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.

fsot

[Anonymous Coward]

prost

woah

[big daddy kane]

well im all for peace love and happiness, but i serisouly have no clue how that could remain profitable, unless of course that 1 gig is space on your own hard drive

What day is it launching on?

[jimmyharris]

The first of April perhaps...

Google vs. spammers

[LostCluster]

I can't wait to see what Google's anti-spam technology is going to look like. You can't do a webmail service these days without one...

Guys

[Jacer]

The pigeons, this? The April fools joke this year is they bunk stories are coming today instead of tomorrow.

cross your fingers

[TheUberBob]

I'm really looking forward to seeing what google does in this space. Hotmail and Yahoo just aren't very high quality/consumer oriented. If google can provide a feature rich interface that doesn't focus on upsell to the user, then they could capture a lot of interest/visibility. Right now I rarely use online email services because of the UPGRADE NOW! spam and the primitive interface.

Binaries?

[LostCluster]

My first thought is that they're going to give one GB of text storage and forbid the use of the service to transfer binary attachments. (with limits on how many e-mails you can get from a particular sender per day and how big each message can be enforcing the rule so that good old usenet encoders don't work.) Therefore, they can give everybody a full GB of apparent storage, while older rarely-checked messages sit in compressed space... readable text always compresses well. :)

$2.00 a gigabyte?

[weave]

The article says google estimates costs of storage at about two dollars a gigabyte. Woohoo if true. Maybe Apple will catch a clue and drop the price on their extra dot-mac storage costs. For a gigabyte, they charge $350 a year.

Yup, heard that right.

Everyone should have their own domain name

[MichaelCrawford]

Bigger, more successful companies than google have been known to go out of business.

I registered my first domain name after my ISP was down for a week and none of my clients could email me.

If you have your own domain, and the hosting service tanks, you can sign up with a different host and have the DNS switched over in a couple days. But if your email address is at someone else's domain, you're out of luck if they go down.

I'm glad I established my own domain when I did. I kept my old ISP even when I moved away, so I could get the odd email from people who didn't know my new one. One day, though, the national ISP that bought them out shut my old ISP down entirely, taking out the email addresses for a substantial portion of Santa Cruz, California's population.

I think each individual person on the planet should have their own domain name.

Joke? Or Not?

[kill-hup]

If it is a joke, they went to the trouble of setting up a "Coming Soon" [google.com] page.

/me would be really surprised if this was for real...

I dunno

[jeffkjo1]

I don't know that this is neccessarily a good idea. Do you really want a corporation holding 5, 10, 20+ years of your email? What if you're under investigation? All the sudden everything you've said over the past 20 years is very easily accessiable.

"Well Mr. Jones, it seems as though you're awfully interested in increasing your penis size for some pre-teen lolitas.. What do you have to say for yourself?"

Re:http://gmail.com/

[kill-hup]

They must have had this idea for a while then:

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

Domain Name: gmail.com

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

Either that or NetSol's in on the joke...

Google Adwords

[Rick and Roll]

I am a little wary of Google Adwords. I read a post earlier on /. that foretold Google offering a gigabyte of storage on an e-mail service, and the post said that the reason it would be good business is because they could do adwords based on the content of the e-mail.

I find this to be an invasion of my privacy. A personal letter with ads attached to it, based on the subject. If my girlfriend wrote a love letter, I could get an ad for roses. I would rather I just get regular ads. Sure, it may be what I want, but I don't want them to know what I'm thinking before they choose an ad for me.

I have found Google Adwords to be really annoying at times on the plain old web search as well. Sure, they're not images, but some of them are really abnoxious - not too different from typing in the wrong URL is sometimes typing in the wrong search terms.

Re:Wahooo

[Mostly a lurker]

I will sign up for 1000 accounts and get a free terabyte storage system.

Many a true word in jest. I do not know exactly how the system will work, but there is enormous potential for abuse. Actually, just personal storage of large amounts of data is probably the least of the concerns. One could imagine a warez or porn distribution system based on small requests to a controlling site that then uses mail fowarding to deliver the content (thus pushing the bulk of the storage and bandwidth costs onto gmail).

Re:Wahooo

[Shakrai]

One could imagine a warez or porn distribution system based on small requests to a controlling site that then uses mail fowarding to deliver the content (thus pushing the bulk of the storage and bandwidth costs onto gmail).

I seem to recall a similar method of warez distribution used back in the AOL days. Store massive amounts in your (server side) e-mail box and transfer it to others instantly without using any of your own bandwidth. They could then download it at their leisure.

Re:What day is it launching on?

