Google's Sergey Brin Talks on Gmail's Future 203
de la mettrie writes "Sergey Brin of Google has been discussing the future of GMail in a recent eWeek article. He says that the ongoing beta test will likely take about six months, and that the implementation of mail forwarding, POP access, mail encryption and even RSS feeds is being considered."
For more answers (Score:5, Funny)
Sergey Brin = worse than Saddam? (Score:2, Funny)
a) he has my dream job
b) he defined what my dream job would be
c) he thought of cool stuff before me
d) he has more stuff than me
I don't mind Bill Gates much despite his money because his company and his ideas are mundane and never very exciting. Oh sure, I'd like to have a mountain fortress with helipads and scuba tunnels, and I guess it would have been OK if I'd come up with the Windows
Don thy Tinfoil Hat. (Score:5, Funny)
already slashdotted, here's the text:
Steve Gillmor
Sergey Brin
Gillmor
Brin
Gillmor
Brin
Gillmor
Brin
Gillmor
Brin
Gillmor
Brin
Gillmor
Brin
Re:Don thy Tinfoil Hat. (Score:3, Funny)
So Microsoft aren't passing mails through the NSA filters? When did they stop?
google isn't evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Encryption support... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Encryption support... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Encryption support... (Score:3, Insightful)
Secondly, its good to see an industry leader take on encryption. MS, hotmail, yahoo, etc have all largely ig
Re:Encryption support... (Score:2)
Re:Encryption support... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Encryption support... (Score:3, Interesting)
Six months? (Score:2, Interesting)
POP? (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, after reading the article, I see that they are also planning to offer imap, but still, pop makes no sense to me for a webmail.
Re:POP? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:POP? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not?
I use Mozilla for my email, but when I download it I leave it on the server until it's deleted. That way I have it on my home computer, but I can still get to it through the web interface if I'm not at home.
Of course, I tend to have to go and clear out old emails every so often..
Deleting messages? (Score:5, Informative)
Is it possible to delete messages, or does everything continue to reside in AllMail?
Oh, no, no, that was just poor wording on our part. It's just that we make a variety of backups, and we can't guarantee instantaneous deletion. Stuff that's on tapes, and those are offline--we eventually delete it, but we can't guarantee an instantaneous deletion.
The question would be whether or not somebody could feel confident that if they wanted to delete something that it would eventually be deleted.
Yes, eventually it will be deleted.
Happy Trails!
Erick
Re:Deleting messages? (Score:2)
The solution? It simple, just configure the backup system to always put the email system on the same set of tapes and to overwrite those tapes after 1 week.
This way, if somebody deletes a message, they have 1 week
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
as a general rule with reguards to email, as long as you have an established policy that states what is kept and for how long, one is safe from anybody who asks for stuff that is older than the retention policy. (but if you are caught changing that policy as a reaction to a request, one is in deep trouble).
There are exceptions, mostly in the financial industry (all written communications must be kept for 3 years, that includes em
Re:Deleting messages? (Score:2)
Which means, a message saved on any part of the tape cycle won't be fully deleted until the entire tape cycle is completed. Since they're not going to release how often they're going to do a full backup tape, they also can't release how long it takes for tapes to get flushed out of their cycle...
Re:Deleting messages? (Score:2)
Best thing since 1998 Hotmail (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail (Score:4, Funny)
This is Slashdot. We are all set if and only if that IM is Jabber based and the client can run on *IX, GNU/Linux, *BSD...
Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail (Score:2)
BTW, why SSH home and use Lynx when you can CGIProxy over SSL home and use (insert browser that you can use at work), or VNC over SSH and use (insert favorite browser)?
Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail (Score:3, Funny)
In Russia, the screenshots were you!
Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail (Score:4, Interesting)
It simply works, it doesn't have any flashy ads to bother you, and it's FAST!
I'm also lucky enough to have an account, and one interesting thing is their heavy usage of Javascript to generate the pages. Your inbox is basically an HTML page linking to a Javascript file and containing one block of Javascript code used to generate all the elements on the screen, and assuming the Javascript file is cached, checking your email should be blazing fast. It works perfectly fine with Firefox too!
