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.

Google is gettting ready, but for what?

[erick99]

I wonder if Google would have offered this as well as rather quickly adding the new features to it's search service if it were not for MicroSoft's impending entry into the search engine market.

However, the email service sounds great. 1GB of space is incredible but I think I would like the ability to do a fast search through all of my stored email even more. 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! It makes you wonder if they don't have a tiered service in mind down the road. Of course, this will be "advertiser supported" so who knows how invasive that will or will not be when using their mail services.

Still, this all smacks of either "window dressing" for Wall Street, "war paint" for Microsoft, or, perhaps, both? Either way the users will be winners for a least a little while.

Happy Trails!

Erick

Is this an April Fool's joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

The press release [businesswire.com] reads like a joke. Is it an (early) April Fool's joke?

1GB of Storage vs. Changing E-mail Address?

[graphicartist82]

What does having 1GB of storage space on Google's mail server have to do with never needing to change your e-mail address?

It might allow you to keep many more e-mails than possible with yahoo or hotmail, but how will this allow me to never change my e-mail again?

Another email address that will never change!

[MavEtJu]

so that users never need to change their e-mail address

So after netscape.net, hotmail.com, yahoo.com, real.net I will have a google.com address which will never need to be changed!

I already have a lot of them you know :-)

Edwin

Re:Google is gettting ready, but for what?

[System.out.println()]

I wonder if the $2 for a GB takes into account that 90% of the accounts will not grow beyond the first few megabytes.

It's about time

[fname]

It always ticked me off how much companies charge to storage. I know that bandwidth costs money, and it costs money to maintain servers, but since the typical consumer price for a hard drive is approaching $0.50/gigabyte, it was just a matter of time before someone offered scads of storage for low-bandwidth applications. Maybe someone else will see what Google is doing and offer unlimited storage of photos and other stuff (with bandwidth limits, of course) that you can share with others.

This could be a Good Monopoly

[rokzy]

if they do this, their popularity might make them quickly become the number 1 webmail service.

then, if they implement a good spam filter, including the ability to cross-reference all their users reported spam or similar titled emails, then they could effectively eliminate non-POP spam.

of course their popularity will make them a huge target of spammers' attention, but I have more faith in Google's abilities than I do in the spammers'.

Unlimited attatchment size?

[Ghoser777]

I can't imagine that emails with unlimted attachment size would be supported. I could send whole ISOs to myself and use Google's servers as my own personal free storage space otherwise. My guess (I didn't get much else from the CNet article), is that either there's going to be some type of traffic cap per day/week/month etc, some maximum size on attachments, or some other system put in place to curtail this. Otherwise, Google's probably going to be in a world of hurt when nefarious people decide to take advantage of the system.

The sad thing is, the people who would exploit Google's offering will also be whining when the service has to be terminated or severely restricted because of their abusive behavior.

As always, there's probably more to the story - time will tell.

Matt Fahrenbacher

Re:What day is it launching on?

[dealsites]

I guess it could be an April fool's joke. Altough it's still 3/31 here, it's gotta be 4/1 somewhere.

--
No april fools jokes here. For real. [dealsites.net]

Re:What day is it launching on?

[DgWatters0]

Yes, but the story is dated 31 March and launching a webmail service isn't very... funny.

Link to the service: http://gmail.google.com/ [google.com]

Re:Google is gettting ready, but for what?

[leerpm]

Not Microsoft. Yahoo. Yahoo is their biggest competitor, and they are going for Yahoo's crown jewels, their premium users who pay for the email service.

Re:Google is gettting ready, but for what?

[afidel]

I take it you've never had to deal with PowerPoint and Excell happy marketing types? We have to remind people constantly to check their pst file size so that they don't go over the 2GB hard limit and lose emails. It's hard to go over a couple hundred megs of plain text email but with multimeg attachment's it's almost a foregone conclusion.

1 gig? Meh..... :)

[Clinoti]

Considering the size of things that people want to email to eachother and the limits imposed by most free email hosters, IANAHU (hotmail user) of 15megs(?) The Gig is probably an attempt to broach the market of the students, peers that do not have usb zip drives and want to store stuff temporarily online until their next access point. That is certainly a market I would want to capture, more so since now I can offer them customized searches, news, email and all without being obtrusive. It's like a one click interface for the Lan/Line Geek.

One may also consider that if they are shelling out 1G of free storage, that the advertisers are going to foot the bills for the massive storage arrays. Think: Tagline: Goggle!

