Google's Gmail Goes Into Beta for Blogger Users

deadpixel writes "Gmail, the 1gb webmail service offered by Google, has gone into beta. Blogger (owned by google) users have first crack at the service. Besides the massive storage, the free service boasts a sophisticated spam filter, no pop-ups/banners, and gives you search results relevant to the emails you receive automatically. Bring on those attachments!"

Details?

[salimma]

Is Google contacting Blogger users, or are all Blogger users eligible to be beta testers? I have a Blogger account and I can't log in to GMail..

1gig?

[RobertTaylor]

"1 000 megabytes = 0.9765625 gigabytes"

says google. [google.co.uk]

Re:You need to be an active blogger

[netsharc]

Wow, I got in too! I feel so special! :) Haha.. and I don't even blog that often.

Hmm, it doesn't work with Opera, so I told Opera to fake being IE, but it needs ActiveX enabled on IE.. oh well, better load up Mozilla.

Jealous? Are you serious?

[fleener]

Jealous? We're supposed to live the hype and get excited about.... web e-mail? Just because it's provided by Google?

So far the only perk I've heard is 1GB storage. My computer has that, and when my broadband goes down, I can still access my stored mail. I'm getting by fine with the <1GB storage my existing free web mail account offers.

What other perks? Ads inserted into e-mails? No thanks. I don't need that intrusion.

Re:You need to be an active blogger

[boredMDer]

I haven't blogged in...wow, 2 months I guess, and I had the ad when I signed in.

Sadly, I've moved to LJ.

But yes, haven't blogged in a while, merely logged in to get a GMail account, and the ad was there.

Possibilities

[Denial93]

Can a beta tester please tell if the sending of very large attachments from one Gmail account to another is reasonably fast? Also, what is the maximum attachment size?

I don't think anyone knows yet what Google does with a new account that holds a single mail with a very large, PGP-encrypted attachment that curiously is accessed and downloaded from a wide range of different IPs, but if so, please tell.

How about those ad?

[The Mutant]

How to get them?

I've got a gmail account (thanks to Blogger), and also have a Google AdWords account.

I've been sending mail to my gmail account from another account, and including things that I thought *should* trigger a Google text ad - one of mine, no less and keywords that certainly do trigger a text ad from the main Google search page - dont. I haven't seen one yet.

During the Beta are they inhibiting the textads?

Anyone see an ad in the wild yet?

Gmail vs. Spymac

[cks3]

I set up one Gig accounts on both Gmail and SpyMac that I've had people sending attachments and emails to to see how they hadnle reaching a GIG. so far, Gmail is only up to 127MB and SpyMac is only at 27MB (but their servers would seem to be a day behind on listing my new email). So far, I have discovered that Gmail's spam filter has caught one actual spam message, and suddenly blocked 5 of 15 messages from one person with no clear reason why. Also, the ad bots only scan the body text of the emails, as all attachment only emails have been ad free. [e-mail] and [e-mail] if you are interested in contributing to the experiment.

I signed up and read the TOS

[saitoh]

And while it states that they will can your account for sending and using your address to receive illicit information in one form or another, I'm tempted to push the envelope (since I dont need the account, I've got an edu account which is better for me).

As much as P2P has been demonized, there is one content that I can think of that is legal, and distrabution is encouraged, and thats concert recordings of bands that allow taping (see etree.org for more info). Each show typically runs between 700MB-> 1.5GB since its done in a lossless compressiong scheme.

So whats stopping me from having people get GMail accounts and then doing a CC to everyone who wants a show and doing a mass mailing (even if its broken into chunks).

I'm not looking for a technical answer, I'm curious about a legal one. (and thus, /. is the wrong place to ask. ;-p) The reason is, whats stopping people from using this for legal functions, but not the intended storage purpose as originally "intended".

They're there

[rebelcool]

but not on every message. Interestingly, messages that once have had ads usually always will so its not like they come and go. But other messages don't trigger them.

Using the text of an entire message for ads requires a bit more computing than just a search query, so maybe they're trying to keep those down while in beta.

They're about as good as the ones for the regular search engine. I'm looking at a conversation i'd been having about jobs and internships and the ads it displayed were related to those.

Safari not supported?

[rfernand79]

Interesting, GMail currently does not support Safari. https://gmail.google.com/gmail/browser_requirement s.html You get a message on the sign in box saying that you can log in anyway, but your browser is not supported.

