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The Internet IT

100 GB Email Account 410

Posted by samzenpus from the still-not-enough dept.
soccrates writes "An article on Toms Hardware describes a Californian company giving out 100 GB email accounts to its customers. They even extended a challenge to get the first user to completely fill up the account, the winner getting a 1 terabyte account ! "
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100 GB Email Account More

100 GB Email Account

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  • Slashdot Effect (Score:5, Funny)

    by typobox43 ( 677545 ) <typobox43@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:46PM (#10390972) Homepage
    I think Slashdot could easily fill this mailbox. If everyone switches their email address to one of these mailboxes, the viruses and spambots would certainly do the work for us.
    • I have a few mailto links posted around and about to give the email address crawlers fodder. Getting the terabytes of spam is not difficult...the problem is that there is zero value to the actual fruit of the spam harvest.

      • Re:Spam Harvesting (Score:4, Interesting)

        by BlackHawk-666 ( 560896 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @04:36AM (#10392172)
        Not so. Feed this spam harvest into the bayes classifier for SpamAssassin or another filter system and train it to recognise that as all spam. This will seriously increase the quality of it's spam checking in future. I fed about 12,000 into mine, the result of about five months worth of harvesting.

        • Re:Spam Harvesting (Score:5, Interesting)

          by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @05:34AM (#10392351) Homepage Journal
          The problem is, one persons spam is another persons ham.

          "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"

          It all depends on perspective.

          Of course, there are common things that neither party wants, but giving a one size fits all filter for all but the most obvious will cause false positives.

          Don't you think the big mail companies would have sorted it out by now if they could? They have the largest harvest of spam around.

          [I was going to stop here, below are just random ramblings]

          Having said all that, I believe every person should be allocated a bloom filter with their mail classification preferences. This filter is used against the results of all the identification rules.

          All the mail companies should accept this token and display mail which passes. Currently, I have 4 mail providers who deal with spam differently, I would like to setup one set of rules.
          The good thing about using a bloom is that preferences can be merged increasing the effectiveness, for instance, a virus filter, a fakes filter, a childsafe filter, or an office filter, developers filter etc.

          Of course, this way, we don't change the front end mailing system itself, and people who don't use this token are free to handle the mail however they like.

          I'll stop wafflin now.

          • Re:Spam Harvesting (Score:5, Insightful)

            by MagicM ( 85041 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @09:16AM (#10393371)
            Of course, there are common things that neither party wants

            Spam isn't about what someone wants or doesn't want. It's about what's unsolicited. Yeah some people like looking at the pictures in their porn spam, but that doesn't make it any less spam.

  • But is it a . . . (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:47PM (#10390978)
    Gmail account?

  • Ugh (Score:5, Funny)

    by ShatteredDream ( 636520 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:47PM (#10390979) Homepage
    I can't even imagine how much time you'd have to spend finding unique porn mailing lists to get enough spam to fill one of these babies up. You'd see so much T&A that sex would be just... boring....

  • *Sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pantero Blanco ( 792776 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:49PM (#10390992)
    It appears that Google has started the email equivalent of a penis contest. First they came along with 1 GB...then MSN with 2 GB...and now this.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:58PM (#10391052)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:*Sigh* (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Pantero Blanco ( 792776 )
        How are they benefiting, exactly? On a practical level, a terabyte-sized email account isn't really any better than a gigabyte-sized one. Anyone who needs an account that big probably runs their own.

        I'm not attacking Google for coming out with the initial 1 GB service; I'm attacking the idiots who feel they have to outdo it as an advertising gimmick.

      • Re:*Sigh* (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        What happens to all the consumers that use one of the gimmicky new webmail accounts that goes out of business or loses emails because they don't have backups?

        • Re:*Sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)

          by suckmysav ( 763172 ) <suckmysav AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:30AM (#10391279) Journal
          You would have to be a complete knob to keep anything important in a free webmail account.

