Google to offer gigabyte of free e-mail

[Bombardier]

By Paul Festa

Staff Writer, CNET News.com

http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5182805.html

Story last modified March 31, 2004, 3:57 PM PST

Google, the company that made off with the search market, is setting its sights on free e-mail.

The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., on Wednesday will launch a test with about 1,000 invited guests to try out a new e-mail service called "Gmail."

Google, which made its name in search but has added numerous services, such as a news aggregation page and a newsgroup interface, says that Gmail is search-based e-mail.

Like Yahoo Mail and MSN Hotmail, Gmail will let users search through their e-mail. Unlike those competitors, though, Google will offer enough storage so that the average e-mail account holder will never have to delete messages.

Hotmail currently offers 2MB of free e-mail storage. Yahoo offers 4MB. Gmail will dwarf those offerings with a 1GB storage limit.

Google plans to make money from the service by inserting advertisements into messages based in part on their content, effectively extending its AdWords program for presenting contextual ads in Web pages to e-mail.

"The idea is that your mail can stay in there forever," said Wayne Rosing, vice president of engineering at Google. "You can always index it, always search it, and always find things from the past."

When asked whether Gmail represented further evidence that Google is muscling in on the turf of Yahoo, MSN and other Web portals, Rosing demurred.

"The way we'd like to say it is that part of our mission is to organize and present all the world's information, and e-mail's part of that information that currently is not well organized. That is the rubric under which we offer this."

[Bombardier]

It's coming soon...

http://gmail.google.com/

[DudeAsInCool]

Lotta bright folks at Google these days...

[DudeAsInCool]

The Fark header wonders whether this is an April Fool's Joke lol IGB does sound like a lot.

Google Australia quiet on webmail plan

By Matthew Liddy

Google Australia has refused to comment on a company announcement that it is to enter the free web-based email market, which is currently dominated by online giants Yahoo and Microsoft's Hotmail.

The Internet search company has announced the launch of Gmail, a webmail service with 1 gigabyte of storage slace for every user.

Some Internet users on technology discussion boards have questioned whether the announcement, made in a press release dated April 1, is an April fool's day joke.

Google Australia has refused to comment, saying all queries must be directed to the company's US-based publicist. The ABC has not been able to contact a spokesman in the US, where it is after 10pm.

The statement says Google is testing a preview release of the product, which it says will allow every user to store up to 500,000 pages of email.

It also promises Gmail will use Google search technology to allow users to easily find any email they have ever sent or received.

The Google statement says it will roll the service out to a small group of testers from today, before it launches a publicly available version.

The one gigabyte storage limit would be about 250 times more than the four megabytes Yahoo offers.

In the statement, Google co-founder Larry Page says Google decided to enter the webmail market after a user complained about the services available.

"If a Google user has a problem with email, well, so do we," added his co-founder, Sergey Brin. "And while developing Gmail was a bit more complicated than we anticipated, we're pleased to be able to offer it to the user who asked for it."

[ASUmusicMAN]

I hope its not an April Fool's joke...it would be damn cool

[Malicious Intent]

I must admit, I suspected it was april fools - but on top of the space station?

[Bombardier]

Google says "Gmail" is no joke, but lunar jobs are

SAN FRANCISCO, April 1 (Reuters) - It's not like Internet search service Google can't laugh at itself, but when an April Fool's joke got out of hand on Thursday, a real business plan was rumored to be a Web hoax -- and that was no laughing matter.

Privately held Google Inc. had Web message boards buzzing on Thursday over whether a new e-mail product, announced on Wednesday and meant to challenge Yahoo Inc. (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people) and Microsoft Corp (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people), was actually an April Fool's joke.

Google's announcement was questioned because of the U.S. No. 1 search service's unconventional sub-heading on a press release and because it also posted a fictional job listing seeking engineers for a "Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (GCHEESE)" lunar outpost.

Google's free e-mail service called Gmail, which will offer significantly more storage than Yahoo or MSN, "is not a hoax," said Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of products.