Google's User Interface (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Google's User Interface (Score:2)
Re:Google's User Interface (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Google's User Interface (Score:2)
Just to take an opposite view.
Re:Google's User Interface (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article [eweek.com]:
Steve Gillmor: It also compares favorably to my corporate e-mail.
Sergey Brin: Well, thank you. There are some things that it is currently missing as compared to corporate e-mail--for example, disconnected operation--though we do plan to provide things like POP3 and IMAP support, which should help that.
If they implement IM I hope they go the Jabber [jabber.org] route.
How did they pick beta testers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How did they pick beta testers? (Score:2, Insightful)
but there is no place where you can "apply" for beta testing...
btw... the usernames for @gmail.com have to be minimum 6 characters
Re:How did they pick beta testers? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How did they pick beta testers? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How did they pick beta testers? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How did they pick beta testers? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How did they pick beta testers? (Score:2)
Re:How did they pick beta testers? (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:How did they pick beta testers? (Score:2)
Re:How did they pick beta testers? (Score:2)
Google Messenger? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Google Messenger? (Score:2)
Dear Mr. Brin, now that we're providing webmail services, don't you feel that a Google Messenger should be in order?
What would be neat is if they integrated Google Messenger service with Gmail. Messages sent to you when you're offline can be transformed into emails, and perhaps maybe even messages in an individual messenger session can be logged to a Gmail folder.
Re:Google Messenger? (Score:2)
Could Google Kill Spam? (Score:5, Funny)
Given the bright minds over there, I have to wonder. Unfortunately for me, I don't think I'd qualify for even a junior janitor trainee position at their offices (I think he's doing particle physics research in his spare time).
Re:Could Google Kill Spam? (Score:2)
Free Lunch? (Score:5, Insightful)
I love google but (Score:4, Insightful)
If - as someone remarked - google goes public that is not the same as google being owned by th e public. It simply means that there will be that much more pressure on them to make cash. Buying stock in an IPO is not to be equated with supporting that company, it simply gives them cash to pursue their business in return for a small piece of the pie.
It would be nice if there was a public - not for profit - alternative to google.
Re:I love google but (Score:3, Insightful)
The truth is though, all that bandwidth costs money. Programmers typically want paid. Hardware breaks and electricity is most often not free. I know a non-profit organization still makes money to cover these costs but I don't see the need for anything more than dmoz if that's what you want.
Re:I love google but (Score:3, Interesting)
mightbe freeshell.org
non-profit company provides email (pop, webmail, pine) access.
all it cost is $1 for 20MB....they also give webspace, and general ssh and telnet access.
amazing shit...
but your right non-profit indexing of the web is needed
Re:I love google but (Score:3, Informative)
As for non-profit indexing of the web, look to the Nutch project, and Directory Mozilla (aka the Open Directory, which is used as Google Directory).
Re:I love google but (Score:3, Insightful)
spam? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. have every single user on the internet signing up
2. singlehandedly save email itself from progressively encroaching social irrelevancy
on gmail and spam filtering (Score:3, Informative)
At the moment, gmail's spam filter isn't all that great allowing maybe 50% through. I figure this is probably because their filter hasn't had enough training yet, not enough users etc. And they make it easy to report the spam by just checking off the messages and clicking "Report As Spam".
So I'm not too bummed, but don't get your hopes up on gmail saving the wo
Why always Hotmail? (Score:4, Informative)
I mean,
My email provider offers pop3, imap, 12 mb storage (well, that's not much, if you pay, you get more), email forwarding etc. (some stuff I don't use, like sms when you get email). Of course, all for free and quite reliable for 3 years now.
So why always Hotmail?
Re:Why always Hotmail? (Score:2)
Re:Why always Hotmail? (Score:2)
It does? I access HoTMaiL all the time and it never tells me to switch.
Re:Why always Hotmail? (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe your browser "disguises" as Internet Explorer? Or they're especially proud of their IE, Mac Version (which is stuck at version 5.2)...
Re:Here's the link (Score:2)
It's really strange that in discussions about GMail, it is mentioned, at all, that it will be better than Hotmail. Hotmail is one of the worst big free e-mail services. It doesn't mean much if an e-mail service is significantly bet
Re:Why always Hotmail? (Score:2)
Yet more testing notes (Score:4, Informative)
In summary - WHOA, keyboard shortcuts!