[el-spectre]

I wonder if this is a good marketing idea... Offer something really unusual on April 1... if enough people bite, then actually do it. Otherwise, call it a joke.

A radio station I know did that, by accident. They changed from top40 to disco one day (this was like 1993) for 12 hours. But then people started calling up with "Where's the disco?" and they had to change formats...

Publicly searchable email...

[ender-]

One thing I think would be interesting is to enable each user to mark certain emails to enable them to be publicly searchable [munged addresses of course]. Something like that could potentially be a huge new resource.

Ender-

Beware too much data concentrated

[orthogonal]

In addition, they want to offer their searching capabilities so that users can search through their entire set of e-mail, I guess forever.

With all due respect to Google, and god knows they're one of the few companies that seems to get "it" right, what with uncluttered interfaces, unbiased services, and unobtrusive text ads -- Google also records the IP address along with the search terms of every search.

Anytime you've Googled on "anime tentacle rape", "venereal disease STD symptom", "P2P download", "closeted gay", "arguments for atheism" or "overthrow government", Google has recorded your computer's IP address and has tried to set a cookie in your browser. To Google's credit, the search still works even if you don't accept the cookie; but Google is keeping the IP and search term log -- forever.

After just a few hundred searches, you don't need to be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to do a little data-mining and get a good idea of a user's interests, proclivities, and possible "deviancy" from his search terms.

My fear then, is this: will you be the only one who can search through your database of email, "I guess forever"? Or will Google be able to search it too. Or even if they lock themselves out of search or reading your email directly, will Google, as they do now for web searches, keep a log of the searches you make on your own email?

Again, you can tell a lot about someone if you have a list of all his Google searches, but you can probably learn even more and more immediate information if you have a list of his searches through his email.

Remember the "Halloween X" email recently released, from Mike Anderer to SCO about Anderer's attempts to raise money on SCO's behalf? Imagine if Anderer had been searching for that email before -- or after -- the release of the "Halloween X" letter; I suspect you could learn even more juicy details by seeing what search terms he used?

What if Richard Clarke and Condaleeza Rice has stored their emails in Google GMail? Of course, the government wouldn't store email in GMail -- but imagine if the people in analogous positions in your company did -- say the head of security and her deputies? Could Google learn much about your company's financial dealings from the search terms they used to review their mail?

What if you stored and looked for emails regarding your company's Non-Disclosure Agreement or upcoming patent for some new technology? Could a competitor glean import information just from your search terms?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, are you still answering "yes" to wanting to try out GMail for yourself?

It's simple: too much information concentrated into any one set of hands -- even hands as apparently benign as Google's -- invites abuse or -- even if Google never bends to that temptation -- tempts others to steal that data.

Compression and Profit

[fm6]

I don't see how they can ban binary attachments unless they ban all attachments. But you probably have the right idea. They could allocate each user 100 meg of raw storage, and simply call this the equivalent of 1G of compressed text. People could store non-text attachments, but would soon use up their quotas. They could also prevent people from using the system as a passive storage area by requiring that people actually send and receive mail.

Still, 100 meg is a lot of storage for a free service. Yahoo used to offer 15, then decided they couldn't afford it. If it were anybody but Google, I'd dismiss the whole thing as another dotcom boondoggle. But Google has a talent for making money on services you wouldn't believe are profitable.

Re:Google Adwords

[Thanatopsis]

Ok then - Don't use the service. How can your privacy be invaded if you don't use the service? It's not as those the Google MediaBot is reading your email. It's simply trying to present contextually relevant ads. Afraid of Google controlling you mind? Don't use the service. Jesus why bitch about a quantum leap in web based email because your "privacy is being invaded." All free email services invade your privacy.

Re:Beware too much data concentrated

[maelstrom]

Agreed, Google has already bent to Scientology, who knows what they'd let happen to your e-mail. Also check out the problems the Orkut service had with its terms of service. Google is a company no matter how well intentioned.

Re:Wahooo

[JPriest]

Or just give friends the account login like an FTP dump.

Pfffft! AOL had 40GB e-mail storage...in 1994!

[JoeShmoe]

That's right AOL. Don't believe me? Here's how it worked. Anyone who grew up on AOL knows what I'm talking about.

Each AOL account could have up to five screen names. Each screen name could have up to 550 e-mails* in their Inbox. Each e-mail could have a maximum file attachment of 15MB.

So...15MB times 550 is 8GB times 5 is about 40GB. That's per account, and thanks to the various account generation/phishing tricks, it wasn't uncommon to have several AOL accounts at any one time.

What did this mean? Well, it meant that AOL became one of the biggest warez havens in the blossoming Internet. And all with point and click easy, none of the file decoding nonsense of USENET.