Google's unconventional March 31 press release announcing Gmail helped set Internet message boards alight because the sub-heading read: "Search is Number Two Online Activity -- Email is Number One: 'Heck, Yeah,' Say Google Founders."

"It is April Fool's Day. We were having fun with this announcement. We are very serious about Gmail," Rosenberg said in an interview.

Still, the Web was buzzing with speculation.

"It's going to go down in history as one of the biggest pranks ever pulled," wrote one message poster at Slashdot.org, which bills itself as a news provider for nerds.

That view was countered by others who noted the relatively low cost of storage and Google's registration of Gmail.com.

"The real joke was an advertisement for a job opening in 2007 at their lunar facility," another Slashdot poster wrote.

That recruiting ad -- which can be viewed by clicking on the Google.com link "Want a job that's out of this world?" -- details the benefits of working at Google's "Googlunaplex" location on the moon.

"The notion that we're actually opening a lunar office is consistent with the spirit of April Fool's Day, and, yes, it is a joke," Rosenberg said of the ad, posted around midnight Greenwich Mean Time on Thursday.

In fact, Google's informational site about Gmail, at www.gmail.com, was up and running Thursday during a test period with a small group of users.

According to Whois.net, an online service for researching domain name registration, Gmail.com does belong to Google.

http://www.forbes.com/technology/newswire/...rtr1320652.html

[DudeAsInCool]

The NY Times also verified that the Google plan is real:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/01/technolo...ogle.html?8hpib

[Kooperman]

Google's Gmail Raises Privacy Concern

Fri Apr 02 2004 00:33:23 ET

Privacy advocates are concerned that there's one big flaw with Google Inc.'s free e-mail service: The company plans to read the messages.

LA TIMES reporting on Friday: The Internet search firm insists that it needs to know what's in the e-mails that pass through its system -- so that they can be sprinkled with advertisements Google thinks are relevant. After all, revenue from those targeted ads will pay for the Gmail service, which began a limited test Thursday, offering up to 500 times as much e-mail storage as competing Web e-mail programs from Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

The TIMES adds: The electronic letters won't be read by Google employees; computers will handle that chore. Nonetheless, the spector of seeing an ad for an antacid beside a message from a friend complaining about stomach pain is enough to make some people nervous about the e-mail service.

"There will undoubtedly be some folks that will see this and freak out," said Ray Everett-Church, chief privacy officer for TurnTide Inc., an anti-spam company in Conshohocken, Pa. The aggressive advertising strategy may put a damper on Google's biggest move yet away from its core business of Internet search. After reading the privacy policy on the Gmail website Thursday, consumer-rights groups began sending complaints to the privately held Mountain View, Calif., company and preparing to warn users to stay away.

"The privacy implications of going through and perusing a customer's e-mail to display targeted advertising could be the Achilles' heel for Google's services," said Jordana Beebe, the communications director for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, an consumer group in San Diego.

The consternation caught Larry Page, Google's co-founder and president of products, off guard.

"I'm very surprised that there are these kinds of questions," he said Thursday.

http://www.drudgereport.com/flash.htm

[Bombardier]

That's yet another tip-off that it is probably a big April Fools joke.

No self-respecting company would dare to outright violate privacy like that.

I mean, come on. Reading peoples' email? ROFL. :rotfl:

[DudeAsInCool]

Well...you see those Google Ads on top of the site that pay for our server costs? They scan the articles we post, and what we type, for keywords...So when you read a Beatles article, you get a Beatles ad on top.

I find it amusing, as opposed to an invasion of privacy...Might not be so amusing tho' if I was some teenage kid typing my private fears of knocking some gf up, and lo and behold, I ended up sending a Trojan Ad (unknowingly) along with my private email message.. then again, the receiving party might find it so.. :evil:

[Kooperman]

I recently added my state location to my personal info...amazing how many Kentucky google ads are following me around now on the top.

[slum_goddess]

i'm still getting 'religious' ones...if only they knew.