          • Re:*Sigh* (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Da Web Guru ( 215458 )
            No, you just have to be a normal (i.e., non-slashdot) user. People store anything and everything in their free email accounts, from email/web site logins and passwords to their only copy of their email/phone contact lists.

          • Re:*Sigh* (Score:3, Informative)

            by @madeus ( 24818 )
            You would have to be a complete knob to keep anything important in a free webmail account.

            *raises eyebrow*

            1) Use GPG to encrypt your emails (using a web-to-imap/pop proxy from freshmeat.net, together with your email client of choice [mutt, pine, evolution, Mail.app etc]).

            2) Get said proxy together with fetchmail and/or quick 10 min $script_lang script to suck it down and just back it up locally every now and again.

      • Re:*Sigh* (Score:5, Funny)

        by slarshdot ( 211836 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:30AM (#10391282)
        soon I will be releasing my email service which will allow u to store 1 million bytes!!

        muwhaha!!

      • Re:*Sigh* (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Jugalator ( 259273 )
        Yeah, they've forced other free e-mail providers to compete, and the consumers are benefiting.

        What a rip.

        Benefiting how? Would you really make more use of 100 GB than 1 GB? What they do is just increasing "the number that matters" to sell their product. Notice how they aren't at all adding any other of Gmail's features. That's because it was only the account size that got attention when Gmail was introduced, so they ignore other things, because they don't really care for their customers, just to sell the
    • I'll be very surprised if MSN ever actually implements a 2GB quota. They couldn't even handle the 200MB or whatever pie in the sky number they said people would be upgraded to. It's all just a marketing ploy with no intent to deliver. And besides, who really needs all that space just to hold the huge amount of spam that hotmail sends to its own users?

    • Re:*Sigh* (Score:5, Funny)

      by slyckshoes ( 174544 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:11AM (#10391159)
      Yes, but fortunately (or unfortunately?) penises aren't growing at the rate that mailboxes are. Size is good up to a point, but a 1Tb penis would make it hard to walk. It would have to be on a dedicated server, so to speak.
    • And the down side to this is what exactly?

  • To win 1TB (Score:5, Funny)

    by erick99 ( 743982 ) <homerun@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:49PM (#10390993)
    You are allowed 500MB attachments so I assume you could upload 200 or so of them sequentially until you have filled up 100GB and then you win the 1TB mailbox. And then.... Profit?

    • Re:To win 1TB (Score:5, Insightful)

      by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) * on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:52PM (#10391009) Journal
      Yes but how many services allow you to *send* 500MB attachments (excluding running your own mailserver). Then again you need to upload *100GB* which would still take alot of time none-the-less. Either way 100GB/1TB at that point everything is just gravy.

      • Re:To win 1TB (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Student_Tech ( 66719 )
        Send the email to your self, click on the "keep copy in sent folder" (Or whatever). So for every message you get 1 GB down (of course I haven't read the terms and conditions for the contest, but it seems like a posible solution, either that or get 2 addresses and send back and forth).
        • First you'd have to get that 1GB in that acct in the first place. Even with a high end DSL/Cable connection you're looking at a long upload time.
          • at this point, it would be alot faster to get a pair of accounts and mail a smaller (100mb) file back and forth to yourself w/ as many ccs as they let you do. attach each old message to the newest and you start doubling. you could fill it pretty quickly that way. I would assume this is done already. i could see somebody doing this in under an hour.

  • 3 Steps.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Scrab ( 573004 )
    1)Get account

    2)Post email address to Slashdot, asking for any and all to send you random stuff

    3)Profit?

    Or should there be a ????? in there?
  • I've only had my gmail account since July, but as of today I've hit the 10% mark, and I don't even send that much email - 99% of it is slashdot, livejournal or other bulliten board reply notifications - maybe 10 a day, and the occasional 2MB digicam pic from the long distance girlfriend.

    Hopefully if my usage trend continues, there should be 100 GB accounts for everyone before my account completely fills up in 5 years here.

