09PM)
done! Address book import
we'll try Opera support
we'll try Ability to send messages with HTML formatting
we'll try POP3 access
working on it Plain HTML version of Gmail
working on it Ability to save a draft
So this is not entirely out of the question.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday October 29, @09:37AM)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://akghetto.com/)
Google is a for profit corporation who's main source of income is from their advertisers. Totally different
Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
(You know I'm right because I used a foreign language phrase...)
Oooooh, you speak Freedom...sorry, couldn't resist
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.glasssteelandstone.com/)
There's that word right that people keep abusing. "I have the right to this... I have the right to that." Bottom line is -- no, you don't have the right to a lot of things. The rights you have are very clearly spelled out by the laws of your country. In the case of the United States, the Bill of Rights. I don't remember the constitution being ammended to include people having the right to leach off of other people's work.
Like many people before you, you confuse a "right" with "I really really wanna. Waaah!"
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
View 1) everything which is not explicitly allowed is forbidden.
View 2) everything which is not explicitly forbidden is allowed.
Your call : does your Bill of Rights define all of the rights which you have?
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a hint about what they say: view 2 is correct, view 1 was the framers' worst nightmare. One of the major concerns in the adoption of the bill of rights was that people might eventually start to believe view 1.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)
No, it specifically limits the US Government's ability to curtail our rights. Our Constitution specically states that any rights not enumerated in it are reserved to the states or the people.
As a side note, it applies to our government, not private citizens and contracts that they undertake. Which is why , when people start screaming "Company X violated my 1st amendment rights" I realize they have no idea about what they speak.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://wolgamott.blogspot.com/)
Article IX: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
That's exactly why (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.moochmuch.com/)
What it boils down to is that you have whatever rights you have the ability and willingness to demand. What _that_ generally boils down to is that you have whatever rights your culture grants you. It is a bad, bad move as a culture for us to decide people have some minimal set of rights that can be enumerated somewhere - instead, keep pushing the envelope of your rights until it includes everything that doesn't hurt someone else.
That said, I don't believe we have a right to force Google to make it easy for 3rd party mail notifiers to work. It did miff me until someone pointed out how their notifier could be much more efficient. I wouldn't be surprised to see them solidify the notifier API and make it a public release after they have tested it for a while.
Third party notifiers =~ /. effect on gmail server (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.numbski.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 26 2005, @10:44PM)
What I mean is, Slashdot bans people when they abusively pull RSS feeds too often, and ask people to only pull RSS once every 30 minutes, and no more often than that. It's possible that these programs are pinging the crap out of the server, essentially DDOS'ing the sytem with mindless queries every few seconds to every few minutes. If the notifiers only queried once every half hour, there would be no issue, but hen people would find it useless since there would be up to a half hour delay on being notified of new mail.
I think therein lies the crux of the matter.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://randyrandy.net/)
Moreover, the only sort of person who could describe Google's changing of a free beta tool's interface as "cracking down" is someone who has never himself been cracked-down upon.
This isn't "cracking down." But at least it wasn't an YRO [slashdot.org] story.
If google's free gmail broke your favorite notifier plugin and that really upsets you, then you're taking free email far too seriously.
Re:Gmail Notifier is NOT complete (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.patik.com/ | Last Journal: Monday December 27 2004, @10:46AM)
Re:Gmail Notifier is NOT complete (Score:4, Informative)
It will get better, not worse (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.patik.com/ | Last Journal: Monday December 27 2004, @10:46AM)
Who says Google is trying to stifle 3rd party apps? It is still beta, they are still fixing things, and nothing has been finalized. Instant Messenger services change their protocols occasionally but they don't block 3rd party apps.
Either way, if you've got a Gmail account, be sure to give them your two cents [google.com].
Re:It will get better, not worse (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.lordjester.com/)
Bullshit! Yahoo just did this very thing. They changed thier protocol in their new releasd that broke 3rd party apps. Yahoo, like others, do not publish protcol documentation or supply APIs, it is up to 3rd party programmers to reverse engineer it to get the 3rd party apps to work.
Re:It will get better, not worse (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It will get better, not worse (Score:5, Informative)
Yahoo blocking [earthweb.com]
AIM blocking [arstechnica.com]
"AOL made changes to their proprietary protocol (called OSCAR) that would ferret out anyone who wasn't using the official client."
Re:It will get better, not worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, Opera and plain HTML versions of Gmail make sense in this context because it's a relatively easy way to increase the numbers; there's no technical reason they haven't supported that yet. Their engineers just haven't gotten around to it.