Hey! (Score:2)
Nope that's not Sergey, that's the interviewer! Is this guy interviewing him or working for him?
Re:Hey! (Score:2)
What a pointless idea. The index contains almost all the data contained in the store (excepting maybe stop words). and besides, the store needs to be decrypted to render the messages as HTML. So how would this brain-dead idea provide *any* privacy whatsoever? OK, so it might protect against an evil sys
Which one is Sergey? (Score:2)
The privacy concerns are overrated. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The privacy concerns are overrated. (Score:2)
OK, maybe Google isn't evil now, but what if Microsoft were to buy them out? And whose to say going public won't pressure them to derive as much $$$ out of their data as possible? Anonymous ad fetching could only be the beginning. Yes you have to trust your mail provider, but the sheer scale of Google's service is what scares people. That is, it's not just your mail they
Re:The privacy concerns are overrated. (Score:2)
Privacy invasion is a lot like being attacked by a hacker: yes the potential is out there. But what
Everything and a bag of chips (Score:3, Interesting)
Google looks to be doing the same thing. They're not just emulating what's already out there but going way above and beyond. They've already got all the basic features that people expect implemented and a few toys. 6 Months gives them plenty of time to go further to give people that last push they needed to move over to GMail vs whatever they're currently using.
One can expect that MS is already at work figuring out a battle plan to counter this. Or maybe they're just expecting GMail to fail financially because they think they're overselling themselves into debt.
MS knows how much it costs to run their service which offers significantly less and has a number of caps in place. Not just storage but also the number of e-mails you can send per day. Hotmail is also ad supported.
I can imagine that MS has something cooking but they're not going to do anything until they see what happens to Google. If Google becomes too popular they may be forced to sell premium accounts that have the extra bells and whistles.
Ben
I switched over to using Gmail exclusively (Score:4, Informative)
Setting up Gmail was trivial - just forwarded email from my domain name. It is a little strange using a web based email system but because it uses a Mozilla plugin it is really more like a fat client. I find that the convenience of getting my email from any computer I am using outweighs any hassles of a web interface.
Oddly enough, I don't use the search capability very often, but it does work well. I like the way threads are organized in "conversations" and a new email to a "conversation" moves the entire conversation to the top of the Inbox.
-Mark
Re:I switched over to using Gmail exclusively (Score:2)
About the "ad" concern (Score:2)
So I've been using gmail now and guess what.. I've not seen the text ads on most of my emails (I'm being completely honest here). In fact, none of my personal emails have any ads on the side.
Guess where the ads are? I bought a couple of things on buy.com and ebags.com and when I got the confirmation emails from them, I saw related ads on the side. Did I notice them? no, I saw th
Re:About the "ad" concern (Score:3, Interesting)
I signed up for my GMail account on yesterday and there certainly are VERY unobtrusive text ads (similar to the ones used on Google Search) on the right hand side of the page. Perhaps older GMail accounts don't have this though. Either way, they are extremely unobtrusive and don't effect the experience at all. I wish
No de Icaza lawsuit? (Score:2)
Miguel, at the very least, a frivolous lawsuit will get you more slashdot stories than Gnome and mono combined. Compare SCO stories pre and post lawsuit for verification.
You are currently using 27 MB (3%) of your 1000 MB (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Six months? (Score:5, Insightful)
What are they building a space shuttle?
No, they're building a massive, wide area distributed email system with vast amounts of storage. I doubt they'd want to tarnish their name, especially with an IPO pending, by going live with a buggy system. If you can shave a few months off that, I'm sure you could have a good career at Google.
Re:Six months? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Six months? (Score:3, Insightful)
*Getting usibility information from the beta testers.
*Assessing their ad-placement algorithms.
*Trying to see how the email will work on their distributed systems.
*Hashing through privacy concerns, see if there are ways to alleviate them.
And I'm sure there's more that others could think of that they'd be testing...
Re:Six months? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google's beta tests for search, groups, Froogle all took closer to a year.
Assuming that they have completed internal testing six months is a very very long period to do beta tests.