Re:1GB limit makes warez heads like me cream my pa

[BarryJacobsen]

It is quite easy to do, asuming the atticment size limit is 1mb, split iso's into 650 chunks and email them to yourself.
Get your friends to sign up and forward the iso to everyone using CC.

650 1 mb files? That's more work than paying for it. Let alone the fact that if you're CCing all your friends you're sending out 650mb * number of people - that's a lot of bandwith that adds up quickly and gets you noticed. I don't think any real warez group is going to be using this.

Dear Google

[Dethboy]

Once a upon a time you used to be able to walk into a hamburger joint and find... well hamburgers. Now we have salads, chicken, ribs(?) and yes, hamburgers. But the hamburgers aren't as good as they used to be, and neither are the salads or chicken for that matter.

Quit trying to be everything (think Yahoo) and stick to being the best search engine on the net or one day you will find yourself in the back room frying chicken and tossing salads and wondering WTF went wrong.

What's really interesting

[Michalson]

Why 1GB of storage may dazzle, what I think could really be revolutionary is the possiblity of Google searching your email. Even with mail folders it's still easy to "lose" some piece of information you want to find later on. With 100 messages carrying the subject "re: meeting" its a pain to find (especially with webmail where each message requires a page load) the one that actually tells you when the meeting is.

Re:Wahooo

[seanadams.com]

I could see this really being a haven for pirates, assuming they have a web front-end. Imagine if everybody had a gig of storage on an absurdly fast pipe and the ability to move files back and forth practically instantly.

We'll have guys writing p2p applications on top of this which let you automatically find the warez you need, then automatically trigger a forward from the mail account where the file is located. And the anonymity is so much easier because the files are being moved by someone else.

Re:Google is gettting ready, but for what?

[NanoGator]

" Of course, this will be "advertiser supported" so who knows how invasive that will or will not be when using their mail services."

Setting aside the posibilty that this is an April Fool's joke, (Although it does say March 31st on the story..) perhaps advertising is exactly what they're after. Instead of using disposable accounts, they make it so you never need to clean your mailbox again. That means you use Google as your mail client instead of whatever app you use. That means their ads are always up, etc.

I'm skeptical about this, really. But hey, it has the virtue of never having been tried. What kind of revenue can you get when you give somebody a low-cost service that makes them eyeball your site many times a day every day?

Re:Is this an April Fool's joke?

[NanoGator]

It probably is. The link to 'gmail.google.com' doesn't even try to work.

I have to admit, though, as far as April Fool's jokes go, this is definitely one of the better ones. I mean seriously, this isn't exactly out of the realm of possibility.

Two words: Jayson Blair

[tepples]

Printing hoaxes isn't beyond some Times journalists [msn.com].

Re:Spam Storage

[SpaceLifeForm]

Send? I'd be more worried that this will *lead* to more spam.

Re:Wahooo

[luckyleprecon666666]

Imagine a p2p google you would be able to find virtually anything until those riaa lamers step in...

Re:Wahooo

[ryochiji]

They say they'll give 1GB of storage space, but that doesn't preclude them from setting limits to attachment sizes and bandwidth usage.

I'm going to take a guess

[KalvinB]

and assume they limit the maximum amount you can attach per e-mail. And using it as filestorage would require giving people your login and password.

Unless you can anonymously browse other people's e-mail it's really not going to work. At best there would just be people advertising their accounts and people would have to manually (or submit a form) e-mail them a request.

At any rate, any system that attempts to whore out Google will be public and no doubt Google will squish such accounts pretty quickly and have no trouble getting the authorities to act on it. I had free anonymous FTP for awhile but since I have an obscure IP (more warez people fish popular IP ranges and don't bother to go to a web-site to see the big giant ad) I only had to report a couple people to their ISP for attempting to store warez on it.

I offer POP3 accounts with no storage limits but with a 15MB attachment limit and I expect e-mails to be pulled from the server. The idea of no storage limits is so that you don't go on vacation only to lose e-mails because your inbox got too full and so you can get large files back and forth easily. Not so you can use it as your own personal harddrive.

I think Google is really overselling this service and once it's all debugged they'll most likely offer something a bit more sane.

Or maybe their next goal is the best spam fighting engine on the planet and offering people insane amounts of space they'll never use is just a way to get people to drop everything else so they can start collecting more spam than AOL for analysis.

Until MyDoom came out and Cox blocked incomming port 25 on top of the already blocked outgoing port 25 I was running a spam can for that very purpose: get all the spam you can where you don't care and then use the info to preemptively block spam from your real inboxes.