  • Rediculous (Score:3, Funny)

    by FiberOpPraise ( 607416 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:52PM (#10391007) Homepage
    Okay, 1GB was fine, a reasonable limit that was more of a marketing ploy than a palpable number for the average user. Soon, 2GB and 5GB email accounts were offered in response to Gmails initial 1GB. This was really pushing the limit of being reasonable. 100GB totally crosses the line. When the advertised size of email accounts becomes larger than most people's hard drives, there is a problem. This is getting absurd. Please stop.
    • I agree completely. I, as a consumer, am SICK and TIRED of benefiting from corporate competition. Why can't they all just knock us back to 5mb?

      Those were the days...

    • ...an unnamed software company executive was overheard saying "1 GB ought to be enough for anyone." (A subsqeunt discussion was spawned discussing whether or not he actually said it.)
  • Apple is FINALLY uping their .Mac e-mail space to 250M. I doubt that will get another $99 out of me but I think its interesting that in spite of the hype (reported here a day or so ago) about Hotmail finally rolling out their new storage, a later story (not reported here to my knowledge) has it that they (MS) are running into problems and putting many of the upgrades (mine for example) off indefinitely.

    As I predicted when G-mail first came out the MS infrastructure is going to collapse under the weight o

  • Re: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fluid-X ( 722858 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:53PM (#10391021) Homepage
    With 100 Gb, they can hardcode the "You are using 0% of your mailbox" message.

  • HORRIBLE Website (Score:5, Informative)

    by Grey Ninja ( 739021 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:54PM (#10391024) Homepage Journal
    For the people too lazy to read the article, the link is here. [hriders.com]. But the site's design is just the most horrible thing I've ever seen, and the email capacity seems to be only 10GB.

    I would still love to see these idiots slashdotted. Go get em boys.

    • Re:HORRIBLE Website (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cmacb ( 547347 )
      This looks a lot to me like one of those thrown together PHP/MySQL web sites (that I'm sorry to say I've been responsible for at one time or another). It's also quite slow. If they can't handle a Slashdotting I wonder if they can handle all multi-meg photo messages that some people will be tempted to throw at it. Whether it's 1G, 10G, or 1T, it doesn't do anyone any good if the server is too slow to handle the traffic.
    • they even advertise a turkey testicle festival... cmon. please. slashdot this out of existence!

  • Too Easy (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nova Express ( 100383 ) <lawrenceperson.gmail@com> on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:57PM (#10391046) Homepage Journal
    This is too easy to win, assuming you have broadband.

    Step 1: Rip all three Star Wars and the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings Movies (yeah yeah, the third isn't out yet) to your HD.

    Step 2: Mail copies to 25 of your friends with GMail accounts as attachments.

    Step 3: Have your friends change each of the file names and mail them back.

    Bingo! Instant excession of 100 GB.

    Alternately, you could just post your e-mail address here and say something like "You wussy, panty-wasted Linux hackers couldn't spam-bomb my account even if you wanted to! Your hacking skills are pathetic and lame! Besides, everyone knows that REAL MEN use Windows!"

    I figured that's good for getting mailed 500 full distros within an hour. That should do the trick. ;-)

  • Unlimited! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by z3021017 ( 806883 )
    I think we'll see the first unlimited e-mail accounts being offered very soon...

    100GB is basically 'unlimited' to the average email user anyway. Now I'm just waiting for the next company to offer true unlimited servce.

    • Already unlimited (Score:5, Interesting)

      by suso ( 153703 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:07AM (#10391129) Journal
      suso.org has already been doing this for 7 years for over 80 local customers. I basically don't have quota support in the kernel. So its not just for email. My philosophy is that if you don't give people a limit, they won't try to reach it. And guess what? It works. People don't abuse the service. They use it normally. A couple of users are exceptions and have over 1GB worth of email that has amassed over the past several years.

      I'm getting ready to install a server with 200GB of home space, so thus its like I offer 200GB email accounts. Whenever I get close to running out of space, I upgrade.