How did AOL do this? I have no idea...but there were entire groups of people uploading warez non-stop so they could forward the mails around. At some point AOL cracked wise and started nuking attachments that had been downloaded X times. But for many years, it was glorious. Imagine sending several GB of software to someone with a single click of a button.

* actually you could have 550 in both Inbox, Outbox, and Read mail and various AOL tools helped you do this, bringing your capacity to a whopping 120GB.

- JoeShmoe
.

Re:Is this an April Fool's joke?

[eclectro]

gmail.com works.

Generally they wait until 12 pm eastern to launch holiday sites.

They did pick a poor time to launch it though.

Re:Wahooo

[saden1]

This is what I like about Google...they are thinking big and long term. You'd be crazy not to switch email account (over time of course). All I want is an email address without a digit and lots of space and with google I just might get both.

As soon as the service is out to the general public everyone on my contact list will be informed of my new email account.

Re:Google is gettting ready, but for what?

[forevermore]

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

If this is indeed a true service, and knowing google's record, I'd say "not very." They've very good at placing their ads in places that are easily visible but do not interfere with what you're immediately looking at. Not only that, I'd bet that they'd use their context engine to give you ads relevant to the email you're reading. Imagine, while you're reading about your mom's latest adventure cruise to alaska, you get ads relating to travel, outdoors, photography, etc. Privacy issues aside, google's context-based ad system is one of the best innovations in web advertising to happen in a long time (if ever).

See also SpamCop

[tepples]

It's probably like SpamCop Mail. SpamCop Mail can download and filter e-mail from your existing account using POP3, IMAP, or WebDAV. Then it splits the ham from the spam and stores them in your folders. When you change ISPs, just set the service to POP your mail from your new ISP's mail server.

Re:Google is gettting ready, but for what?

[Dulimano]

Google is getting ready to know everything about you. They have the Orkut social network, GMail, Personalized Google, Blogger, Froogle. They can link these various facets of your online indentity via cookies or other methods.

These give enough data about you to reconstruct even your smallest habits. Maybe they will sell it in aggregated, anonimized form. Or use it themselves to target ads even better.

Paranoia

[femto]

Femto straps her/his tinfoil hat securely on before continuing...

The following has no evidence to back it and is idle speculation.

Could such moves lead to an attempt to shut down the distributed email system as we know it? Consider the following scenario:

1. Set up generous mail services such as google's new mail service and hotmail.
2. The majority of users register with these free email services.
3. Set up a .mail domain [slashdot.org] for 'approved mail servers' only.
4. The free mail services register in the .mail domain. The registration fee discourages users from running their own servers, driving them to the free services.
5. The free mail services stop accepting email from outside the .mail domain. The majority of users don't care, as they are free mail account holders.
6. Set major nodes in the Internet to block mail traffic from outside the .mail domain. Again, the majority don't care and the 'approved' free services go along with it as it drives more users their way.
7. Make it a condition of being in the .mail domain that your database be available for searching. The remaining small email servers areeliminated. Noone hears (or cares about) their screams.
8. All email is not stored in central, conveniently searchable, databases.

Complete paranoia, but the cynic in me says 'what if'?

to my dearest, p\/\/n3dj-00

[deathcloset]

Would anyone be willing to posthumously open thier email history publicly?

I mean, how cool would that be if 200 years from now anyone could look up your or anyone elses life in great historical detail.

Historical letters are wonderful because they not only reflect the events of the time, but they show the lives of those who lived there.

imagine that, billions of historical emails, searchable.

Of course there may be an event or two you wish to take to the eternal recycle bin, but I'd leave in a couple that I think people of the future would prbably enjoy reading...probably.

What about instant messages when an email arrives?

[xutopia]

I know lots of Hotmail users enjoy that email they receive as soon as an email arrives. I'd love to see google have such a service as well. Without it lots of people will continue to use hotmail.

Lirpa Sloof

[ishamael69]

If you look at Google's press release [google.com] on the matter, you will note it is dated April 1, 2004 UTC.

All of their other press releases [google.com] are simply dated, without the timezone...

Hmmm.. That's odd. Wonder why?

lkml?

[molo]

I wonder what happens when people on the linux-kernel mailing list start using this service.

> ls -sh linux-kernel
182M linux-kernel
> grep -i ^date linux-kernel | head -1
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 19:29:03 +0100
> tail -300 linux-kernel | grep -i ^date
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 12:16:42 +1000

You could fill up the 1GB archive in a matter of a year or two.

-molo

Road to piracy?

[almaon]

1GB, that's a pretty hefty size. My concern is that such a wealth of storage is going to be abused by pirates.

