Google's Gmail To Offer 1GB E-mail Storage?

tstoneman writes "Wow, according to the New York Times (free reg. req.), looks like Google is really trying to push the envelope by offering 1 GB free storage for e-mail users via a service called Gmail, still in the testing phase, so that users never need to change their e-mail address. In addition, they want to offer their searching capabilities so that users can search through their entire set of e-mail, I guess forever. CNET News also has more details." Update: 04/01 02:38 GMT by S : The Google site now has an official press release, naturally dated April 1st.

Other links

[a.koepke]

ZDNet Article [com.com]
MSNBC Article [msn.com]

The article

[Anonymous Coward]

AN FRANCISCO, March 31 -- Google, the dominant Internet search company, is planning to up the stakes in its intensifying competition with Yahoo and Microsoft by unveiling a new consumer-oriented electronic mail service.

The new service, to be named Gmail, is scheduled to be released on Thursday, according to people involved with the plan. It will be "soft launched," they said, in a manner that Google has followed with other features that it has added to its Web site, with little fanfare and initially presented as a long-running test.

E-mail has become a crucial weapon in the competition to win the allegiance of Internet users, who often turn to one or two Web sites as the foundation of their online activities.

As Microsoft's MSN and Yahoo are preparing to attack Google's role as the first place most people turn to carry out an Internet search, Google is hoping to counter those assaults by moving onto the turf its competitors have already claimed in providing e-mail services as part of their portals.

Google is starting far behind Microsoft, which claims 170 million active users for its Hotmail service, America Online and Yahoo. But Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., is planning to play on its information search strength to compete with the existing services.

Google will offer consumers better access to searching their own e-mail and could well upset the industry balance by offering free access to services that previously were only available by paying a monthly subscription fee.

The standard industry practice is to offer tiered mail services, providing only limited storage for free and charging higher fees to users who want to preserve larger numbers of e-mail messages. Google, by contrast, is planning a service to be supported by advertising that will permit its users to store very large amounts of mail at no cost.

One internal Google study put the operational cost of maintaining electronic mail storage at less than $2 per gigabyte.

In recent weeks, Google has picked up the pace of updating and adding new features to its basic search service, as part of its effort to position itself as a strong business ready to sell shares to investors in what is expected to be the most popular initial public offering by a Silicon Valley company in years.

Early this week, for example, Google polished its appearance, making the company's array of services more accessible. The company also moved its Froogle catalog shopping search engine into a more prominent position on the first page of the Google Web site.

Google has been closely watched in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street during the past year for any indication about its plans for an initial public stock offering. The company has steadfastly declined to respond to speculation.

Its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, told The Wall Street Journal this week that the company was exploring many options, but he explained at a recent industry conference that Google does not necessarily need to move forward on an offering any time soon.

Google's entry into the e-mail business will sharpen the lines between the major competing portals like Yahoo and MSN and Internet service providers like AOL and Earthlink. Google recently lost its position as search provider for Yahoo, which has turned to a company it acquired, Overture, to take advantage of the growing amounts of advertising revenue available on search pages.

To date, Google has maintained a strong relationship with AOL. But as it enters a business that competes directly with one of America Online's core offerings, it could find that AOL, like Yahoo, begins to view Google as a more direct competitor.

Microsoft has also dramatically increased the importance of building its own capability to offer search services of its own. The company has been showing a range of features that it hopes will make its MSN service more of a draw to Web users who rely on search engines as starting points for finding information and services on the Inter

Re:Google is gettting ready, but for what?

[aussersterne]

Even though the article notes that 1GB per user will cost Google only about $2 to maintain (they didn't say if that was a annual cost or what), if they did get 100M users that would be pretty expensive!

The number of users who will actually use that much storage is very small. I have a large email volume, plus SPAM, which I save (but filter into another folder with spamassassin). My email archive goes all the way back to 1997 and is still not much larger than 1GB. Even with SPAM, I think most users will take months or even years to reach a 150-200MB, much less 1GB.

