So, what do you think of Gmail?
 

Hey there,

Just a few questions.

For those of you who have Gmail, do you like it?....what do you think of it? I have an account and I really like the "conversation" piece of it. I however don't like the address book that much yet. It's still in Beta though so.......oh well.

For anyone: What do you think of the privacy thing? Is it anything to worry about?

Feel free to post anything here about Gmail. I just wondered, as I've not seen much posted here about it.

On a side note I've been using this nifty little utility called "Gmail Tray" to check my mail for me :)
It's available here . This is of course for Windows only.



Thanks,
D

Since it's General and not a tech question, what is Gmail?

Check out www.gmail.com

It's Google's answer to web based email. They give you 1GB of storage.

Later,
D

Love your nic! I did check it out - how would I get an account?

By nic, do you mean "Fisher of Men"?

Also, You'd have to get an "invite" to get an account.

If I had one I'd give you one.

Thanks,
D

Exactly...

Thanks!

If you want one really bad you can get one at www.gmailswap.com . You'll have to think of something creative to trade :)

If I get any more invites....I'll give you one. I gave away 29 invites after I got my account. Google hasn't given anymore out in the last 2 weeks or so.

Later,
D

Thanks. I'm checking it out now...

Thanks, I did it. I offered the ability to get free from Micro$loth WinDOHS
in exchange for an account. I already have the best email service available,
but always like to check out things like Gmail...

Good deal.

That's a good offer.

I hope you get an invite. It's worth it. I like it very much. :)

See ya round...

A little concerned...

I have to say that after much thought and deliberation.... I am beginning to think that Gmail is not such a good thing.

I'm starting to realize that as a society we've sorta let our guard down as far as privacy goes. It seems that if you use Google to search, and you use Blogger.com to write stuff about your life, and you also use Gmail, that they will know more about you than you would want them to know. I starting to think that all webmail should not be used for anything really important or personal.

I'm starting to feel the same way about Instant Messaging.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I used to be more concerned about security and it seems that I've dropped my guard like everyone else. I need to get back to how I used to be.

Hmm...

______

TBH, i dont care about the whole privacy thing. who gives a shit is someone i dont know reads my email? its not like my life is so deep that people actualy read my personal mail. if i were to plan a terrorist attack or summat, id create my own mailserver with encryption. gmail is great, much better than any competitor.

also, chinaman, you will have a pretty hard time getting invites, google has stoppped giving them to people so they are pretty scarce now.

You didn't exactly ask, but you could check these folks out ->
http://www.cotse.net/home.html

Mei guanxi...

I'm with the Fisherman...there's no free lunch. If they "give you"
1GB of storage, somebody's gotta pay for the hard drives and
bandwidth. I don't subscribe to unkown devils. Not since migrating
from Mirco$loth to Linux. ;}

I have a gmail, and i really like it :) I've also used pop goes the gmail, and its really usefull... I'll have to check out the gmail tray thing.

As for the security, as of now, i am not worried about it, but i could see how it could get scary in the future. For example, if somehow our society changed into a 1984 type thing, and the government didn't like [insert random topic here], things like gmail could be used to "check up" on us. However, i don't think that there is any worry of that anytime soon, unless you sound like a terrorist or something.

What google does, is they provide "revelent" small text adds, that relate to what your message is talking about. I think advertisers like these adds alot more, because they probabally get alot more clicks, and for google, that means more money for them. I wanted to test these adds, so i talked to myself about a wanting a camera, and sure enough, after a couple of messages, there were little text links telling me websites where i could buy cameras. However, i could also see how this could be bad at times, like, if you had a family member die, and then there was a link to a site joking about funreals or something. However, i think google will do something to incorperate more taste than that.

Luckly, I got an invite from a friend right before they stopped giving out invites. I really like gmail so far, I think its really innovative and it has a nice interface. The conversation style aspect of it is pretty sweet too.

As for those who are paranoid about the fact that its free, does that mean that you don't trust Yahoo or Hotmail or any other free e-mail account either? I don't see why you would worry about free e-mail, its nothing new. Although 1000MB of storage is pretty sweet :D

For those worried about security, I'll just say I'm not. Think of how many gmail accounts there are. Now think about how many google staff there are. Do you seriously think that people at Google are going to be digging thru everyone's mailbox out of their own personal curiosity? Of course not! And even if they were the chances that they pick to look at you out of the thousands of other accounts are slim. In fact I thought I read in their TOS that no actual people look at the contents of your inbox. They just have software that parses your e-mail and brings up relevant advertisements (I actually found a couple good sites this way).

All in all, so far my gmail experience has been great. I have zero complaints about the service.

I stopped using my accounts, sent them a message that they could give the space to someone else. I've also switched to Teoma for a search engine, which is pretty good.

It's not so much a loss of privacy issue, or the cookies that expire in 2038, neither of which pleases me, but. it has more to do with their hiring practices and preferences.

First, anyone with Gmail using Linux - get FreePOPs ( http://freepops.sf.net ). POP3-scrapes Gmail, so then you can get alerts and such easily when you get new mail. It also works with the archiving on Gmail. And, of course, Firefox has a Gmail-checking extension as well. http://updates.mozilla.org duh.

I'm using Gmail and love it. I think it's a more sophisticated method of using e-mail (better than e.g. IMAP). The conversation-tracking feature, especially, is really nice (especially how it then hides all those thousands of annoying "> > >" reply lines). Great for all the chain jokes and stuff that everyone always sends around. I agree, the address book could use a little work, but then again, how many features do you need for an e-mail address book? You're not gonna be using it (for most people) to look up people's snail-mail addresses and such.

Privacy - you know how many bots are out there scanning everything on the internet and 'reading' it. It's the exact same thing with Gmail. A computer scans your e-mail for keywords and gives you non-obtrusive ads based on it. And why is everyone so worried about Google getting data from your e-mails? They'd find out more about you from all the searches that you do on Google, as well as the page referral info passed on by your browser. And let's not leave out the Google Toolbar for IE - that thing reads what every single webpage that you look at is in order to look it up for its pagerank to display. Personally, I find Yahoo's method of putting adds at the end of every single e-mail you send to be a much worse invasion of privacy. And Google tells you exactly what it's going to be doing in all the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions. They aren't hiding anything.

Considering that this is the average person's perception of "privacy", a 1984 style world wouldn't be too far.

someone should create fmail (free mail) which could have all of gmails cool features but is an opensource webmail thingy, alternative to squirelmail kind of thing.