[wplug] Gmail anyone?

Shane Liesegang liesegang at cmu.edu
Mon Mar 7 08:11:02 EST 2005


For many of the same reasons Google in general is better than Yahoo. :-)

First off, it gives you a gigabyte of storage and lets you use google 
to search it. They encourage people to never delete messages, and with 
a gig of storage, it seems like you won't have to very often.

I've never been a big fan of webmail in general, but GMail has far and 
away the best interface I've ever seen. It uses a combination of DHTML 
and JavaScript (I think... someone correct me here if I'm wrong) so it 
doesn't require a reload for each new message. Thus it's pretty fast.

It has some other niceties in the interface, like conversation sorting 
and some minor features.

The tinfoil hat brigade gets up in arms because it analyzes your 
incoming mail to provide context-relevant text advertisements (much the 
same way Google ties ads to certain search terms). So if your friend 
writes you about having the flu, you might see an ad for flu 
medication. This doesn't bother me terribly much, as Google claims that 
no human ever reads the mail and no personal data is tied to the 
aggregate market research.

Having someone snoop in your mail is a danger with any ISP, really 
(_someone_ has to have root, and that person could be nefarious), but 
Google has yet to give me cause to distrust them in such matters. I've 
never minded Google's advertising, and see it as the reasonable 
necessity of providing a free service.

They're doing the invite system as a way of gradually scaling up the 
system. If they made it completely open there would likely be a rush of 
signups that would overload the system. But if you have to know someone 
(and practically everyone does at this point... I remember when invites 
were going for reasonably large amounts of money on eBay), then the 
signups trickle in at a more manageable pace.

Any other questions? If you're interested, I have some invites (as do 
many other people on the list, it seems).

	- SJML

On Mar 7, 2005, at 7:42 AM, Phil wrote:

> On Sun, 2005-03-06 at 19:38 -0500, Mike Procario wrote:
>> On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 06:20:00PM -0500, David Ostroske wrote:
>>> I've got some. Plenty!
>>>
>>> If anybody wants one, email me directly about it.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, 06 Mar 2005 09:27:28 -0500, Doug Green <diego96 at mac.com> 
>>> wrote:
>>>>  Hey-
>>>>  Anyone have any Gmail invites to hand out?
>>>>  Thanks
>>>>  Doug
>>>
>>>
>
> I admit I haven't paid close attention to the gmail thing.  Can someone
> explain why you need an invite?  And what makes it better than yahoo?
>
> Phil
>
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