04-01-2004, 11:00 PM
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Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 15,171
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Google's Gmail: Hoax Or Not?
Speaking of April 1 doozies...
"Mountain View, Calif.-based Google also will provide one gigabyte of storage to free account holders, far more than that offered by Yahoo and Microsoft's Internet unit, MSN, which each built strong user bases around free e-mail services and have been attacking Google's prominence as a Web search provider. However, Google's one gigabyte of storage claim led to some speculation about the Gmail announcement being a hoax since it took place on April Fool's Day. Google has pulled April Fool's jokes on the tech community before, including jokes about pigeons being the driving force behind Google's search technology and that Google was looking to start a new research center on the moon. In addition, the press release about Gmail was fairly goofy, including lines such as 'Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born.'"
The one gigabyte of email, plus the fact that the press release was dated April 1 2004, UTC (why would a CA company make a post at UTC?) made me believe it was a hoax -- but apparently, it won't be. 1GB of email for... free? 8O How would they handle the backup? I can tell you this: if it's for real, I'll be signing up.
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04-01-2004, 11:04 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 182
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I already signed-up for information just in case this is for real!!! But I will not be surprized if I get an e-mail with a pie in my face. :roll:
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04-01-2004, 11:07 PM
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04-01-2004, 11:09 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 53
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Perhaps the 1GB is just for mail text (sans attachments) -- meaning they can compress it VERY effectively. 1GB a mail text can probably be packed down to 50MB or less using compression.
This would put it within the same order of magnitude as the storage offered by some other free online mail accounts -- although still quite a bit more than the standard 2MB offered by hotmail.
Just a thought...
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04-01-2004, 11:11 PM
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Oracle
Join Date: Dec 2003
Posts: 830
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how will google be able to afford 100's of terrabytes of server space for free? I hope it isnt a hoax. (i pay $3.99 per month for 100mb)
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04-01-2004, 11:11 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 97
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It could be true... There will no doubt be caveats:
* No backup (unless you pay for it)
* Mail is wiped unless you log in once every 30 days
Remember that Exchange has Single Message Storage. So if I send an email to 100 people it stores only 1 copy. Perhaps they are using something like this for either emails or attacehments. So if a 10MB attachment (identified by file size, name and checksum for example) appears in 1,000 peoples mailboxes it takes only 10MB not 10GB.
On top of that with some decent compression (and text compresses easily) it might be do-able.
Or maybe they'll have 2 million people sign up for it and just not be able to support it and it will die 
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04-01-2004, 11:14 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Dec 2003
Posts: 217
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I actually saw this yesterday on CNet:
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5182...feed&subj=news
The story is "last updated" today, but if you look at the dates of the comments some were made yesterday. It was this that lead me to believe that GMail is not a hoax/joke. I have even signed up for it! (I'm looking for a new email provider because mine has informed me that they will be discontinuing POP3 access in 2 months)
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04-02-2004, 12:34 AM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Aug 2007
Posts: 238
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If it true, I'll sign up for it, but I'm wondering what I would ever need 1 GB of storage for (when it comes to e-mail that is). 5-10 MB seems about right for me, for free e-mail.
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04-02-2004, 12:35 AM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 97
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I have >5GB of corporate email.
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04-02-2004, 01:20 AM
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Philosopher
Join Date: Aug 2002
Posts: 593
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Google will be able to finance it through economies of scale--it will cost google less to finance 1GB of email. Ads will be inserted into the email by, i imagine, some sort of patented Google technology to match up emails to ads.
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