Outbound Adverts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've followed GMail with some interest. What I'd like to know, and hopefully a Beta-tester can tell me, is are there adverts added to your outbound mail? Hotmail, for example, adds a one line MSN/Hotmail ad as a signature to everything.

Are Google doing this?

Also, if anyone is offered an account that they don't want I'd hate to see it go to waste.

shaun.lownes(a)lycos.co.uk

Re:Possibilities

[Chris Pimlott]

I was wondering about this; I recall way back when in the "hacker days of AOL", there a AOL warez scene that functioned via email. Someone would make a mail and upload as many programs as possible as attachments. Then they'd forward a copy to anyone who was interested. Because it was all done on AOLs internal mail system, it didn't have to transfer a new copy of the attachments to each person. You could send hundreds of megabytes to dozens of people instantly. A neat trick.

I wonder if something like this would be possible on GMail. Sure, a gig isn't what it used to be in terms of the sizes of modern games, movies and music, but it's enough for a lot of things.

Re:How about those ad?

[STrinity]

The ads appear immediately to the right of the message body, though if the system doesn't detect any keywords to trigger an ad, the space remains blank. And for those wondering, encrypted messages don't trigger ads.

Re:Privacy is not my main concern with Gmail

[Aero Leviathan]

Yes but no. I also have Firefox with Adblock. Do a google for oh, say, linux [google.com], and look to the right. You still see sponsored links. That's because when the ads appear on Google itself, they are not in a separate iframe--Google has control over its own pages, so it can just server-side include them (or however they do it).

Whether or not PGP will work with gmail is another issue as well..

Disclaimer: I'm not actually bothered by gmail's policies either, just pointing stuff out

Re:Privacy is not my main concern with Gmail

[OldSchoolNapster]

Why do you block Google's ads? They are relevent and, since they are text, unintrusive. I will never click on a popup or animated banner and I do my best to block them. I do click on Google's ads if for nothing else than to throw a little money (that isn't mine) their way. Well done, Google.

See...

[Kjella]

I've been making a small tool using DHTML and the only problem so far has been with IE which always complain "There is a problem loading the page" despite the fact that it loads it successfully.

...that's the problem, someone else has figured out how to write to our standard. Time to embrace and extend, not to mention upgrade our webdesigner tools ;) On a more serious note, DHTML support is a good thing. There's only this much you can do with static HTML.

Kjella

Expectation of Privacy

[Syre]

What privacy advocates have objected to about Gmail is that, by scanning mail and displaying an ad next to it, the service reduces the "expectation of privacy".

"Reasonable expectation of privacy" is a legal term which, among other things, influences what the courts allow the government to do when snooping on people without a warrent.

For examples of this, look for instance at the case law surrounding trash [floridadetectives.com].

The courts have ruled that it's perfectly OK for law enforcement agencies to pick through your trash because people do not have an "expectation of privacy" when they throw things away.

The danger with Gmail is that it starts to erode the generally-held idea that it is wrong for anyone to read someone else's email. Sure, it's just software and sure, no one is actually reading it. But the contextual ads may give the impression that the mail is read, therefore allowing the courts to rule later that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in email, and allowing the government to snoop through your mail at will.

This isn't coming tomorrow, but it's one of the main objections privacy advocates have to Gmail. Similar sentiments from other privacy advocacy groups are expressed in this article [msn.com]

Re:Well, when you put it like that...

[Arker]

Thanks. It's rare to see someone actually follow through on a statement like that here on slashdot.

The problem the committees tried to solve with their new terminology is a real one, and I don't want to minimise that. Most people using computers these days don't even know what binary means, and as the powers go higher, the difference between the binary and the decimal interpretation increases. The potential for confusion is great. And if their terminology had been used from the start it would make sense. But the fact is it hasn't, we've got over 30 years of tradition using the binary terms, and for some committee to think they can simply redefine them by fiat is irritating to say the least. Given that the the usage is already well supported and entrenched, not to mention that the binary values are the natural groupings of bytes which make sense in the areas where they are used, I would propose instead of trying to redefine kilobyte as 1,000 bytes and make up a new term (kilo-binary-byte aka kibibyte) for what we already call a kilobyte, they should make up new terms for the less useful values instead (perhaps decimal-kilo-byte aka dekilobyte for 1,000 bytes.) As it is, their proposal is being mostly ignored, causing even more confusion than existed before they tried to remedy the situation, and about the only folks that seem to get anything good from it as far as I can see are the hard drive manufacturers, who get a handy excuse to continue inflating their drive capacity numbers.