Google Opens Gmail To All

Reader Russian Art Buyer lets us know that GMail is now open for all ("Google Mail" in the UK). The service is no longer by invitation only. This welcome page shows an ever-increasing amount of storage available per user, currently about 2,815 MB.

Capacity drop?

I wonder if we'll see a drop in storage capacity with the increased number of users.

Also, my GMail account still says I only have 73 invites left. If it's open, why don't they drop the limited number of invites?

Re:Capacity drop?

I doubt we will see a drop in capacity at this point. Everyone who wants a gmail account has had it for at least a year now, so I don't think many will come who haven't come yet.

Re:Capacity drop?

Most people I meet on campus have never even heard of GMail.

Where do you go? Remind me never to hire any of those uninformed tech grads!

Re:Capacity drop?

Not everyone knows they want one yet. Others want one but aren't sure it's worth the price of dealing with a shift in addresses. My brother just recently accepted my invitation to gmail after getting fed up with all the ads on hotmail. I'd invited him long ago but he didn't want to have to tell everyone of his new email address. He's gotten to the point where it's worth switching and just occasionally checking up on his old address for the few that never got the notice of his change in address.

Re:Capacity drop?

The invitations had more to do with mapping social networks than limiting capacity.

Just checked...

...and I don't see any way to sign up other than the "use your mobile" promotion that they've had going for a while. There's no link from TFA either.

annnd checked again...

If I try to go to gmail.com, I get the old URL (the one with &ltmpl=m_wsad and no way to sign up) but the link in the summary (with &ltmpl=m_blanco ) has a sign up form. Interesting. This with clearing my cache first to be sure that it isn't a browser caching issue.

Re:Just checked...

You cannot log into Gmail using your Google Account username and password. GMail uses a seperate acount system.

Does it now? I just launched IE to check it (easier than logging out of everything in Firefox) and the text above the login box said "Sign in to Gmail with your Google Account".
So I'd guess that yes, you can log into Gmail with your Google Account username and password.

And it doesn't ask for a cell phone or anything like it, either.

I just wonder if they're going to drop the invites altogether...

But I read somewhere below that the problem may be with you living in North America...

How do I receive SMS on a land-line phone?

I noticed a link on mail.google.com
marked "Sign up for Google Mail"
http://mail.google.com/mail/signup [google.com]

Which local telephone companies in the United States allow land-line customers to receive SMS? Or do I have to sign up for a 24-month mobile phone contract at $30 per month?

Not really

Maybe the submitter has a different definition of all than I, but Gmail still requires either an invation or the ability to receive text messages. While the number of people who can't get text messages may be small, there are still many people who cannot sign up.

Re:Not really

Maybe you should read the FAQ...

Their FAQ pages have not been updated yet. As with almost all previous Gmail enhancementsit takes time to roll things out globally. When I navigate to Gmail.com using IE7 or Firefox, I see a nice "Sign up for Gmail" panel with a link that takes you right to a signup screen--no invitation is necessary. (Now, I'm using a company proxy that hits the Internet in Europe, so YMMV depending on your location.)

Give it a day or so, and you should see the non-invitation link.

Re:Not really

Per a user on the "Gmail Users" Google Groups, this may be only for certain non-United States locations. When I connect to Gmail from my home in the USA, I only get the SMS screen, but when I connect through my office (through a company proxy that hits the Internet in France) I get the non-invitation screen.

Re:Not really

But if you're signing up for a gmail account you're already trading a certain amount of privacy away anyway.

Re:Not really

Gmail still requires either an invation or the ability to receive text messages.

I haven't read the CNN article linked here, but I did read the article on my Wii last night. The long and short of it is that signup is geographically limited. Just about everyone not in North America is now able to sign up without going through the text message routine. The Google spokepeople have promised that North America will follow "soon".

Hope that clarifies things.

Fastmail

How does gmail compare to fastmail? I've been using a fastmail account (the kind where you pay once to set it up and it's free thereafter) to consolidate my emails for years and it's ok but it's gradually being overwhelmed by the amount of spam I get. How does gmail stack up, especially in the area of spam killing? Does anyone have both?