And of course, it's very likely that Google will aggressively filter SPAM in the same way that Yahoo! or the others do.

searching email rocks

[afidel]

Especially if you are subscribed to high volume, non-public mailing list which are relevant to your job. I used to run a person search engine from altavista and the ability to pull up info from the devel lists at works was invaluable. Then I upgraded to win2k and it no longer worked all the time, and finally I had to reinstall and the software refused to install (it had been brought in origionally with an upgrade from 98SE). I would love to be able to search email so easily again but I doubt my employer would allow me to sign up an outside email address to the internal lists that would make it most valuable =(

It's no lie....

[mrpuffypants]

Check it out:

http://www.gmail.com/ [gmail.com]

Re:$2.00 a gigabyte?

[System.out.println()]

Actually.... .Mac doesn't offer a 1GB email package. The 1GB iDisk is what costs $350 (it's much more useful than 1GB of mail, still a ripoff though.) .Mac's 200MB mail costs $90/year, for the curious.

source [mac.com]

http://www.gmail.com/

[Mattwolf7]

Take a visit to http://www.gmail.com/ [gmail.com] looks real to me...

But then looking at the Whois

Domain Name: GMAIL.COM
Registrar: ALLDOMAINS.COM INC.
Whois Server: whois.alldomains.com
Referral URL: http://www.alldomains.com
Name Server: NS2.ALLDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS1.ALLDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS3.ALLDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS4.ALLDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS5.ALLDOMAINS.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 25-mar-2004
Creation Date: 13-aug-1995
Expiration Date: 12-aug-2006

Re:http://www.gmail.com/ Full NiC Record

[Thanatopsis]

It's owned by Google alright!
Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-425410)
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
CA
94043 US

Domain Name: gmail.com

Registrar Name: Alldomains.com
Registrar Whois: whois.alldomains.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.alldomains.com

Administrative Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
CA
94043 US
[e-mail] +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
CA
94043 US
[e-mail] +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571

Created on.: 1995-Aug-13.
Expires on: 2006-Aug-12.
Record last updated on..: 2004-Mar-31 16:50:22.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.32.10
NS2.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.34.10
NS3.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.36.10
NS4.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.38.10

Alldomains.com - The Leader in Corporate Domain Management

Re:What day is it launching on?

[Verne]

Google's Gmail To Offer 1GB E-mail Storage?
Posted by simoniker on Thu 01 Apr 01:23PM

not from here it aint.

Hold on... Where's the Gig Storage?

[SeinJunkie]

I'm sorry, but I don't see anywhere in the article where it says each account will have "1 GB per user." The only thing mentioning a GB is this line:

One internal Google study put the operational cost of maintaining electronic mail storage at less than $2 per gigabyte.

Re:What day is it launching on?-proof positive

[way2trivial]

Hell, look at googles own news release date

http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gmail.html

Re:Hold on... Where's the Gig Storage?

[SeinJunkie]

Nevermind, I guess it's only in the CNet article, along with the only reference to "Gmail."

Hotmail presently offers 2MB of free e-mail storage. Yahoo offers 4MB. Gmail will dwarf those offerings with a 1GB storage limit.

Re:What day is it launching on?

[metlin]

Unlikely.

Reuters has it covered [reuters.co.uk] - I would imagine this accounts for atleast a wee bit of credibility to the report :)

URL to be

[umrgregg]

http://gmail.google.com/ [google.com]

Re:http://gmail.com/

[Thanatopsis]

They bought the domain. I know the previous registrant.

Re:This could be a Good Monopoly

[Smidge204]

Juno [juno.com] has a "Central spam filter" like that. It works damn good, too. I've had the same (free) e-mail account for nearly five years now, and if I get 3 spam mails a day that's a lot. (INCLUDING Juno's own mass-mailings to it's users for their premium service)

Spam pops up in the "Junk mail" folder, which does not count towards your storage limit (messages are automatically deleted after a few days). This gives you a chance to glance through the junk and see if any good mail got caught in the net. If so, you can "remove from junk", which also reports to the system that this type of e-mail might not be junk. This creates a balance preventing people from tricking the filter into thinking EVERYTHING is junk mail.