    • Re:Unlimited! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by JUSTONEMORELATTE ( 584508 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:09AM (#10391142) Homepage
      Now I'm just waiting for the next company to offer true unlimited servce

      Uhh... You've come to the right place [slashmail.org]
      Of course, OSDN isn't giving them away, but they are also giving add-free access for $14/year.


      --
      Free gmail invites [slashdot.org]
    • "Unlimited", just like cable connections.
      (Unlimited, unless we think you're using too much. No published number, but just what we think on that particular day, depending on who you talk to)

  • What they didn't tell you is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by kylemonger ( 686302 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @11:59PM (#10391059)
    ... their mail server is behind a 2400 baud modem.

  • I can win... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Keebler71 ( 520908 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:01AM (#10391078) Journal
    They even extended a challenge to get the first user to completely fill up the account

    Piece of cake...is there a way to auto-forward my hotmail account? Should take about a week...

  • A real use for this stuff (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Deep Fried Geekboy ( 807607 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:01AM (#10391080)
    I dunno about anyone else but I USE this stuff. I gave all my gmail invites to myself so I now have many Gmail accounts, which are all used for the same thing ... offsite backup.

    The 100 G account would be great for backing up digital images, something that is extremely hard to do otherwise (bit rot on CDs, DVDs and even naked hard drives, which is what I use now). Yeah, I take a lot of pictures.

    I just got notified that because I purchased extra .mac storage, mine has been upped to 1.2 Gb. Hooray!

    You cannot have too many backup strategies. I use .mac for all keychains (containing serial numbers, passwords and private banking details), plus current 'work' folder... then I have a Retrospect backup to a remote FTP server for my boot drive, plus a nightly mirror onto a second hard drive. You CANNOT have too much of this stuff.

    The day I walked into my office and my HD was dead, I saved the entire accumulated cost of all this by being able to boot up from the second drive within seconds and carry on working.
    • Your sig is offering gmail to strangers.
      Your backup strategy involves using your gmail storage.
      Makes me wonder, do you realize that your gmail account gets nuked if someone invited by you starts sending spam? I'm not sure how far up the tree the nuking goes, but if you invite a spammer, you both get the axe.
      Just sayin....
      • Hm ... good point. In fact I've only given away one gmail account to a stranger and I checked them out first as far as I could.

        I don't use the gmail account for any critical backup... in fact my whole strategy is that there should be no such thing as a critical backup... but it is a VERY convenient tool. For example, an account that you forward all 'your password is' emails to.

  • 36 million subscribers * 100Gb = ???? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by seanvaandering ( 604658 ) <sean@vaandering.gmail@com> on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:03AM (#10391092)
    In order to attract interest, the company launched a 3-Gigabyte free email service a little over a month ago and since then has signed up more than 36 million users...

    Another alternative is, of course, to post it on Slashdot. But the question that lingers, is how in the hell did a little unknown magazine end up signing up 36 million people?

    Now I'm not a biker myself, but you'd think with that many e-mail addresses from this company I'd of seen it once or twice working in tech support...
  • Oh too easy! Just have someone email him the Longhorn ISOs. That should fill up 100GB real quick, and nobody has to get nekkid!
  • I need attachment size ~700MB for my, umm, "files" :D Then I can access my "files" from anywhere :D
  • They even extended a challenge to get the first user to completely fill up the account, the winner getting a 1 terabyte account

    What if I upload a 200 MB file and send to myself in email and then forward it over and over to myself until 100 GB is full. Shouldnt take more than an afternoon's work??

  • How to win contest:

    One post on usenet with your email address complaining about your small penis size. Then just sit back and wait.

  • 100gb mail? just give me the stinkin drive! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tonyz2k ( 178027 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:07AM (#10391130) Journal
    Where are they getting all this cheap storage? Instead of giving me a 100GB mailbox (with annoying blinking GIF ads), how about they just send me a 100GB hard drive (and a bunch of regular snail-mail junkmail that i can just throw away)?

    Yes, chide me, fellow slashdotters.. for I did not know that they are relying on sparse mailboxes.

    This company would terminate the service (or file for Chapter 11) long before the millionth user took their first gig.

