G-mail Account

[sunil_jok 2]

all email check for spam, by looking at the repetation of certain words, and sometimes using ip address, which is not very good, and sometimes by the feedback given by users. gmail serves ads by looking at some key words, and they say that no human eyes look at the email. so whats the problem, they give us this great service because of the ad money, and when they can target the ads to the right audience then they get more money, and when they get more money their service improves. also i have sometimes noticed that some of the ads they serve is pretty well targetted. infact sometimes they r pretty interesting.

but i can say that no human is reading it, coz once i got a poem on my email and it had some reference to birds and sparrows and the ads i got were bout birds, books relating to it. and so on. so whats the worry about? it is not as if you are sending matters which might endanger national safety.

for those of who are so worried about such things i can suggest only one thing. run ur on mailserver, and send mail to only those people who have their own mail server.

[MasterMind 0]

Hey... Chill it guys...!!!!

As long as you are not discussing rocket science/national defence.... who cares if some automatic robot reads your mail....????

For business purpose, where security and confidentiality counts.... go for trusted services like www.bcentralhost.com like microsoft...... or something like that... else if you have a full time connectivity and direct ip, setup a mail server like sunil suggests and register the domain.... but, that doesnt mean anything at all.. if your addressee is using services like yahoo...... the mail will be processed at their end... .... so, why make a fuss over the whole stuff?

We have to accept that email ID really gives us an ID or address... Its a wonderfull service and we are getting it for FREE..... now, we shouldnt be so possisive about the mails we write... if the company that provides us this service free after spending huge amounts of money into the infrastructure and maintenance..... why cant they make a little money by having automated progs going through our mails and placing ads..?????

Its like saying... I will you use you for whatever i want, but, you should never expect anything in return.... is that fair?

No Offense to anybody..!!!!

[chandramauli 0]

Hi

I found this article thought some of u might find it useful ... so read on !!1

thnx

GMAIL-IS-TOO-CREEPY.COM

Gmail is too creepy     

Presumably you have a Gmail account,

and do not object to Google's policies

But many of us will not send mail to gmail.com ...

Problem 1: Gmail is nearly immortal

Google offers 1 gig of storage, which is many times the storage offered by Yahoo or Hotmail, or other Internet service providers that we know about. The powerful searching encourages account holders to never delete anything. It takes three clicks to put a message into the trash, and more effort to delete this message. It's much easier to "archive" the message, or just leave it in the inbox and let the powerful searching keep track of it. Google admits that even deleted messages will remain on their system, and may also be accessible internally at Google, for an indefinite period of time.

Google has been spin

________________________________

Link 2 : This link is a must to read http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/GmailLetter.htm

An Open Letter to Google Regarding Its Proposed Gmail Service

From:

World Privacy Forum

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse

    and

Australian Privacy Foundation

Grayson Barber, Privacy Advocate

Bits of Freedom (Netherlands)

British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (Canada)

Calegislation

CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering)

Roger Clarke, Privacy Research and Advocate (Australia)

Consumer Action

Consumer Federation of America

Consumer Federation of California

Consumer Task Force for Automotive Issues

Electronic Privacy Information Center

Federación de Consumidores en Acción (FACUA) (Spain)

Foundation for Information Policy Research (United Kingdom)

Mari Frank, Esq., Author of Identity Theft Survival Kit

Simson L. Garfinkel, Author of Database Nation

Edward Hasbrouck, Author and Consumer Advocate

Massachusetts Consumer Assistance Council

Massachusetts Consumers' Coalition

National Association of Consumer Agency Administrators (NACAA)

National Consumers League

PrivacyActivism

Privacy International (United Kingdom)

Privacy Rights Now Coalition

Privacy Times

Private Citizen, Inc.

Privaterra (Canada)

Public Information Research, Inc.

Utility Consumers' Action Network

April 6, 2004

Sergey Brin, Co-Founder & President, Technology

Larry Page, Co-Founder & President, Products

Google Inc.