External POP support is a little more dubious: "In the future you will be able to access Gmail messages from non-Gmail accounts for free or at a nominal fee." [google.com] My bet is on the nominal fee. You can be sure they're going to start charging for POP access if they notice a significant drop in ad impressions for web-based Gmail 'cause that's going to mean a big drop in and CPM deals their sales folk are doing.
And the "beta" program? People, it's viral marketing. It's the ultimate technical shrug, "Meh, it's just a 'beta'" I can guarantee sites like GmailSwap [gmailswap.com] has their business development staff weeping tears of joy; you can't buy marketing like that, but hordes of technorati are creaming their jeans for this email-cum-status-symbol.
Why would google do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been trying to imagine why google would do such an un-google thing. Perhaps they're worried about coders going to next level, and coding up entire gmail readers--or incorporating gmail account readers into something like Thunderbird [mozilla.org]. Adding that word-identification script filter to the login process would certainly prevent something like that--but also has the side effect of blowing up the seemingly innocuous gmail email notifier.
Which leads me to wonder how google's own system tray email notification program can still work. Obviously it's still possible, in theory, to do this same thing in spite of the word-identification script filter. Perhaps google will publish an API that 3rd party developers can use solely for the use of gmail notification abilities in their own programs.
I can't believe (thought it's definitely possible) that their goal would be to blow up only the 3rd party email notification programs. It seems like 3rd party notification programs would serve to only promote the use of gmail. And, as far as I know, they gain no ad revenue directly from their gmail notification system tray icon.
They actually publish an API for doing (limited) google searches in 3rd party programs, which seems like a more overt way to avoid ads and avoid google's revenue source. Maybe that'll be history soon, who knows? I hope this isn't an indication of their new corporate policy and philosophy.
Re:Why would google do this? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.hiddenglade.com/threesecond/)
It has nothing to do with adsense: you have to open messages to receive ads, and notifiers don't do that.
I think it's probably to block other people who aren't yet on our radar, such as spammers automating logins for the purposes of evil, or someone trying to create a shell program around Gmail that blocks ads.
Re:Why would google do this? (Score:5, Informative)
GET
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GNotify 1.0.21.0)
Host: gmail.google.com
Cache-Control: no-cache
Cookie: en_US; GV=fea7b8d648-b9be26d2425258708508713e52327ed1; GMAIL_AT=6d9cba730be1a490-fea7ca187f; SID=AV8H4FYfeDJ-4lwENnL9kzcyiSJshVSKK2xixnjpjWgHs
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Set-Cookie: SID=AfvmInwaGVRkESW3REmGuiyongiyNzyqguZePHuQUyJ9s
Cache-control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Server: GFE/1.3
Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2004 23:45:55 GMT
4
0
I however absolutely hate the color scheme involved with Notifier, so I will NOT be using it until they improve that. GTray (http://torrez.us/gtray), my app of choice, still works just fine as of about 10 minutes ago. If Google really does close it off at some point, I think we should petition them to open up a version like Google API with similar restrictions.
Browsers (Score:3, Interesting)
i'm logging in and out just fine (Score:3, Informative)
really? (Score:5, Informative)
Get a better account (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://diddyinc.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday September 21 2003, @01:55AM)
beta (Score:4, Insightful)
"Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?"
fuckin
Notification (Score:3, Insightful)
Fair enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Saturday February 15 2003, @10:04AM)
Simply put.. (Score:3, Informative)
(http://artlu.net/ | Last Journal: Wednesday June 09 2004, @02:32PM)
I've also heard rumors of people making $50/click off of adsense which is absurd! Hence, why Google wants every dime they can get!
Re:Simply put.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Whenever a user logs on, their entire mail spool is loaded into memory for fast access (since hard drive access is so slow.) This is normally not a problem, since only a small percentage of users will be actively online at a time. However, when there is an email notifier logging on every five minutes checking for new emails, this creates increased server load for Google's servers. Google's Notifier doesn't have this problem, since it just waits for a packet to be sent out by Google.
That's my guess, anyway. I doubt they're doing it just to be annoying.
This is a rather stupid story. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is a rather stupid story. (Score:4, Informative)
Big Deal! (Score:3, Insightful)
There probably is very good reasons for them blocking it.
I have no doubts they will eventually have a developer API written for Gmail, like they do for other things on their site.