Ben

Not a good idea

[FlynnMP3]

There is no way I want my personal email forever in someone else's colocation storage site.. If the allure of having it there in the first place is taken away, then there isn't a point. Other than to abuse the 1gig storage limit.

This idea needs a rethink. Even if it is true.

Re:Wahooo

[JPriest]

I am retarded, this is an April fools joke.

Re:I dunno

[bc90021]

How is this different than now? As of now, most people will have years' worth of email on their home computers.

In fact, Google having it might be better - if word gets out that they're letting the government read people's email, they'll lose the audience for those ads they'll be selling.

However, since no one is selling ads to Evolution on my deesktop, a search warrant doesn't kill marketing dollars for anyone.

Re:Google Adwords

[amRadioHed]

Just because the ad a mail provider shows you is related to words in your email doesn't mean they are "watching" you or invading your privacy in any way.

Just because the ad a mail provider shows you is unrelated to words in your email doesn't mean they aren't "watching" you or invading your privacy in any way.

Adwords by themselves imply nothing relating to personal privacy.

I love Google to bits, but...

[judd]

... their desire not to be evil notwithstanding, there is no way in hell that I'm leaving my email on a remote box in US jurisdiction, where it can be snooped, indexed, crunched and otherwise interfered with. Does the US have *any* privacy legislation for consumers? No, I thought not. Does the US pass on commercial information gained through espionage [zdnet.co.uk] to US companies? Yes it does.

Google search = providing me with other people's stuff. Google mail = potentially providing other people with my stuff.

Definitely an April's Fool. With proof.

[Wolfier]

Check out www.google.com.
Then go to froogle.google.com.
Then go to gmail.google.com.

What do you notice? Right, no "TM" at the corner of the logo!

I don't think their lawyers would be this foolish if it were meant to be real.

Re:You are forgetting something though.

[RallyNick]

Readable text compresses well, but compressed text is hard to search, which they say you can do.

Maybe not so. They don't read all the text on every search: they index it before it's saved and they search the index. That returns pointers to saved messages which are then decompressed if requested by the user.

Re:Google is gettting ready, but for what?

[cavebear42]

I think "a little while" is more true than people are considering. Is the concept of "forever e-mail" real? I thought it was. I move to hotmail for the last move ever, no more ISP changes, no more requiring a client. Then the pot sweetened, outlook express reading and locally storing emails off of the servers. Then it all went to hell, the folder sizes got cut ridiculously small, they started extorting money for real sizes, never increased maximum attachment size with the market calling for larger files, and then the selling of our addresses. A sad day indeed. My last e-mail address ever is now just a junk mail box, I still use it for required registrations and such but it fills from zero to capacity in 48 hours.

I resolved to purchase a domain and collect all mails to the domain (catch-all), leaning how bad that was, I now have only a few allowed. My main one get more spam every week and I know that one day I will have to leave it too, at least for another on the same domain.

Thinking that Google will be a permanent solution is a little short sighted, the only way you can assure a permanent address which you can control is to purchase a domain, and even then you may still have to move one day. (I'll gladly use my 1 GB though.)

Read the Press Release - Something's Fishy

[abenoboy]

Gmail press release [google.com]. Some quotes: "Email is Number One; "Heck, Yeah," Say Google Founders." "recalled Larry Page, Google co-founder and president, Products. "She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages"

come on, kvetched? no other Google press releases [google.com] have this kind of informality. So, this is either April Fool's, or something trying to _look_ like April Fool's.

PISSED OF AT .MAC

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Does anyone else think that Apple's .Mac service should offer MORE than the 15MB limit, especially at $100 a year? I'd gladly pay that $100 every year for e-Mail, iDisk, iCal, et. al. to sync to it all, but give me a few gigs god damn it!

Google is smart. Most people will not use all the space. Hard drives are cheat, and the 1 gig thing will PULL people away in droves. Especially if the only ads are the nice polite AdSence crap they have! Hotmail sucks without Mozilla and AdBlocker.

Okay... time to stop reading Slashdot...

[I Be Hatin']

I guess the April Fools jokes are starting in earnest now. I plan to not read Slashdot for the next two days. I hope that all of you who hate the editors' habit of repeating every April Fools joke they find (or worse yet, making up their own!) will join me.

Mail between Google accounts

[billstewart]

Hey, if it's only sending the data between Google email accounts, no problem - everything stays in the LAN / SAN networks instead of hitting the real Internet, or optionally just sends pointers to the original without duplicating it.