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway

Mountain View, CA 94043

Dear Mr. Brin and Mr. Page:

Google’s proposed Gmail service and the practices and policies of its business units raise significant and troubling questions.

First, Google has proposed scanning the text of all incoming emails for ad placement. The scanning of confidential email violates the implicit trust of an email service provider. Further, the unlimited period for data retention poses unnecessary risks of misuse.

Second, Google's overall data retention and correlation policies are problematic in their lack of clarity and broad scope. Google has not set specific, finite limits on how long it will retain user account, email, and transactional data. And Google has not set clear written policies about its data sharing between business units.

Third, the Gmail system sets potentially dangerous precedents and establishes reduced expectations of privacy in email communications. These precedents may be adopted by other companies and governments and may persist long after Google is gone.

We urge you to suspend the Gmail service until the privacy issues are adequately

addressed.

[AmanJ 1]

hi friends,

from yesterday i m not able 2 open my gmail a/c after i type in my pass and user id the next screen appears but it doesnt get fully loaded.

do any of u are also facing similar problem.

pls help

aman

[Dhananajay 0]

I agree with mastermind

What is privacy in mail, its some thing important and should be shared on “need to know basis” right

So if I opt for Gmail and give Gmail id to a friend, I already understand what kind of mail is coming to my gmail account and I accept it. My official mail comes on my office mail ID so where is the question of privacy lost ???

And if some sender thinks that his message need to be private then he should send it to my other private email id.

For Information to those who doesn’t know, every message is scanned some where we never now where.

Ok here I will give example

All official mail can be viewed by system admin in any office (I had seen this thing happening)

Any mail coming in America can be viewed by CIA,PIA,TIA …..

So where is the privacy ?????

If some one wants to track our message and if he has resources he can, nothing can be done to stop him.

So instead of suppressing Gmail all these controlling bodies should consecrate on spam and other important problems like chield sexual abuse through mail??

[Mahidhar 3]

hey aman, i jus tried opening my Gmail account ... opens fine. but i havent got any of my mails which i forwarded and subscribed to ... no incoming messages its like its in a state of dormancy ... messages which i send seem to be going ...

[AmanJ 1]

may they r doing some upgradation and my a/c would start working properly soon

[anoopr 0]

I read some virus has hit the google servers early this week and some of their services have been knocked out.

I did not have any problems with gmail, though.

[hotguy 0]

For Information to those who doesn’t know, every message is scanned some where we never now where.

Any mail coming in America can be viewed by CIA,PIA,TIA …..

So where is the privacy ?????

If some one wants to track our message and if he has resources he can, nothing can be done to stop him.

For Privacy, better start sending mail in mother tongue that too not in English on your own script. Better CIA, FBI, IT cos recruit localites to translate messages or to insert Advertisements!

More BPO works to India are anticipated !

[Beetle 0]

Found this interesting article

Google Conquers E-Mail

Content by Technology Review Magazine

Gmail is the best thing that ever happened to Sun Microsystems.

Of course, Google’s Gmail service doesn’t directly have any relationship with Sun—at least none that Google has disclosed. Like most of Google’s infrastructure, Google’s Gmail service is probably hosted on racks and racks of Intel-based computers running some variant of Linux. Google’s expertise is in making thousands of these machines run in concert as a single computational resource—a resource that can store thousands of terabytes and satisfy simultaneous requests from millions of users.

Sun, on the other hand, makes much of its money these days by selling “big iron” computers to companies that haven’t mastered the art of so-called grid computing. Sun’s customers find it easier to scale their computing problems by throwing money at their problems. It sells mainframe-class machines with dozens or even hundreds of processors that are incredibly reliable and capable of handling tens of thousands of simultaneous requests. The economics behind what Google is doing and what Sun is selling couldn’t be more different.