There's also damn good reasons to word verification filters -- brute force attacks.
No. (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.interlingua.com/)
Not if your e-mail is Google's property. Google has every right to do whatever they want with their property. Anybody stupid enough to use a so-called "free" e-mail provider for anything serious deserves what they get.
Maybe Pop Goes the GMail worries them? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://dreamlayers.blogspot.com/)
It's about getting a hold on the desktop (Score:5, Insightful)
We all know Google has been deemed to be the best positioned company to compete with Microsoft. The big fear of course is that MS will use their desktop monopoly to blur the barrier between the offline and online worlds and make sure their offerings overtake Google in market share terms.
Now, take a look at these videos (http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/productinfo/co nceptvid/default.aspx [microsoft.com]) and you'll see that Longhorn will have this standard pop-up notification API that can be used by applications to inform the user of events. It is used prominently in these demos to show email reception.
Naturally, I would expect this to work with Exchange and possibly Hotmail (but what if Outlook/Outlook Express use it... See below), but not with Gmail.
Why is this important? Because if Gmail takes over the Web mail market, which could very well happen by 2006 given their good feature set and experience with applications at this scale, users will become accustomed to this functionality. Google will fiercely market the notifier applet to their users and everyone will have it, and they won't care less when the Longhorn applet can't notify them about new messages in their Gmail. And considering how many people I know who only have a Web mail account, I think this would allow Google to prevail by meshing and extending their user experience right into their desktops.
Then again, given that they're thinking of implementing POP access and that MS mail clients may as well use this feature, this may all be a moot point...
Re:welcome to crazyworld (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, not only is the Google Office Suite better and more stable than MS Office; the GoogleOS is finally ready for prime time
And this may as well be why Google actually represents more than a threat to Microsoft. It is not about the desktop operating system anymore; a new breed of software companies is out there using the Internet as their distribution channel. Google, Amazon, eBay, etc., are all software companies in disguise. Typically, you don't pay to use their software; advertisement and special services takes care of that. But still, you access their servers to use their software in order to get your information processed.
As broadband becomes ubiquitous, we should expect more and more innovative uses of the Internet (note I said the Internet, not necessarily the Web...) As for MS, how much more can they really grow? New machines cannot sustain their level of growth forever, and the users will not migrate to their next version of Windows or Office suite just because; they are now finding themselves diverting towards new initiatives and into new markets where they actually have to (gasp!) compete, lest they lose relevance in the larger scheme.
I don't see MS disappering anytime soon, but certainly it is not the good ol' times where they could just crush away their competition, and they are worried about that. Whether they have reason enough to be worried or not is up for debate, but just like with people, stress can be more harmful to companies that the actual situation they're stressing about.
Most of these ideas have been said before many times, and that includes several Slashdotters. You can go look for the posts yourself.
What is this fud? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.udviklingschef.dk/ | Last Journal: Sunday April 18 2004, @02:52PM)
Legitimate reasons? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://whattheboat.com/ | Last Journal: Monday January 03 2005, @09:14PM)
Its all about server load. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.cyberlot.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 10 2005, @10:40AM)
Right now these third party apps work by logging into the gmail account and pulling up the records, its just like you going to the webpage and logging in. This requires there system to access and cache every message in your inbox.
Imaging what would happen to the
This is what they are trying to prevent, thousands of third party checkers slowing down there system. I would be willing to bet once they have there gmail API stablized they will publish something like they have for the google search API, allowing third party programs to PROPERLY check the system without using excess resources.
Excuse me? (Score:3)
Ah, the conspiracy theories that fly around on slashdot.
Regarding word identification & shiznit (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.littleblur.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday June 27, @07:32PM)
Your email notifier would just have to ask you to identify the word in the png every so often. Barely even inconvenient.
But they didn't do that anyway. Whatever.
business model (Score:3, Insightful)
I heard... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't like their policies, they'll refund your money.
Assuming this is to block notifiers... (Score:5, Insightful)
This may be a silly question but... (Score:5, Insightful)
A) That there IS a word logon system currently implemented.
B) That said word logon system was to block third party systems from interoperating with Google.
Finally, why was this put on Slashdot when there is absolutely no link to any article whatsoever to backup the few sentences that make up this story? Since when is some guy's short four sentence oppinion the ENTIRE story, without giving any examples whatsoever?
A better solution... (Score:3, Interesting)
Third party products likely cause excessive loads: ask people not to check their email too frequently (that's what Northwestern did when I was checking my mail every 5 minutes with Eudora) then ban belligerent accounts.