The problem with internal testing is that you can never account for the wide variety of things that users will do to your site. Your QA team may come up with a great set of tests, but for every functional part of your site, your users will be able to make it break in a dozen different ways.
Re:Six months? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Six months? (Score:2)
Huh?
java != javascript
Re:Six months? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Six months? (Score:2)
OK, I'm with you. I misread the comment and thought you were making a direct comparison. My bad.
Re:Six months? (Score:2)
Re:Six months? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) RAR file
2) Split into 29.9 MB segments
3) Write scripts that interface with Gmail
4) Register 15 accounts
5) Free Storage.
Also, they limit attachement size, but do they limit body size? would it be possible to UUencode the whole thing and stick it as the message text?
Re:Six months? (Score:2)
"Attachments" are basically the same thing, except that most mail clients know how to parse MIME extensions and only show parts that are intended to be human-readable. If you looked at it with a very old pre-MIME MTA you'd basically see a message with Base-64 (or quoted) text that form the "attachments". A logical way for them to handle things would be to limit
Re:Six months? (Score:2)
Yes, they do. They limit the total size of an email to be 10 MB which includes the text and (if any) attachments.
Re:Six months? (Score:2)
Re:Six months? (Score:2)
IE Only! Are you smoking Crack? (Score:2, Informative)
The difference between GMail and an application is that you can check it anywhere. I've used Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, and they both pale in comparison. I now have a GMail account, and its fantastic. Its well designed, very int
Re:Six months? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they're building a product that they hope will dislodge MSN Hotmail from its dominant position. Hotmail gets at least 145 million visitors [microsoft.com] per month, and Microsoft poured money into Hotmail for eight years before it became profitable.
Microsoft can afford to pour money down a hole until something becomes profitable. Google can't. So Google has to get it right the first time and make Gmail a much better product right out of the gate in order to combat Microsoft's built-in advantages as the owner of the OS and the browser that most people use.
Re:Six months? (Score:2, Insightful)
Heck, how long did it take for those inbreds to just start USING Google search ? WE THE NERDS had to change their start page to Google.com because they were still using the default MSN page. And then we had to teach them how to use a fricking SEARCH ENGINE.
Gmail is cool, but they won't steal many Hotmail users. They earn a whole bunch of new users though, as well as us geeks who typically ru
Re:Six months? (Score:2, Interesting)
Give me a break. Good software companies spend time to test their product: user testing, functionality testing. Google is very careful to test features before the roll out to the world. Given the size and breadth of the GMail product, this isn't that long.
It makes me think of The Simpsons episode where Moe turns his bar into a family restaurant, and he buys a surplus Navy deepfryer that he says can flash fry a buffalo in 40 seconds. Home responds, "Forty seconds? But I want it now."
I expect that if you
Re:Six months? (Score:4, Informative)
I have to wait six months to get an account :(
Nyah nyah! I have one! :-p It's actually not too tough to get an account. You just have to be acquainted with someone at Google. If you're on Orkut, it shouldn't be a problem to find someone who's less than a few degrees of separation from you who works at Google.
Also, six months is hardly a long time for a beta test. This is an absolutely enormous task they're undertaking. It's not like they're just installing IMP on a server or something. Gmail is also still very far from being ready for public consumption. I send bug reports and feature requests in constantly for things that are IMHO absolutely necessary for a full email experience.
Orkut invite code. (Score:2)
Re:Six months? (Score:2)
Re:Rush! (Score:3, Informative)
Warning - Do Not Click Link (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:i dont understand (Score:3, Interesting)
Because Google is run by people who, not only love technology, but actually understand technology. These guys are technologists first and businesspeople second. They've created a geek playground, set their geeks free, and watched them play. The result of that play is what we love about Google.
That might all change once they go public. I hope that it doesn't but pouring buckets of money at people tends to oftentimes ha
If only it was IMAP, you wouldn't need ...... (Score:4, Interesting)
Since 1990 IMAP had a "search unseen" feature (See http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1176.html [faqs.org] which enabled clients to easily broaden and narrow searches easily (see Pine for a good implementation).
I currently have about 1GB across a few IMAP folders at my ISP; and can search the hole think quickly and efficiently using '90's technology.
I don't see the big deal.