Google's New Big Brother Email Service

infowars.com...

personally i never used google to search for things 'cause i use yahoo...

is this google e-mail good or bad in your opinion???

I don't know. 1 Gig is huge, for freemail. On the other hand, though, they do go through your email to find what you like, and sell that info to spammers.

However, look at the timing. Most free email providers give you 1 to 2 megs of storage. Google is going to give you 1024 megs. Free. My business account, the one my company pays for, has a 10 meg limit per user, with a total of 400 megs of disk space. 1 gig is huge! And...they made this announcement on April 1st...Google likes to joke...

Well I've always used HOTMAIL and Ive never had a problem with them. So I see no need to use google for email, although i always use google for my internet searches.

Targetted advertising which is triggered by words in your email is definately evil, but at the end of the day, they won't be forcing people to use the service.

You will need the one gig of storage just to hold all the advertising.

Lets see, 1 gig times the number of people who may take this offer up = one hell of a lot of hard drives to hold this all. They must be pretty sure this is going to make some money.

I wouldnt use this as my primary email account but I sure will sign up for the disk space! Anyone know of the file attachment size limits though??


Mmm... 1 gigabyte of spam......

PLUS, this may be a way for Google to hold on to some market share while Micro$oft is gearing up to release its own search engine....?

lol, I don't think microsoft will post any threat to google in regards to being the top search engine. as for their email idea, sounds both fishy and not the greatest. its probably going to be a webmail setup, which always sucks when compared to a true email setup where you can use your own client and extra stuff like PGP/GnuPG, and other 3rd party apps to clean, manage and secure your email.

There is some speculation among Internet industry insiders that the Gmail announcement was an elaborate April Fools hoax from Google. Stay tuned.

They talked about this on TechTV's TechLive show and stated that it is DEFINATELY not a hoax... storage prices are super cheap nowdays.... especially if you're buying terrabytes at a time! Details are a little sketchy though.. who knows

I use cableone for email. And yahoo. But I would stop using google if they were sifting through my email. Creepy.

gmail.google.com...

Here you go, its real.

[Edited on 2-4-2004 by SpittinCobra]

But the 4/1 press release is a bit... uh... whimsical www.google.com... "User Complaint About Existing Services Leads Google to Create Search-Based Webmail Search is Number Two Online Activity � Email is Number One; "Heck, Yeah," Say Google Founders And my sales rep from Google has said, "I can't say" with a wink when I asked him about the 4/1 hoax rumors.

Originally posted by SkepticOverlord
But the 4/1 press release is a bit... uh... whimsical

www.google.com...

"User Complaint About Existing Services Leads Google to Create Search-Based Webmail
Search is Number Two Online Activity � Email is Number One; "Heck, Yeah," Say Google Founders

And my sales rep from Google has said, "I can't say" with a wink when I asked him about the 4/1 hoax rumors.

If its a joke, its a good one.

Wonderful!!! LONG LIVE GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGLE!!!!!!

I could not ask for more!!

Hell, I would get it just to get rid of some of the other emails I use for junk and what not. I have myway, excite, yahoo, netscape and comcast.
Why not use it, all my ads are blocked anyway. It's got a spam blocker, what else do you need.
If it's easy to use, I'd be very interested!

update:

" Google Inc. hails its new e-mail service as a breakthrough in online communication, but consumer watchdogs are attacking it as a creepy invasion of privacy that threatens to set a troubling precedent.

Although Google's free "Gmail" service isn't even available yet, critics already are pressuring the popular search engine maker to drop its plans to electronically scan e-mail content so it can distribute relevant ads alongside incoming messages.

Privacy activists worry that Gmail will comb through e-mail more intensively than the filters widely used to weed out potential viruses and spam.

Gmail opponents also want Google to revise a policy that entitles the company to retain copies of people's incoming and outgoing e-mail even after they close their accounts.

The e-mail scanning, which Google says will be handled exclusively by computers, has raised the most alarms, partly because it seeks to capitalize on messages sent by people without Gmail accounts.

Google intends to deliver ads by analyzing what's being discussed. For instance, an e-mail from one friend to another talking about an upcoming trip might include links to hotels or airlines.

Gmail has a "definite creepiness factor," said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google portrays the commercialization of e-mail as a small trade-off for a service that will give each user one gigabyte of storage - up to 500 times more than other leading free services - and provide a quicker, cleaner way to search e-mailboxes. Most e-mail messages opened on Gmail won't even contain ads, according to Google."
the story continues

gmail.google.com...

Residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.

Why would they want to keep a permanent record of your emails for a lifetime except for datamining? What advantage accrues to them to keep all your email?

Not for me, thank you.

i wouldnt mind some spam for 1gig of email space.. as long as they have a seprit folder for it...

and i hope they make it pop3

As some of the details are coming out, privacy groups are becoming more and more concerned.

story.news.yahoo.com.../ap/20040407/ap_on_hi_te/google_mail

Although Google's free "Gmail" service isn't even available yet, critics already are pressuring the popular search engine maker to drop its plans to electronically scan e-mail content so it can distribute relevant ads alongside incoming messages.

Privacy activists worry that Gmail will comb through e-mail more intensively than the filters widely used to weed out potential viruses and spam.

Gmail opponents also want Google to revise a policythat entitles the company to retain copies of people's incoming and outgoing e-mail even after they close their accounts.

The e-mail scanning, which Google says will be handled exclusively by computers, has raised the most alarms, partly because it seeks to capitalize on messages sent by people without Gmail accounts.

And they're going to deliver ads according to what's in the email. Although I'm not that privacy-paranoid, I am considering putting a filter on my accounts that bounces any Gmail, thanks, unless they change their policy.

The gods know I get enough spam already, and the message content on Yahoo groups (where you HAVE to read past the ad to get to the message if it comes into your email) is just plain annoying.

I would use gmail for mailing lists and updates,

if you want to send a personal email and worryed about privasy dont use gmail for that stuff, you should have a good email servis with your isp...

my cable isp has unlimited inbox space, with a siclamer to try to keep the stuff you save on the server to a minimal cuss everyone shares the space, and the stuff u dont save gets saved to your pc HD just make sure you have a good antivirus scanning and updated..