Assume that the offical gmail notifier creates less load per request than 3rd parties: open up your API and third party apps will use this too (it's probably easier to program anyway).
Loss of ad revenue: require third party apps to displace one ad everytime a pop up notification is displayed. This would be no more intrusive than the ads in gmail itself since you'd only see the ad when you do have email (which is consistent).
Gmail is still in beta: perhaps a lock-out is best until gmail is officially released. Then standards shouldn't change so google could be play "nice".
That said, Google can do whatever they want. You don't like it, find a better service.
Disclaimer: I don't have gmail and am relying on my intuition. If you think I should, send an invite to: jd0g85 at yahoo dot com
Um, I think this article is just plain wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://chris.webdevlab.com/)
This is true, if you consider mis-typing your password 5 times part of your normal "login process", otherwise, it still works like it always did, as the word identification script does not kick in until after you have mis-typed your password 5 times (seriously! go try!)
Personally, I find Google's gmail notifier annoying since it sits in my taskbar and doesn't have popup notification
Thats great and all except it DOES have pop up notification (not only does it popup, but you can right click the google icon on your tray and have it "tell you again")
Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email?
YES, you should be free to use whatever third party software to check YOUR (POP3/hosted/payed for) email. However, Google is also free to NOT allow you to do so with your free gmail account. There's nothing to argue about, if you don't like it, dont use it.
Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?
yes [mozillazine.org]
Why was this article even posted to slashdot? There werent even links to outside sources (besides Gmail itself). This is just one guy writing up some stupid (wrong) comments, and it's on the freekin
The reason for this is simple... (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://ottodestruct.com/)
Look, the original thing that they had offered no easy way for a client to check for messages. So they created the Gmail notifier. Along with it, they created a low bandwidth simple way to check for messages. The Gmail notifier doesn't actually check the HTML version of the page. It pulls something down that is much simpler and less bandwidth/CPU intensive on their end.
By breaking the old way of doing it, they're forcing these apps to change what they do in order to work. Most likely, these apps will *copy* what the gmail notifier program does to check mail. And that's likely fine with Google. Hurts them no more than if the person was using the real notifier, in that case.
Google: Counter Culture Flop (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.dreamops.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 02 2005, @10:05AM)
So, the two million byte question is when will people accept the fact that Google is just as "evil" as half the other companies out there despite its professed black sheep good-guy policy? Right here, we have Google striving to lock 3rd parties out of its email client, something universally hated when it come to MSN and Yahoo IM's, while Google itself is happily absorbing as many 3rd party features into it's core service as possible ala Windows. Hell, Google is a quasi-dictionary [google.com] now as well as advertising service and potentially an online store front for ecommerce in the near future. Even there IPO was rigged in order to put them in the best position possible by feeding off wildly speculatory and inflated stock... At least until they realized the market wasn't going to play that game.
Personally I have no problem with this. Business is business. But I'm just wondering when people will take the blinders off and realize Google is just another MSN, Yahoo or Windows, and not the cool counter e-culture phenomenom masses worship.
I tried to login via the Firefox extension (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.geocities.com/orion_blastar/contact/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 03 2007, @07:19PM)
I emailed Google's Gmail abuse address to ask them if my account was hijacked and if I can get back in, but they have not yet responded.
I had set my Yahoo Groups to send messages to my Gmail account. So I can better read and search the messages. Is this some sort of violation of the ToS, because if it is, I've missed that.
Google still has not contacted me back, and I find that very rude.
What a stupid question... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://moofie.lastcoolnameleft.com/)
Sure. You're free to use any software you want. And Google is free to not allow you to use any software with their service that you don't want. And since you're not paying them anything, you don't have much leverage to get them to change their policy, do you?
It's a free service. Take it or leave it.
next...? (Score:3, Interesting)
(mailto:ltwally@softhome.net | Last Journal: Tuesday March 04 2003, @07:48PM)
Gmail already does this. Try using opera to view your Gmail account. And no, Google is not doing this because Opera doesn't work with the site... If you use Opera and switch its user-agent line to IE or Nutscrape, Opera will be able to access your Gmail account just fine.
I'm not saying that Google doesn't have reasons for doing this.. maybe they do. But at this point in time they're actively stopping perfectly good "alternative" browsers from getting to your Gmail.
Would this be tolerated if it weren't Google? Would Microsoft get away with this?