Sure there's a 2MB storage limit and a 2MB attachment limit, but it's always been more than enough for me. (Especially for the price!)
=Smidge=

Re:Wahooo

[eclectro]

They probably anticipate such schemes, and probably will limit the size of attachments.

I hope that the filesharers don't ruin it for the rest of us.

Re:gmail?

[aarku]

click friendly: google's press release [google.com]

Re:It's no lie....

[mac-diddy]

whois shows that the domain gmail.com was created back on Aug 13, 1995 [whois.net], which is actually before google.com domain was created (Sep 15, 1997 [whois.net]).

wayback [archive.org] has some listings for gmail.com, but it's been blocked with a Robots.txt. I wonder what the history of the gmail.com domain is and if someone made some cash selling it to google?

Re:http://gmail.com/

[ticklemeozmo]

1995-08-13
That seems a little fishy to me...

among other things, Mickey Mantle died on that day at 63 in Dallas.
http://www.nortexinfo.net/McDaniel/0813.htm [nortexinfo.net]

However, it seems that www.google.com wasn't registered until 1997-Sep-15

google.com
Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-258879)
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy
Mountain View
CA

Created on..............: 1997-Sep-15.
Expires on..............: 2011-Sep-14.
Record last updated on..: 2003-Apr-07 10:42:46.
94043 US

Re:Beware too much data concentrated

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually... http://www.infoanarchy.org/story/2002/4/13/1258/31 858

Re:Google is gettting ready, but for what?

[Waffle Iron]

I take it you've never had to deal with PowerPoint and Excell happy marketing types?

Not to mention friends and family who just bought a 5 megapixel camera to take pictures of their new baby, but have no inkling of the concept of scaling images.

A single one of those pictures where you have to scroll to see more than the upper right corner of the baby's forehead in a 1024x768 window can max out a typical free e-mail account.

Re:What day is it launching on?

[Brendor]

I think the April Fools joke here is a little test on something that's condescendingly called reading comprehension.

Open the artcicle and press Ctrl or cmd f and search for the word gigabyte.

The article mentions maintaing email storage is as cost effective at $2 per gig.

The New York Times was an unwitting accomplice. The CNET article is very explicit in the claim though . . .cool.

It's a live link

[randomErr]

It's a live link:

gmail.google.com [google.com]

Re:Wahooo

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there is a precedent for this, in warez at least. Back in the mid-early days of AOL (around aol versions 2.5 to 3), kids who weren't cool enough to use FTP for pirated software used AOL accounts created with fake credit cards (which was apparently possible at the time). AOL's emails could hold something like 10 or 15 megs of attachments apiece, and you could have hundreds of emails in your inbox. Since they could be forwarded instantaniously to other aol accounts , mass-mailing was an incredibly easy way to transfer around what were very bulky files for that time period.

Re:Wahooo

[timeOday]

It's not inconceivable though. Disk space is only 50 cents per gig - think about it, a gig is worth less than postage for two pieces of junkmail!

Re:Two words: Jayson Blair

[Guido von Guido]

They've really gone down hill, Blair or no Blair. For instance, the NYT's Judith Miller printed a lot of bogus information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction prior to the war. Her sources appear to have been Iraqi ex-pat Ahmed Chalabi and defectors associated with him.

this is an april fools joke

[Anonymous Coward]

this is an april fools joke, falls right into the pigeon [google.com] cluster one they did a few years back.

note the similarities of the writing on both pages.

Can you say...

[Mixel]

... APRIL FOOL?

Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache is here

[LostCluster]

Uh, no, the Google Cache is here [216.239.41.104], you linked to the original.

Uhm... wait... a Google Press Release isn't in the Google Cache yet... who would have figured?

