The Google email account thing

[dvd_master]

Hey, I'm curious as to what the front page meant when it said the Google news was raising some warning alarms.

I saw it on CNN news last night (March 31st) so I am ready to argue that it is, in fact true. It was on that ticker thing at the bottom of CNN with more minor news, or recaps for those who missed the headlines.

This is not a stupid April Fool's day joke, I seriously mean that it was announced. I'm thrilled. I can finally ditch Hotmail.

[wmansir]

The thing is 1 GB of data storage is a ridiculous amount of storage for a company to provide for free. Think about it. Hotmail has 80+ million accounts. If Gmail were to be as popular it would need 250,000 320GB drives to meet the demand. A 320GB drive goes for about $300 US minimum right now. Let's say Google gets an unheard of 33% discount. That's $50 MILLION in just HD costs alone. That doesn't include the costs of thousands of servers needed, technicians, bandwidth, ect.

I think it's a hoax, but it's a pretty good one. 1. It is getting main stream press, but they are sometimes very stupid. 2. They have a lot of info put up, including a good sized terms of service document which looks legit on first read. 3. the Drudgereport is reporting that the LA Times is going to run a story about some concerns over Gmails "computer reading" of emails to target advertisement, but like I said the press can be stupid sometimes.

[Wilbert]

I saw it on Ars. Good one! To bad that they didn't make it more realistic :)

[wmansir]

This story (http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2004/4/2/technology/7686051&sec=technology) says it isn't a joke, and they have a quote from a VP saying they got a little carried away when writing up the press announcement.

I'm not buying it yet, but still it is April 2nd...

Also, if you followed the developments yesterday you would see that it was a very hectic time for Gmail. I think Google just acquired the Gmail.com url a few days ago. The site was unavailable when the news first hit. Then it was just the Gmail logo and the words "coming soon!", then a few hours later they put up some content. If this was an actual product launch, it was very poorly executed.

EDIT: spelling.

[avih]

well, gmail.com now redirects to gmail.google.com, which is a login screen, but no sign up options.... although there's an 'about/faq' page, and u can leave your email to get more details when there are some.

i read about it in the register (or the inquirer?), sounds like a logical move except for the 1G stuff.. although $50M, or even $200M are way within google's abilities, and it MIGHT have huge revenues. who knows. i know i'll register an account if i could.

if it's a hoax, it's a damn good one ;)

[avih]

seems it's for real (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15121) afterall. good. very good :)

[Neo Neko]

It's true. No one said they are going to be using IDE HD to store all this so it is not going to cost as much for them to do this as some people are saying. Second they can offer a gig and get by with a lot less for a long time. Who is actually going to use a Gb? Probably very few people. Second in signing up to use the account you give them the right to search your email and bundle relivent advertising. [Not that GPG would not stop most of that.] Finally this is google. They don't charge their customers anything, have yet to IPO and make as much money as the big boys. Oh and how much space does 1Gb of text take up when zipped?

I mean my fusemail account says I have 20Gb of space. But I don't know If I will ever use 1/100 of it.

[temporance]

Maybe they have some pretty neat compression technology. 500M of ASCII should already compress pretty well. But imagine they have the same email (e.g. a joke) in the inbox of 10,000 users. They only need to store it once. So worse case, someone stores a single e-mail with a 500MB DivX home movie attachement. Best case someone has 500MB of junk forwarded jokes and circulars. Would compress to 1MB if they're lucky!

[wmansir]

Originally posted by Neo Neko
It's true. No one said they are going to be using IDE HD to store all this so it is not going to cost as much for them to do this as some people are saying. Second they can offer a gig and get by with a lot less for a long time. Who is actually going to use a Gb? Probably very few people. Second in signing up to use the account you give them the right to search your email and bundle relivent advertising. [Not that GPG would not stop most of that.] Finally this is google. They don't charge their customers anything, have yet to IPO and make as much money as the big boys. Oh and how much space does 1Gb of text take up when zipped?