Re:Fastmail

I do have both except I pay for the Enhanced account at Fastmail. GMail doesn't compare in terms of features, with Fastmail offering full Sieve scripting, I've got my domain hosted and sieve lets me do pretty much everything I ever wanted to do with email. It's also great for managing spam.
Fastmail lets me use webDAV to access my file storage, and I just love IMAP/IDLE support. With Fastcheck installed that monitors my mailbox with IDLE, the notification often pops up before I get it on my Blackberry (PUSH-based), something Exchange has never managed to do at work.
I get loads of spam in my GMail even though I've never given it to anyone, which I think speaks for itself. 1 or 2 spams a week with Fastmail and I've had it for 8+ years.

i love gmail

i'll be the first to admit that i am a pretty serious google fanboy and i haven't used a fastmail account so proceed with caution.

i have two public access unix accounts, one on SDF [lonestar.org] and one on hobbiton [hobbiton.org] (hobbiton stopped being public access like 6 years ago). two years ago there was a sudden astronomical increase in the amount of spam that i was getting on both accounts. both systems had not yet set up greylisting or some other anti-spam measures and so i was worried that i would have to abandon an email address that i have had for almost 10 years.

i got a gmail invite from a friend and set up my new account, and gmail has an option where you can choose to send mail as another account and make that the default method for sending mail, so i set up my gmail account to send as the two unix accounts and then added the gmail address to a .forward for each shell account.

so now i use gmail as the central store for all of my email. now that both shell accounts have graylisting and other spam filtering i take advantage of that PLUS gmail's ability to bucket spam, so i have not seen a spam email in something like 6 months. i could go back to the old way (i look really oldschool using ssh to check my mail with pine) but i have become so lazy and spoiled thanks to gmail that there is no real reason to go back.

so, if you want to keep your old address and switch to gmail, it is possible, provided your old provider has some means for you to forward your mail.

It's about time...

Now if only they would add IMAP support and improve security, they might have a chance of being successful with Google for Domains.

here comes the spam

By invitation only was a perfect way to protect against spammers signing up quickly. Well, not perfect, but at least you could always know who the root of the spam tree was and could handle the whole tree. Now they (at Google) destroyed the reason for their own success.

Surge in users?

Great. Now we get to see how Gmail handles thousands of accounts being created just to send out spam.

Re:Surge in users?

They have incentive to police spammers that use gmail accounts -- volume reduction. If every spammer that uses a gmail account sends enough e-mail to fill a full 2GB (in the Sent folder), that also nets 2 GB on the receiving end -- removing the spammer's account can reduce storage requirements by up to 4GB per spammer removed.

They also will get a very nice benefit to closing spammer accounts -- their sent folders are 100% spam. What better way to see what tricks spammers are using than have 2GB of sent spam in one easy location? They can easily see what percentage of that spam folder was then in turn delivered as non-spam and how many users read it and marked it as not-spam.

Playing the same game MS played

First get all the data of the users into its servers, relatively easily, cheaply and painlessly. Like Word5' importing WordPerfect or Excel importing Lotus123 without any hitch. Once all the data is safely collected MS increased the switching costs and made it nearly impossible to get back to the competitors. Till date it keeps changing file formats, macro language, APIS, look and feel and tries enshrine even the bugs in Word5 as the new "standard" "open" document format!!!

In the case of Google, it will find increasing the switching costs to get out of gmail not very easy. Reason are:

1. It uses a simple browser as its interface and it does not have the same level of control over http protocols and XML protocols MS enjoyed over Windows platform.

2. Users have become more aware of these issues. The resurgence of OpenOffice and fandom of Firefox shows that.

3. Google says its motto is "dont do evil" and atleast part of its fan base is taking it at face value.

Overall, IMHO, if google wrests significant portion of the data from the clutches of MS and shows how advantageous it could be for companies and users to keep their data in a format with eye on the switching costs it would benefit the consumers.

Re:Playing the same game MS played

Google is actually "not being evil" here, by making it easy to extract your email.

Just go to "settings"->"forwarding and pop" and select "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)". You can then download a copy of all the mail to your computer using a normal email client (You can choose to keep a copy on gmail). You can also get all mail automatically forwarded to an outside email address.

That makes it easy to switch email provider; I used it the other day to download a copy of all my email, just in case. It seems to me that Google has chosen not to lock in users, but to simply try retain customers by being better. Which is the way it should be, and which makes me more comfortable relying on google services in the future.

Regards, Thue

Let the Spamming Begin

Now will I receive as much spam as I do from Hotmail addresses?