Re:Wahooo

[loconet]

From GMAil's Terms of Use:

Prohibited Actions

In addition to (and/or as some examples of) the violations described in Section 3 of the Terms of Use, users may not:

* Generate or facilitate unsolicited commercial email ("spam"). Such activity includes, but is not limited to
o sending email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act or any
other applicable anti-spam law
o imitating or impersonating another person or his, her or its
email address, or creating false accounts for the purpose of sending spam
o data mining any web property (including Google) to find email addresses
o sending unauthorized mail via open, third-party servers
o sending emails to users who have requested to be removed from a mailing list
o selling, exchanging or distributing to a third party the email
addresses of any person without such person's knowing and continued consent to such disclosure
o sending unsolicited emails to significant numbers of email addresses
belonging to individuals and/or entities with whom you have no preexisting relationship
* Send, upload, distribute or disseminate or offer to do the same with respect to any unlawful, defamatory, harassing, abusive, fraudulent, infringing, obscene, or otherwise objectionable content
* Intentionally distribute viruses, worms, defects, Trojan horses, corrupted files, hoaxes, or any other items of a destructive or deceptive nature
* Conduct or forward pyramid schemes and the like
* Transmit content that may be harmful to minors
* Impersonate another person (via the use of an email address or otherwise) or otherwise misrepresent yourself or the source of any email
* Illegally transmit another's intellectual property or other proprietary information without such owner's or licensor's permission
* Use Gmail to violate the legal rights (such as rights of privacy and publicity) of others
* Promote or encourage illegal activity
* Interfere with other Gmail users' enjoyment of the Service
* Create multiple user accounts or create user accounts by automated means or under false or fraudulent pretenses
* Modify, adapt, translate, or reverse engineer any portion of the Gmail Service
* Remove any copyright, trademark or other proprietary rights notices contained in or on the Gmail Service
* Reformat or frame any portion of the web pages that are part of the Gmail Service
* Use the Gmail Service in connection with illegal peer-to-peer file sharing

How will they enforce/check that? I'm not sure..

Re:Google vs. spammers

[SEE]

Oh, it's simple. To quote Google's press release:

"And it turns annoying spam e-mail messages into the equivalent of canned meat."

History of Google April Fool's jokes

[NiKnight3]

2000 - MentalPlex
http://www.google.com/mentalplex/ [google.com]

2002 - PigeonRank
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html [google.com]

[shrug] It sounds like a Google AF joke to me, but it seems like it'd be a bad idea for Google to mock free e-mail when it would be a good idea for Google to get into that (even if it wasn't a gig worth of space). If it's a joke, then it's almost like they're saying, "Haha, free e-mail. Riiiiiiiiight."

As far as bandwidth and space are concerned, think about it... they have 4 billion web pages cached. How big's a web page? 4 KB? Not even including images, that's a lot of hard drive space. And bandwidth goes without saying.

Of course, they probably want attention. They got it. But Google gets attention for pretty much anything [userfriendly.org].

Re:1000 GB == TB?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's just using the correct measurement for the stated SI prefix [nist.gov] (1000B = 1KB, 1000KB = 1MB), rather than the binary SI prefix [nist.gov] (1024B = 1KiB, 1024KiB = 1MiB, etc).

Posting anonymously for fear of mod retaliation from those who still think the sun revolves around the earth. :) If you still want to argue, please answer these questions:

How many meters are in a kilometer?
How many grams are in a kilogram?
How many bytes are in a kilobyte?

Re:It's no lie....

[hawaiian717]

GMail used to be the free email service offered for fans of Garfield [garfield.com] (the overweight lasanga-loving orange cat on the comics page). I notice that they now offer e-garfield.com emails instead.

Re:1000 GB == TB?

[B747SP]

You must work for a hard drive manufacturer.

Actually no, he's right. 1000Gb DOES == 1Tb. You probably have the decimal mutiples that hard drive manufacturers use mixed up with the binary multiples that everyone wishes they used. 1000 Gigabytes == 1 Terabyte. You're thinking of Mebibytes and Gibibytes. Try an RTFM here [nist.gov] and here [nist.gov].

