With a gigabyte of storage behind every mailbox, Google are launching a new free email service, GMail, and naturally it has powerful searching facilities built in. Google hope that contextual ads inside messages will pay for the service and not put users off too much – they are not planning on using popups or banners.
Microsoft and Yahoo offer only a microscopic 4mb of storage with their basic accounts and don’t have anything like the same search functions – though advertising is kept to banners on their portal pages. One gigabye is enough to store about half a million plain text email messages a page long. Messages are threaded into conversation threads automatically, reducing the need for users to spend time sorting mail
Larry Page said “Gmail solves all of my communication needs. It’s fast and easy and has all the storage I need. And I can use it from anywhere. I love it!” Well, we’re glad he likes it.
Thankfully, the service provides a spam filter, so you need only store the things you want.
We’ve signed up for a test account – we’ll let you know how we get on.
All about GMail
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.
Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.
At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.
After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.
These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
View all posts by Fraser Lovatt