Kinda irrelevant

Invite spoolers have been around for some time.

Worldwide BETA

Open to the world, yet it's still a "Beta" application. Huh.

Re:Worldwide BETA

And this is different from other large applications like, say, Vista how?

Here's to hoping frivolous accounts kept in check

So, I hope that we don't begin to see inumerable amounts of bot-generated Gmail accountslike one finds in other web-based email services.

old article (2004) and you need a cell phone....

That article is 2.5 years old.... There is no link at Gmail allowing a free signup without a cell phone.

This is what Gmail says about signing up currently:

Can I sign up without the invitation code? Or without a mobile phone?
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=m obile&answer=22245&hl=en [google.com]

wow

finally........i havent managed to score a gmail account yet!

There Goes the Neighborhood

Welcome mass flood of spammers to Gmail! True there were some out there before, but now that it is open its just going to get thousands of times worse. Hopefully they tweak up their internal spam filter to allow for their own domain.

I'm just glad I got in early enough that I have the names that I wanted before they got snatched up and added extra numbers or other junk to them.

bummer

I was hoping to trade 1000 gmail invites for a joost invite

a nagging problem about gmail

This may be a little off topic, but maybe many others here will benefit from discussing this same concern. I love Gmail, but there is a problem I see that's been slowly nagging me:

I use Gmail to read the messages off my work/academic Pine accounts, and it has rapidly become my main way to check email because it has a great feature set, and Gmail doesn't pull some of the stupid tricks that other free email services do. I also use it to send messages (i.e. the "from:" field pretending as if it is one of the other work/school accounts I have), and rapidly I'm accumulating email on my Gmail account that now doesn't exist elsewhere.

However, sometime in the far off future, Gmail may decide not to work one day, or there may be a new technology to replace it. We can't know for sure. So I would like to be able to have a backup of that mail just in case. As much as I trust Gmail and like Google, I need some way to keep my mail on my own, because if it were all lost, it would be awful.

Couldn't they offer a service, for some reasonable amount of $$, where they would burn my entire Gmailbox onto a DVD and send it to me? With the size of my mailbox, POP downloading is becoming impossible, and this would also be a great way to give users some peace of mind.

or has anyone else felt this worry, and come up with an interesting/workable solution??

Configure GMail to be my spam filter?

I'm curious about GMail's spam filtering abilities. I've heard that it is pretty good. Can Slashdotters recommend the best way to pass my company's email through GMail and then back to the intended recipient? For example, I have a catch-all address which receives @mycompany.com's email when the recipient doesn't exist, and it just sits there in the catch-all inbox until I clean it out (since my email server's spam filter isn't pushing all the spam to trash). I can configure the catch-all to forward to a gmail account and hope that filters out more of the spam, but is there a better way to do this? And what about legitimated address email, can I filter it through GMail to catch the spam better?

Tongue, meet cheek.

This is a 3 year old dupe [slashdot.org]!

Selective quoting of discussion follows:

Prepare to be underhwelmed [slashdot.org]

What is left in webmail? The best Google can do is offermore default space than Yahoo and Hotmail. This will cost them money - Yahoo currently soaks $19 a year out of anyone wanting more than 4 MB. Maybe they can do filtering better, but I don't see them outdoing spamassassin etc. Ultimately its just another email address. The geek cachet will wear off quick after everyone you despise starts using googlemail.

Bad move [slashdot.org]

it's a bad bad move on google's part. The infrastructure needed (and the sysadmin) to provide a robust, spam-free , web based email system is of a sheer magnitude greater than just being pure search.
For starters , the tech support will ramp up ,and add to google's costs. And Googlemail will become the numero uno target for spammers.
If I were the Google founders, I quite honestly wouldn't bother - it's to much hassle and dilutes the Google "brand".
But then again, the IPO is coming up, so having a "webmail" component is an easy sell to "analysts" in Five Points ...ahem... Wall Street I mean.

I really can't see it catching on guys!

Now if only...

They'd let you use some of that storage for Picasa's web albums. 250MB for pictures, almost 3GB for email? That's kind of ass-backwards.

Yahoo Mail Beta blocks Linux

And at the very same time, Yahoo Mail Beta has blocked Linux users. Maybe it's time to switch.