Those of you who are familar with AOL back in the early days found their large capacity email to be a haven for piracy. Large file attachments that once initially uploaded, could be forwarded and shared with hundreds of people in seconds, once recieved, it could be forwarded again to yet even more people. All without the delay of re-uploading, nor even having to download the complete file.

I hope that Google has something up their sleave to preemptively nullify this problem before it starts. I used to make entertainment software for PC's and eventually had to disolve the S-Corp due to dwindling sales lost to piracy. The above mentioned method the result of...

Possible solutions would be to limit the size of attachments. Possible disallow forwarding attachments greater than 50MB. Dunno, just hope this is just paranoia talking and not an omen commanded by my Rice Krispies.

Re:Google vs. spammers

[vericgar]

You answer your own question, in a way.

If google's spam blocking is very superb, then they use that as a selling point for upgrading to a pay account.

I'm sure they'll have other features for a non-free account as well. Maybe even do e-mail hosting, where you point the MX for your domain at google and it handles all your e-mail.

feedback into search: purified pagerank

[phossie]

here's another possibility:

every time somebody emails somebody else an URL - at the moment - they do it for a reason. and if my experience is even close to typical, this happens often. if a thread results, something was interesting. if the thread is related to the content at the URL (which google will have, one way or another), then chances are the content was interesting.

this could be a *very* good way to slow down people trying to "optimize" for pagerank. it would also allow google to be on top of memes travelling through personal networks, and react accordingly in realtime.

Re:What day is it launching on?

[prwood]

Absolutely correct. I can't believe so many people have been taken in by this!

Is this email from Yahoo related?

[foxlakeawp]

I wonder if this is related? Today I got this in my yahoo mailbox: Dear Yahoo! Mail User, We've made changes to your Yahoo! Mail account -- we've upgraded your email storage quota to 25MB, at no cost to you. As a loyal Yahoo! Mail user, you've been randomly selected to receive this free benefit effective March 31, 2004. You'll also be able to attach up to 10 files to an outgoing email message (increased from 3); and your outgoing message size can be up to 10MB (increased from 3MB). It's just our way of saying thanks!

Re:Beware too much data concentrated

[26199]

Do you have any kind of proof?... they may well be doing something with the data, but I find it hard to believe they're building a table of IP addresses and searches... where's the commercial gain?

Re:http://gmail.com/

[doowy]

That doesn't mean google registered it in 1995. Take a look at the wayback machine [archive.org], there have been pages there in the past. Particularly a webmail provider in 96.

Also, searching the web (using google of course) turns up lots of pervious remnents.

Here it is for sale [netconcept.com]. This is probably who google bought it from - umm, probably last week (but who knows).

Re:Pfffft! AOL had 40GB e-mail storage...in 1994!

[Anonymous Coward]

So...15MB times 550 is 8GB times 5 is about 40GB. That's per account, and thanks to the various account generation/phishing tricks, it wasn't uncommon to have several AOL accounts at any one time.

So that explains why warez releases are always broken up into 15MB RAR or ZIP files.

Re:Wahooo

[Billy the Mountain]

Come to think of it, you could write a client that automatically interfaces (for hotmail even, who cares, right?), that would automatically manage 100 or so accounts, including logging into each one occasionally to ensure the account stays active. It could then create a virtual email account that combines the storage capacity of each. Your main account then would automatically forward incoming mail from your "main" account to one of the 100 or so sub accounts for long term storage.

BTM

Re:Is this an April Fool's joke?

[siriuskase]

Works for me, too. The google press release is dated April 1 and reads like a joke.

Email is Number One; "Heck, Yeah," Say Google Founders

that just sounds too dumb to be a serious headline: http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gmail.html

Holy Jebus

[iswm]

How do they plan to get that much space.. We're talking 47.6837158 petabytes after they get 50 million users. 50 million is a bit high, but who wouldn't want to take advantage of this? You also have to account for people who sign up for more than one account if it's possible to do so.

1024 Megabytes of Email?

[Aldurn]

I'm currently doing my time as a tech support person, and as such, we sometimes get more... interesting... customers.

Case in point: we got a guy calling up having trouble sending email. He said he kept getting a bounce message. The message really didn't make sense, so we got his username and went to talk to the email sysadmins.

Turns out the recipient server was choking, because the user had sent a 700(!) Megabyte attachment! So we cleared the message out of the queue, and let it be.

Half an hour later, the user calls up again, saying he got another bounce message. Back to the sysadmins for a closer inspection of the mail server.

Turns out that what was REALLY happening was the mail server was TIMING OUT after 700 Megs, and the message he was really trying to send was 1.4 GIGAbytes!