Re:Wahooo

[Phil1]

I doubt very much whether Google would risk upsetting their fans by dangling such an attractive service in front of them and then calling "April fool!".

No, I reckon its far more likely that they've released this on / near April 1 because the possibility of it being an April fool's joke is generating almost as much interest as the service they'll be offering. Double the interest, double the anticipation and double the publicity. I'd love to know how many clicks the gmail site [google.com] has got by the day's end.

Re:What day is it launching on?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has been talking about this for a while. [searchvisi...report.com] And on CNN from January [cnn.com]

Google's ACTUAL April Fools Joke...

[Ulky]

An excellent looking Job Oppurtunity [google.com]!

Re:Wahooo

[yellowcord]

I was pretty sure it was a joke... then I started looking at the attached pages to gmail.com they have fancy privacy pages and everything. Then I went to the Google Accounts [google.com] page to maybe sign up... Clicked on the "Forgot your password?" link... funny stuff.

Re:Wahooo

[Jugalator]

I also assumed it was a joke, but then I navigated to their newly registered domain name and FAQ page about it:

http://www.google.com/gmail/help/about.html [google.com]

They're *really* going for trying to fool people if this is a joke. Listing reasonable browser requirements and all (IE 5.5+, Firefox 0.8+, etc with Javascript and cookies enabled, bla bla).

They have a Gmail Privacy Policy [google.com] as well, that looks just like any other policy after skimming through it.

Hmmm, well, but if you say so... :-S

Re:Is this an April Fool's joke?

[phch]

I don't think gmail is a joke. It looks like Google's real April Fool's joke is here:

http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html [google.com]

Email from google

[stfvon007]

Well using the only e-mail address I could find on the site I e-mailed google to ask them if it was an April fools joke. So far this is all I got back:

Hello,

Thank you for your feedback. Gmail uses completely automated
technology to give you search in your inbox, highly relevant ads, and
other useful information. Your comments will help us make improvements
to our email service and policies as Gmail evolves over the next
several months from a limited testing period to wider availability.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

Re:Wahooo

[zeekiorage]

1GB looks very much like a joke but google can make it (gmail) real.

A quick whois shows that gmail.com is indeed registered under Google Inc.

whois gmail.com
Registrant:
Google Inc. (DOM-425410)
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy
Mountain View CA 94043
US

The link in the press release http://gmail.google.com [google.com] doesn't work, but http://gmail.com [gmail.com] works. Also there is a Gmail FAQ [google.com] page.

GMail's Ts and Cs

[lxt]

Intersting Terms and Conditions from the gmail.com info page:

Gmail Program Policies

To uphold the quality and reputation of Google Gmail, your use of Gmail is subject to these program policies. If you are found to be in violation of our policies at any time, as determined by Google in its sole discretion, we may warn you or suspend or terminate your account.

Please note that we may change our policies at any time, and pursuant to our Terms of Use, it is your responsibility to keep up-to-date with and adhere to the policies posted here.

Prohibited Actions

In addition to (and/or as some examples of) the violations described in Section 3 of the Terms of Use, users may not:
Generate or facilitate unsolicited commercial email ("spam"). Such activity includes, but is not limited to

sending email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act or any other applicable anti-spam law
imitating or impersonating another person or his, her or its email address, or creating false accounts for the purpose of sending spam
data mining any web property (including Google) to find email addresses
sending unauthorized mail via open, third-party servers
sending emails to users who have requested to be removed from a mailing list
selling, exchanging or distributing to a third party the email addresses of any person without such person's knowing and continued consent to such disclosure
sending unsolicited emails to significant numbers of email addresses belonging to individuals and/or entities with whom you have no preexisting relationship