Brazil only

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 520 [theinquirer.net]

illusion of exclusiveness

G-mail is hardly exclusive. Anyone that wants a g-mail account can get one. Even if this story is not true, and they have not "opened it for all". I'm sure many of us have gmail accounts with a lot of remaining invites...all anyone who wanted a key has to do is ask around.

Personally I think its a marketing strategy used by gmail to make people feel special by having it "invite only", but by making so many invites they have destroyed the exclusiveness of it :s

This is not done lightly ....

Blogger (also a famous google service), recently started the migration of all accounts (optional, for now) to the new ones based on the GMail login. For this reason they must open the subscription to everybody of Blogger who doesn't have a GMail account. From this to open up all the doors is a small step... I think they started the integration of all the company services under the GMail account. It's easier to login but also to track all the users...

UK? All of Europe

As I understand it, it's not just Google Mail here in the UK, but throughout all of the EU, since it's actually a German company that owns the Gmail trademark here.

Funny, I handed out my first invitation to another prospective user (my wife) just three days ago. I have 99 left, and don't need them.

Gmail doesn't work with tabs

My biggest gripe is Gmail doesn't work with tabs. When using webmail, I open email into tabs I want to read, and by the time I've finished clicking say 5 or so emails, they have finished loading into my browser and I can switch tabs to view them. Gmail doesn't allow tabbed browsing. Also I find Gmail's interface a bit clunky and limiting, much like Microsoft's products are.

Re:Gmail doesn't work with tabs

My biggest gripe is Gmail doesn't work with tabs....Gmail doesn't allow tabbed browsing.

It does if you select basic html as the page format.

Didn't need invite/mobile

Here in the US I was able to get my first GMail account without an invite or use of mobile phone. Right after Google announced GMail they let people request an account. There were certain Google services that automatically qualified one immediately for GMail ( I forget which one(s)), but I didn't have one of those, so I waited.

Finally, about 10 months later I received an invite directly from Google, not from any third party.

Excellent

So now we can go about the business of signing up without pretending there's something in the way, eh? Should have been done a while ago I think, around the time people started having 90+ unused invites in their accounts. Maybe it's that google is getting more confident about their storage capability, but I doubt it.

if friends*1000 invites_available_per_capita
        open_it_up_for_gods_sake()

Never realized it was closed

If there were hoops to jump through before, they were so negligible that I don't even remember jumping through them.

SMS w/ ICQ or AIM

If you need a mobile phone, do you perhaps only need an SMS client? I couldn't find any documentation on how to send to AIM or ICQ without just replying, but in theory, could you enter something into the google reg page so it messages your AIM account rather than a phone?

Still requires an invitation?

Invitations to open a Gmail account are still required in North America, Asia and most parts of the South America, but Google spokeswoman Courtney Hohne said those restrictions will be lifted "very soon."

http://www.physorg.com/news90096289.html [physorg.com]

Now this article was posted 18 hours ago so unless that's "very soon", invitations still seem to be required.

Not accessible to Canucks

All I get is the standard invitation-only page, with no sign-up links. I realize from reading other posts that North America isn't included in the non-invitation sign-ups yet, but I don't even have the option to use a mobile phone either. At least the page doesn't allow for my carrier (Rogers) and I don't see 'Canada' as an option under the mobile sign-up page. It's a pity, really, because I've been waiting for a long time to get a gmail account and dump my hotmail account forever. Guess I have to be patient...

Storage and ads

Google is offering a lot of storage for free, which doesn't seem economical. But the company hopes to make money off of e-mail by serving up ads tied to the content of e-mail in your box.

people just seem to know

If you have it, you don't need it. If you need it, you don't have it. If you have it you need more of it. If you have more of it, you don't need less of it. You need it to get it. And you certainly need it to get more of it. But if you don't already have any of it to begin with, you can't get any of it to get started, which means you really have no idea how to get it in the first place. Do you? You can share it, sure. You can even stock pile it if you'd like. But you can't fake it. Wanting it. Needing it. Wishing for it. The point is, if you've never had any of it, ever, people just seem to know [youtube.com].

GMail is popular

By the way: It's Google Mail in germany too because some other company holds the rights on a "G-Mail" brand.

Making the switch,

I made the switch from hotmail to gmail a few years ago, mid 2004, and I've never been happier! Each to their own.

Uh, it worked in December

That's funny, I was able to sign my dad up for gmail with no invite on December 25th. Hrm.

It is also GMail in the UK

It is also GMail in the UK