Nevertheless, Gmail validates a claim that Sun has been making for nearly a decade—that it’s possible to replace a network of PCs running Windows with world-class computers offering computing services to low-cost and easily-managed desktop machines—perhaps machines so inexpensive that they don’t even have a hard disk. Sun called such computers “thin clients.” While they are popular at some companies, they haven’t made real inroads against the Windows desktop because the applications just haven’t worked as well.

But Gmail does work just as well as a copy of Outlook Express running on the desktop. In some way, in fact, it works better. This is big news—bigger, in fact, then most people seem to realize.

Until Gmail, practically every Web-based application was a pale imitation of that same application running on a PC. Web-based applications had the advantage that they were accessible from any computer on the Internet on professionally managed servers, that the data was backed up, and that the applications themselves were constantly updated. But compared to applications running on your local machine the web versions had fewer features and performed more slowly. Most users—businesses and consumers alike—were unwilling to make that compromise.

Gmail is different. For starters, it’s blindingly fast—so fast that it feels like it is running on your local computer and not in some data center. Click on a message’s subject and it instantly appears. When you are done reading a message you click “Archive”—the message is instantly stored, and you’re looking back at your inbox. (As with other Web-based mail systems, you can report spam simply by clicking “report spam.”)

Gmail gets its speed from some of the cleverest JavaScript ever written. Lots of information is stored inside your browser and redisplayed from memory; this avoids the need to constantly download pages from Google’s servers. The JavaScript can "listen" directly to your keystrokes, allowing you to drive Gmail with single-letter commands: press “y” to archive a message, “c” to compose a new message, and so on. You don’t even have to depress the Ctrl key, making Gmail even faster to use.

Gmail shows that Web applications with thin clients can have advantages over software running on your desktop. The most obvious is reliability: Gmail runs on Google’s servers, not your hard drive, and Google almost certainly does a better job than you do with routine maintenance, backups, and the like. And because everything is kept on Google’s servers, you don’t have to wait for long downloads. Google’s computers are blazingly fast: searching through the few thousand messages stored in my Gmail account is essentially instantaneous. Searching through the same amount of mail on my local computer takes ten seconds or more.

Gmail’s anti-spam system is nothing short of phenomenal. I sent Gmail a copy of my entire inbox for two weeks—that’s 200 real messages a day plus 500 pieces of spam. My anti-spam system at home let through about 20 spams a day; Gmail let through fewer than 5. Gmail’s big advantage in the anti-spam department is its ability to harness the collective vigilance of all Gmail users. Once a message has been reported as spam by a few dozen users, Gmail’s servers can pull that message out of everybody else’s inbox.

There are problems with Gmail, of course. I’m one of 31 privacy advocates and civil liberties organizations to have signed an open letter calling upon Google to suspend Gmail until the service’s privacy issues are properly addressed. One concern raised in the letter is that Google scans all incoming e-mail for the purpose of displaying targeted advertisements. I think that the growing trend toward putting ads in application software is troublesome, no matter whether the applications are running on my computer or on a remote server. Right now the only way Google makes money on Gmail is by having people click on those ads, but I fully expect a subscription-based version of Gmail to be available within a year that allows me to make those ads go away by paying a monthly fee.A bigger problem with Gmail is the company’s data management and retention policy. I like to think that I own the e-mail that I receive, but with Gmail I’m definitely sharing that ownership with Google. If I decide to cancel my account, there's no obvious way to download all of my mail that’s stored on Gmail. One of my annual housecleaning chores is to make a CD-ROM with all of the past year’s e-mail, but Google does not provide the tools that would let me do that, short downloading each Web page to a separate file. (Apparently, however, independent developers are filling the void that Google has left; click here, for example.) Unfortunately, use of such software appears to violate the Gmail terms-of-service agreement, which forbids the user from using "any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the [Gmail] Service." What's more, even if I terminate my Gmail account, Google essentially reserves the right to keep my stored email forever. (Here's the complete privacy policy.) Clearly, with possession of data comes control over that data.