Re:I'm going to take a guess

[Jahf]

Not if you can:

a) have a system similar to FetchYahoo!, but limited to downloading headers only (or imap/pop3 access)

and

b) write a quick program to parse commands out of the headers.

Heck ... you could even get real fun and encrypt the information with PGP and randomly use different headers for the request (no need for it to be in a displayed header) just to make it harder to determine a message as being a request.

There are alot of holes left to fill for such a system, but it is possible. For instance, FetchYahoo only handles grabbing messages but messages are sent from the local system ... but a similar script could be written to send the file through the Google interface. If sending to another google address the send should be fairly automatic.

If there is an attachment size limitation that can easily be fixed by sending multipart messages (ahhh, UUencode could make a comeback).

Do I think the above is likely? No, Google is fairly savvy, but anything is possible.

Re:I love Google to bits, but...

[phatsharpie]

If you are worried about email privacy, why not encrypt all your emails using GPG or PGP? That way you should be able to use any ISP for your email needs without worrying about someone snooping your email.

-B

1Gb for what ?

[jdifool]

Giving away 1Gb is, as previously said, the perfect way to attract warez, and affiliated nasty stuff.

I get 100Mb available on my very french provider [freesurf.fr], I've been using this address for five years, and I'm still at 30% of the total capacity.

Binary attachments, furthermore, are rarely re-used over time, and only constitute evidence against you in court... :)

Tip : when you visit pr0n, or any kind of sensitive contente / untrusted source, just use another email address previously registered only for that specific use. So far, only 2 spams a week on my normal mail : and this is only because I began to work (ah... the basement.).

Regards,
jdif

Re:Dear Google

[Dalcius]

The difference here is that Google does not (as of yet) have a burning desire to add clutter. They're already searching images, newsgroups, news websites, the web, good deals (Froogle), and business locations. They make an IE toolbar for blocking popups and searching. I've seen a piece of searching hardware they sell. You can buy ads, too.

Google is huge.

And yet still, every piece of the puzzle is simple as can be. Google realizes that each piece is its own piece and should be used independantly of the others without sucking the user to a page he didn't intend to visit.

What's the primary complain about computers second to "It doesn't work?" "It takes up so much time!" Who wants to visit a website which requires drudging through links, ads and banners to do what you want? People want a simple interface and want to get their task done.

To illustrate the point: on Yahoo, you'll see distractions and clutter attempting to get you to spend more time at their website and use more of their utilities. Most people are annoyed by this. On Google, you won't find link upon link cluttering up the page trying to get you to go elsewhere. You won't find animated ads. You won't find banners. On the other hand, you WILL find what you need -- in a search or otherwise.

Google shoots for a great user experience -- and users come back. Google focuses on quality of product, not quality of marketing.

There's no reason that something this big can't be great. With the right management and the right motives, as Google has had on their very long journey thus far, this can work. These types of successes don't happen often, but Google is already a long way down that path and doesn't appear to be wandering off of it.

Cheers

Re:Beware too much data concentrated

[Anonymous Coward]

Google also records the IP address along with the search terms of every search.

That might be a good thing in the right hands. If I had access to Google's logs, the first thing I'd do is go back to 9/11 and look for WTC-related stuff before anything happened. Obviously there's a huge spike when the news got out, but who was doing screwy queries beforehand?

It might reveal some interesting things.

Well there is a real difference

[Sycraft-fu]

Between consumer storage and enterprise storage. Our users always bitch about their UNIX quotas. 100MB unless a professor oks more up to 500MB, more that that requires clearence from one of the department heads or associates. They ask as you do, why if hard drives are so cheap don't we give more storage?

Because when you implement a consumer level storage solution, the drive is your entire cost. You buy it, store data, and our happy. That's not the case with our UNIX storage. First, it is Sun hardware so more expensive anyhow. Second, it is all SCSI RAID-5 with a hot spare, more expensive disks and 2 of them wasted space. Finally, it's all backed up. Nightly, tapes rotated weekly, with monthly trips to a secure offsite vault.

It's not so cheap to implement sotrage of that level. To expand it requires not getting another disk, but getting more disks, hardware to hold those disks, a tape backup unit capable of backing up ALL the storage in one shot, tapes to hold those backups, and space in the storage facility (we actually get that last one for free).

We don't just get to drive to CompUSA, drop $200 and boost the disk space. It takes thousands of dollars, not to mention staff time spent planning and implementing the changeover to result in no loss of service or data. Because of this, it is expected that when we put a solution into place, it will last a number of years. We are currently upgrading it, but that'll be the last time for a minimum of 3 years.