I mean my fusemail account says I have 20Gb of space. But I don't know If I will ever use 1/100 of it.

What are they going to use? Tape? IDE HDs have become extremely affordable, especially considering this data needs to be 100% on demand. I just used retail IDE drive prices as a minimum base, whatever enterprise class solution they use will cost several times more.

But I admit, prices will drop, they don't need near that capacity at launch time, and they expect most users to use a small fraction of their allocated capacity.

[Atamido]

There are several ways that they can save money with this:

1. Not many people are going to use 1GB of storage.

2. Compression of emails should be high for everything except binary attachments.

3. They can limit the maximum message size people can send/receive. (Hotmail/MSN does this. You can't send a message over like 2MB is size) If people can't send/receive a 500MB divx file, it will be harder to fill the account.

4. Limiting transfer bandwidth. Nobody wants to transfer a 500MB file at 2KB/sec.

5. No POP3 access also makes it more difficult to transfer large files.


If I had to guess, I would say the biggest cost would be the backup costs. You are talking about hardware RAID5 + Tape backup most likely. And neither of those are very cheap.

[wmansir]

Originally posted by Pamel
There are several ways that they can save money with this:
3. They can limit the maximum message size people can send/receive. (Hotmail/MSN does this. You can't send a message over like 2MB is size) If people can't send/receive a 500MB divx file, it will be harder to fill the account.



I heard it was a 10MB limit per message.

It might seem hard to fill up 1 GB, but if you have a digital camera (which many people do) it adds up quickly if you get into sharing pictures with friends (and not bothering to resize because, heck you got a gig).

[Neo Neko]

Even for sharing digital photos email is rather awfull. Last I heard it was extremely bad nettiquet To send a single email with large attachments. Which even over broadband a single 3 megapixel image or even a 1.3 Mpi would be seen as large. Even back in the day only morons used email as a file transfer system. So anyone who does it with gmail is likely to get what's coming to them. The odd email attachment is fine. But it should never be used regularly as such. It was never meant to be. If that is what you want to do use the protocol that email was derived from.

But even if people do use it as online photostorrage there is a way to overcome them. Have all images stored in accounts on the server be resampled. Something like those socalled dial up accelerators do. Make em look like ass and take up very little space. Quality 3 JPEG anyone?:devil:

[Wilbert]

On the surface, it sounds like a wow idea. You get one gigabyte of storage and don't pay a copper cent in return.

Guess how they are going to pay it? They will violate your privacy by scanning your mail. This is done, in order to add ads-shit to it for making money:

Google plans to make money from the service by inserting advertisements into messages based in part on their content, effectively extending its AdWords program for presenting contextual ads in Web pages to e-mail.

references:
http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5182805.html?tag=nl
http://news.com.com/2010-1032-5183646.html?tag=nl
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5184090.html?tag=nefd_top

[avih]

i don't think it has more privacy issues than a good relevant web ad. i don't think anyone is actually going to read my emails there any more than on any other webmail. and i don't look at ads anyway. i also don't think the subliminal message is going to hurt me ;) yahoo put ads as well, so at least they're now going to be relevant. at least it's more interesting :)

and while we're at targeted ads, what ads will some terorists swapping emails on gmail get?? "Get Flight simulator today at 30% off"? ;)

[mf]

Originally posted by Wilbert
Guess how they are going to pay it? They will violate your privacy by scanning your mail. This is done, in order to add ads-shit to it for making money
So? This is a machine tailoring ads to your context. I don't have many emails that I don't want anyone else to read, and the ones that I don't want read I couldn't really care about anyone I don't know reading (and I care even less about machines). And regarding the law, they have no foot to stand on might they find something that breaks the law, if they claim to only use the info for adserving.