We repremanded the user, cleared out the queue, and sent him on his way.

privacy?

[r5t8i6y3]

i wouldn't touch this service with a 10-foot pole given google's lack of a serious privacy policy. i didn't notice any statement regarding privacy in the announcement. but the privacy policy for the whole site includes, "Google may decide to change this Privacy Policy from time to time." also, do you know what google *really* does with those cookies?

talk about a profiler's goldmine. don't tell me any of you believe google (a for-profit company) wouldn't scan every last email for "marketing" reasons?

peace

What is going on here...

[LostCluster]

One of two situations are true... I'm just not sure which:

A: This is Google's April Fool's prank that they'll fully put on display tomorrow, and somehow a ton of media outlets [google.com] including the NY Times, Reuters, Forbes, Wired News, ZDNet, and Slashdot have all fallen for it hook line and sinker.

=or=

B: Google's really going through with this...

Streamload does this

[sideshow]

My sister downloads 20GB of anime a month using these guys.

http://www.streamload.com

Re:Wahooo

[manual_overide]

so run your own mailserver. I have 14 GB of storage, unlimited email addresses, my own @., minimal spam (spamassassin, and smart management of email accounts)

though i may be skirting the rules of my TOS, my ISP will never know because the server (like the rest of my network) is behind a NAT and a decent firewall.

If you are not on cable, then there are usually no TOS that mention running servers. (the no servers rule is mostly for web/ftp servers anyway)

I'd shut up if I were you

[Sycraft-fu]

Did I say this was all I did? Hell no. This is a minor thing. We've talked about how we want to do it, gotten quotes, and are now ordering hardware. Of coure while with was going on we were still busy doing other things from setting up new systems to making sure the chip fab is working to the every day hand-holding.

Oh, and take a real quick guess as to what we are implementing as our new disk solution. Hint: It has three letters and rhymes with LAN.

Get off your high horse (and get an account, you high and might AC trolls are just dumb) and get a clue. That I mentioned that staff time is one of the costs of an enterprise storage upgrade (it is) does not imply that the staff spends all their time on it. However time I spend on that is time I do not spend rebuilding a system, configuring a sniffer to catch the latest virus, or explaining to a user for the 50th time why not to open an unknown attachment. It is not the major cost of the storage upgrade, but it IS a cost.

By the way, I'm the Windows guy mostly. However storage effects the Windows side too and I'm not such a one-sided tech guy that I also don't understand and work on the UNIX side as well. I simply mention our UNIX storage since it is the reliable part. The storage on the Windows servers is not as reliable. It's RAID 5, but not backed up. The UNIX storage is mapped on Windows domain accounts and users are instructed to use it for important storage.

This would be because our implementation is old, probably older than your company. Our univeristy got in on this shit a LONG time ago. We had a network (albeit a shitty one) when ethernet wasn't even a draft. It used to be UNIX or fuck off in terms of deparment provided systems. There is still a legacy there. We now have extensive Windows support (about 3:1 Windows:UNIX systems) but the reliable big iron remains the UNIX servers. We have, as of yet, not moved to a SAN. Being a university department and therefore of limited funds shapes this as well.

Oh, and it's not like the UNIX system in question just holds disks. It also runs several apps that are too heavy for our Sunblade or shell servers to handle. This isn't a little Ultra-5 with an array attached, it's the heavy duty mini-computer.

Google's previous April Fools jokes

[jesser]

Pigeonrank (2002) [google.com]
Mentalplex (2000) [google.com]

CNN has it on their front page!

[miro2]

They already have "industry analysts" (the guys in the next cubicle) quoted

april fools is the best day!

[Urgo]

Lol I love april fools day. For a list of other sites pulling april fools jokes check out:

http://www.urgo.org/aprilfools.html

Heres the list so far:

www.urgo.org [urgo.org]
mrtwig.net [mrtwig.net]
southparkx.net [southparkx.net]
www.suprnova.org [suprnova.org]
www.cowsponge.com [cowsponge.com]
Google [google.com]

from a vendor of google's...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think this is a joke. The questions we have gotten from them leads me to believe that this is NOT an april fools day joke, but does explain some of the PO's we have gotten lately... I could be wrong, but hey, I'm just an AC.

Re:Wahooo

[LostCluster]

Assuming this is a joke for a moment.. I'm not so sure Google would have wanted this much publicity. PigeonRank was of course done an idea crazy enough that nobody would buy it, but this one's just too close to possible...

Re:What about instant messages when an email arriv

[WebGangsta]

Piece of cake -- incorporate that into the Google toolbar that everyone has already downloaded. (unless Yahoo's toolbar has a pending patent on the concept, in which case you're on your own)