Send, upload, distribute or disseminate or offer to do the same with respect to any unlawful, defamatory, harassing, abusive, fraudulent, infringing, obscene, or otherwise objectionable content
Intentionally distribute viruses, worms, defects, Trojan horses, corrupted files, hoaxes, or any other items of a destructive or deceptive nature
Conduct or forward pyramid schemes and the like
Transmit content that may be harmful to minors
Impersonate another person (via the use of an email address or otherwise) or otherwise misrepresent yourself or the source of any email
Illegally transmit another's intellectual property or other proprietary information without such owner's or licensor's permission
Use Gmail to violate the legal rights (such as rights of privacy and publicity) of others
Promote or encourage illegal activity
Interfere with other Gmail users' enjoyment of the Service
Create multiple user accounts or create user accounts by automated means or under false or fraudulent pretenses
Modify, adapt, translate, or reverse engineer any portion of the Gmail Service
Remove any copyright, trademark or other proprietary rights notices contained in or on the Gmail Service
Reformat or frame any portion of the web pages that are part of the Gmail Service
Use the Gmail Service in connection with illegal peer-to-peer file sharing

Security
You must promptly notify Google of any breach of security related to the Services, including but not limited to unauthorized use of your password or account. To help ensure the security of your password or account, please sign out from your account at the end of each session.

Account Inactivity

Google will terminate your account in accordance with Section 9 of the Terms of Use if you fail to login to your account for a period of nine months

Today's REAL April Fool's joke:

[shunterman]

I think Gmail might be real. Because this is clearly Google's joke for today:

http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html

Heh. "Massively parallel lava lamps".

This doesn't seem like a joke

[Jugalator]

They have a detailed FAQ about it, registered gmail.google.com and even international domains like www.gmail.se [nic.se] (even if it's not even mentioned by Google officially yet), professional terms of use documents, etc. The news about Gmail is also said to have been published by Cnet back in March.

They might have used this special date to gain extra PR from the confusion about it, however I doubt it's a joke.

Re:Wahooo

[kryonD]

Ah...it's back....here's the REAL Joke [google.com]

Re:What day is it launching on?

[ashot]

Storage: Google believes people should be able to hold onto their mail forever. That's why Gmail comes with 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of free storage ? more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offer.

reading comprehension indeed..

Already been done

[Anonymous Coward]

About 2 years ago i found a site which offered episode downloads. You ran a java application on the command prompt, it would connect up to a server and list available episodes. Select an episode and it would show the last time it was downloaded &/or checked to be complete. Any corrupted or missing parts could be automatically reuploaded by anybody who downloaded it. the actual files were downloaded from a free webspace provider with only a meg or so stored in each account and files were split into hundreds of pieces. I believe the info file was encrypted and it held the username and password to each account. it was completely automatic and worked great... until of course the provider went broke.. damn eh.

Moogle.com

[Flave]

To those suggesting that they should have called it Moogle:

Registrant
Domain Deluxe
GPO 7628
Central,
HK

Registrar..: IARegistry.com (http://www.iaregistry.com)
MOOGLE.COM
Created on..............: 05-May-2001
Expires on..............: 05-May-2004

Administrative Contact:
Deluxe, Domain [e-mail]
Domain Deluxe
GPO 7628
Central, HK
+852.9102.8527
Technical Contact:
Deluxe, Domain [e-mail]
Domain Deluxe
GPO 7628
Central, HK
+852.9102.8527

Name servers for this domain:

NS1.BLACKCAB.COM 64.40.99.7
NS2.BLACKCAB.COM 64.40.102.7

Re:Wahooo

[WiggyWack]

Hey, you were quoted in Forbes! [forbes.com]

"'It's going to go down in history as one of the biggest pranks ever pulled,' wrote one message poster at Slashdot.org, which bills itself as a news provider for nerds."

Too bad they referred to you just as "one message poster" instead of LostCluster. I'd demand a correction.

CNN Reports that this is real

[DDumitru]

Apparently, this is not an April Fools joke, although

http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/01/technology/googl e_ email/index.htm?cnn=yes

Quoting:

" But Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of the products group at Google, said the Gmail announcement was legitimate. He did concede that the company did get caught up in the spirit of April Fool's Day in its press release. "

Not a joke

[Pascal666]

Rosenberg says this is not a joke [yahoo.com]. The lunar jobs were the joke.