[Neo Neko]

Originally posted by Wilbert
Guess how they are going to pay it? They will violate your privacy by scanning your mail. This is done, in order to add ads-shit to it for making money:

Stricly speaking how is it a violation of privacy if you agree to let them do this?[see terms of usage] Second since when was the average email considdered private?[Last I knew it was rather trivial to set up a relay to pull in traffic. And Email is plain text after all. Then there is the carnivore program.] The only types of email that are remotely private are those encrypted with schemes like PGP or GNUPG. And guess what! If you use PGP or GNUPG Gmail will be every bit as private as your regular ISP mail!! Using them the only ads you are likely to see are those relating to PGP or encryption. :p

[wmansir]

Originally posted by Neo Neko
Even for sharing digital photos email is rather awfull. Last I heard it was extremely bad nettiquet To send a single email with large attachments. Which even over broadband a single 3 megapixel image or even a 1.3 Mpi would be seen as large. Even back in the day only morons used email as a file transfer system.

But there are a lot of morons out there :)

I remember seeing an MSN TV ad the other day where a father was "showing" his kids how to attach a picture to email, and talking about how cool and easy it was. Meanwhile the two kids are like "yeah, we know dad!" and giving each other funny looks.

All us net savvy folks know that attachments are just for viruses. ;)

Originally posted by mf
And regarding the law, they have no foot to stand on might they find something that breaks the law, if they claim to only use the info for adserving.

As long as they make it clear in there Terms of Service agreement I don't know why they would have to skirt the law. It's only illegal to intercept communications if the person has an expectation of privacy. Since they are telling you they will read your mail when you sign up, you can't have an expectation of privacy. Of course anyone who knows how email works will tell you not to have an expectation of privacy regardless when it comes to email.

[mf]

Originally posted by wmansir
As long as they make it clear in there Terms of Service agreement I don't know why they would have to skirt the law. It's only illegal to intercept communications if the person has an expectation of privacy. Since they are telling you they will read your mail when you sign up, you can't have an expectation of privacy. Of course anyone who knows how email works will tell you not to have an expectation of privacy regardless when it comes to email. That's not what I mean. I mean it's the same as running windows update with a pirated windows, because microsoft claims no data is being sent to microsoft (hypothetically), if that actually is the case, they can't sue you for a pirated windows version, because the info they acquired was unlawful. If google however claims that the data can be read by any google employee (instead of strictly for ad tailoring), then they CAN actually inform authorities of illegal activities that have been spotted through reading a user's email. That was what I meant.

[wmansir]

Originally posted by mf
That's not what I mean. I mean it's the same as running windows update with a pirated windows, because microsoft claims no data is being sent to microsoft (hypothetically), if that actually is the case, they can't sue you for a pirated windows version, because the info they acquired was unlawful. If google however claims that the data can be read by any google employee (instead of strictly for ad tailoring), then they CAN actually inform authorities of illegal activities that have been spotted through reading a user's email. That was what I meant.

You are right. As long as one party consents (Google in this case) the authorities, or anyone they choose for that matter, can monitor a users activity on the site, which would naturally include any email read or sent.

[Doobie]

Even if it cost $50 million to have as many users as Hotmail but with a gig per person, Google has the cash. But, I bet it won't even cost five million. Between compression and rapidly falling costs of HDD space, by the time they have millions of users with hundreds of megs each, HDD space will be pennies per gig. Even at current prices, if Google can make just a single buck off of each user over several years, Google will be making good money.

And, no, I doubt Google will do cheesy stuff like limit email sizes to make it difficult to fill up a gig. Why should they when HDD space is so cheap?

They could even have a handful of tape drives with multible cassettes that hold hundreds of terabytes per unit for pennies per gig.

The real mystery is why isn't everyone offering a gig of email space, especially the non-free services.

[Neo Neko]

Why would free services offer 1Gb when the email services we pay for [yeah time warner i'm talking to you] offer a pittiful amount of space to their users. And they are getting paid good money.