There’s also concern that Gmail might become a one-stop shopping service for law enforcement, much in the way that America Online has become. Having a gigabyte of stored e-mail makes Gmail an attractive target: it’s not just a window into your present activities, but into your past as well. Just imagine the potential in a divorce proceeding!

Like any other Web-based application, Gmail doesn’t work if you’re not connected to the Internet. Now, e-mail might seem like an inherently network-based application, but I frequently download e-mail to my laptop and then read it while I’m off the network—for example, when I’m in a room that doesn’t have wireless connectivity or when I’m flying off to California.

One problem that I have with Gmail is its incompatibility with other e-mail systems: Gmail does not support either POP or the increasingly popular IMAP mail protocol. As a result, I was unable to use Gmail with my Treo 600 using Sprint’s wireless network. Google has said that it intends to support mobile devices directly before the end of the year. But the lack of IMAP support means that I can’t easily transfer e-mail messages to or from Gmail the way I can between other IMAP-based services.

As my last note of singing Gmail’s praises, I need to point out that it seems to work equally well with practically every other browser that I’ve been able to throw at it, including Internet Explorer for Windows, Apple's Safari for MacOS 10, and Mozilla Firefox for both. This is no easy feat for an application this sophisticated in its use of JavaScript. Google has clearly gone out of its way to show that complex Web-based applications can be developed and deployed without relying on all of that Microsoft-specific junk that’s been crammed into IE. Other websites should take notice.

Many companies will probably decide that Gmail is not appropriate for business use, since businesses typically want to maintain control over their own e-mail. Perhaps Google will bring out a version of Gmail running on an appliance, the way the company now sells a search appliance. But the idea of search-based e-mail is catching on. Bloomba, for example, is an e-mail client that offers many of the searching, spam protection, and automatic message filing that Gmail has—but it works with any POP or IMAP-based account. As with Gmail, you just click a “file” button when you are done reading a message with Bloomba and the message is filed; you get your filed messages back by using search.

Gmail is going to make a big impact, and e-mail will never be the same. But Gmail also proves an argument that Sun’s been making for more than a decade. I wonder if they will exploit it.

[deepu 0]

Why use GMAIL when our own Rediff is providing 1 GB

[Beetle 0]

Huge Difference

You will know if you are a Gmail user. By the way, Gmail has started issuing invites to Gmail users.

[MasterMind 0]

By the way, Gmail has started issuing invites to Gmail users.

I couldnt find the link.... where is it?

[karpar 1]

I have not been able to invite anyone either!

Chirag had mentioned in this forum that they had probably stopped issuing invites...

[Beetle 0]

I received a few invites, dint know that you ppl wanted it. If I did, I would have shared.

[yusufmerchant 0]

i would like to sign up for gmail can anyone send me an invite my add is yusufmerchant@hotmail.com

[deepu 0]

me too would want one....

invite me at deepu_vk@rediffmail.com

[deepu 0]

Me just got a GMail account...

Its really cool

My id is deepu.krishnan@gmail.com

[swaroop 0]

gmail has started to issue invites.. i had one two days back.. i have heard from my friend that he had 5invites.. but they got consumed real fast..

[Vishal Gupta 4]

GUYS!

I HAVE 5 INVITES.

ANYONE INTERESTED CAN CONTACT ME.

[Vishal Gupta 4]

What happened guys!

Do no one want GMail account?

I am worrid if i lost these 6 invitations.

So pls if anyone wants, ask me.

[Beetle 0]

Dear Ash

Google has issued five invites to all its users, and they did it simultaneously. As a result, there are invites everywhere and no one is really interested.

[jusmail 0]

Heloo all,

I notice many a discussion about g-mail in this forum. How can I get hold of a g-mail account?

[compenn 0]

I'll also come 2 know when u know. somebody tell us pls.

[jusmail 0]

Those with an excess of invites, then send one across to me at jusmail@softhome.net.

Thanks RIMWEB