There are compenstaions though. Users expect, correctly, that if they accidently delete a file, we will be able to recover a copy only 1 day old. They expect that if a disk fails, there will be no interruption to their work. They expect that even if the building were destroyed, their data would survive. This is all correct, but all expensive.

This is also what is offered by most online webhosts and the like. They aren't whacking single IDE drives in their servers and hoping that they survive. They run some kind of RAID setup with regular backups. That costs a good deal more money.

There is also the problem that high storage most often infers high bandwidth. For a long time I had about 5MB stored on my website. Not supprisingly, I used less than 500MB/month. I then had more to store, and now use about 500MB. If I provided only my website to transfer the files, I'd exceed my 21GB/month quota, I have two other servers that combined tend to do around 30GB/month. What I offer would be considered low demand files (OGG soundtracks for the old iD (Doom/Doom2) and Raven (Heretic/Hexen) games.

Bandwidth is expensive, and companies need to turn a profit. They also don't want to risk lawsuits over lost data.

Re:Wahooo

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont get it how is this funny? Can't be a joke.

Take a close look at the press release...

[megalogeek]

Today is March 31st. The PR is dated April 1st. You do the math.

Re:I'm going to take a guess

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's really funny that you spent so much time crafting a detailed response. You totally swallowed this April Fool's joke.

Re:woah

[Lairdsville]

Well, a gig of disk space will cost about 50c, and if you spread that over 3 years, that is about 15c per year. I guess that Google's business plan predicts that they can make more than that in advertising. All is all, it sounds feasible (but it is April 1st!)

Re:Wahooo

[LocoSpitz]

Since when do April Fools Day jokes have to be funny for anyone other than those behind them? People never laugh when the sink sprays them with water in the morning...

Re:Wahooo

[LostCluster]

It is a joke, it's going to have to go down in history as one of the biggest pranks ever pulled... both the AP and Reuters have put out wire stories which means it's going to be in hundreds of newspapers tomorrow morning.

It'll say a lot about the gullibility of the news media if this is indeed a joke...

Not all they're cracked up to be

[ChrisBrown1]

I have a short one cbrown at (an EXCEPTIONALLY well known domain). Through some fluke, I NEVER gave that email address to anyone for use or posted it anywhere. I now get 300+ spams per day to it with ~15 per day getting through the spam filter. ALL phonebook spam. Granted, Google plans to do a better job of spam filtering, but that's yet to be seen.

How to alienate mainstream media just before IPO

[waimate]

Here's the funny bit -- the mainstream media [reuters.com] has picked this up and started running with it [google.com], but have neglected to include the bits that make it clear to the technically informed that this is a joke.

So the mainstream press have fallen for it. Ha ha, it is to laugh. Problem is, when Google does eventually IPO, they're gonna be looking for favorable coverage from those same media outlets they made look like gooses. I wonder if the individuals in those media organizations will remember how Google made them look stoopid.

Not quite so clever. Also, Google News has picked up this story itself, linking to the mainstream stories that don't include the tip-offs that its a joke.

Thus it has become a self-replicating disinformation virus, quite disconnected from the original "joke" press-release.

Re:What day is it launching on?

[drix]

Yeah but an even cooler joke would be throwing something up that everyone thinks is an April Fool's joke, and then doing it for real. A meta-April Fool's joke, if you will.

This is definitely not nearly as far off the deep-end as, say, PigeonRank [google.com], for example. It's not even really very funny. And it sounds a little outrageous, but not a lot. I'm 50-50 on the fence as the whether this is real or not. (It seems like it would be rare for NYTimes, Reuters, and CNet to all get suckered, for example.)

Re:Google vs. spammers

[DrSchlock]

What I don't understand is how they can justify this as a business. How will they recoup the cost of providing millions of gigs of storage and huge amounts of bandwidth indefinitely?

Well, this kind of service wouldn't actually require 1 gig/user. It's not like they're handing you your own sealed-off hard drive. Most people will never use anything like that much space, I suspect, and the company would only have to pay for the amount used in practice.

They'd recoup costs the same way they do for search: through targeted ads. They're already pretty much caching the Internet; if anybody could handle this kind of space and bandwidth, it would be Google...

