Gmail
April 1st is a bad time to be announcing a service that sounds too good to be true, particularly by a company with a history of playing jokes on April Fool’s Day.
But Google’s “GMail”:http://gmail.google.com/ looks like the real deal to me. According to the “press release”:http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gmail.html Gmail will offer 1GB of space per user (compared with less than 10MB for competing services) which will allow most people to simply keep all the email they send and receive without regard to storage limits - and then leave it to Google’s great search capabilities to enable the user to quickly find any email they are looking for. Google will pay for the service through the inclusion of innocuous AdWords ads.
The tremendous cost of supporting a 1GB mailbox per user and the date on the release is what is causing people to view this as a hoax. Some facts that place this in the non-hoax camp:
* It’s a terrific idea
* The name and logo are perfect.
* The About pages collects email addresses of interested users.
* Business model makes sense, particular considering an upcoming IPO.
* Google released an “obvious”:http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html April Fool’s joke.
* A March 25th “patent application”:http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=%22413%2C536%22&OS= by three supposed Google engineers that is related to inserting ads into email.
Let’s hope it’s real.
screenshot:
http://thelastminute.typepad.com/blog/2004/04/gmail_screensho_1.html
There has been GMail for over 5 years. I know since I am it’s Founder and President. Commpare these features to Google proposed version.
Never any Ads.
Up to 20 private addresses - All changeable.
Maintains messages for ever.
Can Chat online
No spam
Yes it’s $10.00/year - That’s $1.00 per address
Plus many more features.
See: http://www.usegmail.com
GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google
GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium. GMail Drive creates a virtual
filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored
on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag’n'drop files to.