Thursday, June 17, 2004

Gmail

I was pleasantly surprised to see that I received an invitation to sign up for a Gmail (Google's new email service) account when I logged in to Blogger. Apparently, it's quite difficult to get a Gmail account, with people willing to do strange things, and pay significant amounts for one.

I'm experimenting with Gmail, and I think that the most appealing aspect of the service is the 1GB space limit, which trounces Webmail's puny 10MB. It means that I can store as many photographs as I want to, without worrying about running out of space (although 100MB should be more than enough for me). The built-in search facility is useful.

While there are privacy concerns about the Gmail service, which searches the text of emails to display advertisements, I'm not really worried, since most of my email can already be intercepted by human beings, as it travels across the net. A machine scanning for words is far less threatening, in my opinion.

I'll probably post some more about Gmail, but for now, it's greatest impact will probably be felt by users of other email services, like Yahoo, who will find their storage space increased.