Re:Beware too much data concentrated

[retto]

If it is true I'd assume it would have something to do with targeted ads based on searches. I could see it useful for google to see what kinds of searches are down in response to certain events. What terms do people use to get more information about breaking news, current events, or the TV show that is on now? IP addressing would help group it, but there are so many people on dial-up, wi-fi, public terminals, etc that the information would be worthless in most cases. Look at what the RIAA has to go through for a lawsuit. It would be far to expensive and require too much cooperation from too many sources to tie google searches to IP. Imagine how many people would drop their ISP and stop using google if it was revealed they were teaming up to send you junk mail based on your searches or alert your insurance company and significant other every time you search for 'STD.' If you hear that Google is going to start offering free email, and one of your first concerns is 'What if the NSA starts using it and it is hacked?' you need to relax more.

Re:Wahooo

[Gloume]

The catch is that you also have to power it, house it, maintain it, cool it, and keep a redundant backup...for all of them.

Re:Wahooo

[kevinank]

Online storage is considerably more expensive than the raw disk drives, and in this case would almost certainly have to include redundant storage or risk strong criticism each time a drive failed. A terabyte array is considerably more than $500.

On the other hand, disks have gotten to a competitive price point with offline storage. Comparing disk storage to DAT is a wash (not that the disk storage is nearly as stable over the long term, but it would be nice if at least some of the cost reductions in disk were the transition to tape. But DLT is still mind numbingly expensive, and M-O while cheaper than DLT is still more expensive than a cheap hard-drive IIRC.)

Re:Wahooo

[LostCluster]

Nope, because they still haven't done their IPO, so their stock isn't being traded on the open market. SEC has no jurisdiction over Google until they file for an IPO.

Re:Well there is a real difference

[farghen]

On the other hand, using regular PCs is what google does well. They don't rely on such expensive hardware, but redundant cheaper hardware. I wouldn't put it past google to do this cheaper than you might think possible

Web Alerts Integration?

[manmanic]

I'm pretty sure this is a joke (the PR [google.com]'s a giveaway). But I also wouldn't be surprised if Google are releasing something related to email shortly at local.google.com [google.com]. This would make sense given their recent release of email-based information services such as the Web Alerts [google.com] (a poorer cousin of Google Alert [googlealert.com]) which followed their previous News Alerts [google.com]. Maybe a central location for managing Google-based email notifications?

Re:1000 GB == TB?

[dubl-u]

You're thinking of Mebibytes and Gibibytes.

Come clean; you're the guy who made up those terms, right? Because as far as I can tell, nobody else uses them. Except as very geeky punchlines, of course.

Google's actual April Fool's Joke.

[Tatarize]

google's april fool's Joke [google.com]

Re:Wahooo

[1u3hr]

Of course most average Joes won't use anywhere near a gig. If this is genuine, the gigabyte thing is more of a gimmick. It'll only be slashdotters and other hardcode user that will ever get anywhere near this amount

Actually, the reverse. The average clueless user sends and receives from his buddies gigantic image and video files, MP3s, etc, etc. You could max out a gig with just one or at most two attached ISOs.

(Yes, I know "GMail" is an April Fool joke.)

How they could do a gigabyte per user

[weave]

If this is not an April Fool's joke, then technically the way they could achieve a gig per user is to have it be effectively a gig, but not physically.

Look at all of the email that is duplicated, especially spam and mailing lists. Store one copy, hash it to a unique key somehow, and only store the key in the user's mail directory.

This same technology could be used to detect and eliminate spam -- even if spammers randomly generate bits of the message. The report spam button will generate a case history of spam patterns and deal with it. Idiots, of course, report spam falsely, so a reputation index can be learned through past behavior to weight the legitimacy of the reports and to minimize abuse.

I think it's real. Let's see. I'm going to be co-workers real money it's real, so it better be!

This must be real, because here's this year's hoax

[DaveTheTriffids]

Google is recruiting engineers for a research facility called GCHEESE due to open on the moon [google.com] in 2007, according to the company's recruitment pages. Surely they wouldn't run TWO April Fools in one year?

Bad sign

[superultra]

Is it a bad sign when the really good ideas are hoaxes?

I need this why?

[Paulrothrock]

I have 3 gigs with my hosting plan, and I can create mailboxes to fill that space, and includes webmail. I have 90 gigs on my computer, and can archive my emails. I have grep to search through said archive for patterns. I have a CD burner, and therefore have unlimited backup for my email. Oh, and my hosting plan includes spamassassin and I use Apple's Mail, which together have caused one false positive in a year of using this combination, with probably a million disgusting spams kept from my sight.

Remind me again, why do I need 1GB of space that puts my personal correspondence in the hands of a corporation, subject to archival and advertising?