  • 1 TB free service (Score:3, Insightful)

    by microsopht ( 811294 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:08AM (#10391138)
    When 10 GB email account is considered unfillable, so much that the owner is willing to give 1 server of 1 TB for the winner, the even better idea - to that owner and my fellow slashdotters ( if u wanna st art up a email service BTW },
    would be to offer 1 TB space for all- that would really be unprecedented and gain the maximum publicity and no one in this world would probably use more than a few GB - and the owner wouldnt have to worry about providing 1 Tb since as and when a user signs up , 1 Tb space doesnt need to be allocated and can be scaled up as and when required.
  • > An ad-free 100 GByte email account will be priced at $150 per year.

    Seems conveniently priced at the price of a hard drive plus a decent amount of bandwidth, now if you are making an archive of quite a few mailing lists this may be worth it, however If I really needed this much space, I'd just host it myself.

  • hriders.com (Score:4, Funny)

    by pmsyyz ( 23514 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:11AM (#10391155) Homepage Journal
    Worst website EVAR.
  • and just how long do you think this company is going to be around, taking care of your emails while promising everything to everyone?

    I'll settle for a little less storage, from a stable provider with a sound business and IT plan, thanks.
  • I just upgraded my home file server. 4 x 200GB WD IDE drives on a 3Ware card at RAID 5, giving me 540GB of space (each drive formatted down to 180GB).

    Anyways, my pr0n drive alone was over 150GB (yeah, I know). All I'd have to do is bring the server into work, stick it on the T1, configure QOS on the router to give my box preference (good to be the admin), and let er rip.

    Anybody know how long it would take to upload 100gb at 1.5mb/sec?

  • Not so wierd (Score:5, Interesting)

    by photon317 ( 208409 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:23AM (#10391239)

    I think Google (or anyone) shouldn't have a problem just giving people "unlimited" email space (and then whacking abuser accounts who mount gmail-based filesystems to store terabytes of pr0n...). For legitimate users of the system:

    1) It's text, compress it, save space.

    2) If you have a large user base, chances are there are many duplicate emails floating around the system. Hash everyone's email body-content globally. Then when that stupid email gets forwarded to 6000 of your customers, it only gets stored once for each unique form it arrives in. Ditto for mailing list emails.

    3) Make sure that your spam filter is really good, and especially that it never falses tosses legit emails, so that people trust it. Anything that's in the spam box gets autokilled in a week.

    4) Limit attachments to reasonable sizes. You're trying to stop people from email-attaching a 700MB uncompressed cd rip, or whatever. Gmail currently limits the entire message, all attachments included, to 10MB in size. They do other stupid things too though, like not letting you send zipfiles... A better system that leaves more freedom for the user might be to say that all attachment types are legal, but if a message's total length exceeds 10MB, then attachments in it will be "flagged for deletion", starting with the largest attachment in the message first, until the number is under 10MB. These larger "flagged for deletion" attachments get forceably deleted from your email archives after 24 hours, or 3 days, or something of that nature. In this way you can still transport large files via email, you just can't archive them there.

    Once those simple measures are in place, you can largely rely on statistics and reasonability. If a reasonably average webmail user actually received and archived over a gig of mail in a year under such a system I'd be impressed.
  • Just for archiving important documents (I'm a student, no porn jokes!). But gigs, I don't know. I have a gmail account, but I still use my school's account they gave me. Never trust your hard drive for the important stuff, I always feel. So large email accounts are useful, but this is over the top.
  • That email is looking more and more like an attractive P2P interface for file sharing. I think this would be a convenient way to share files. Encrypt and send them to mailboxes, pick them up at your convenience.

    While the base64 encoding isn't terribly efficient for space, an interesting characteristic of email is that multiple recipients at the same domain - say gmail.com, benefit from a single data transmission to gmail's server delivering the mail to several destination accounts. So for the first time we
  • ln -s /var/spool /dev/null
    Or was it the other way around??
  • Up to today, Weiss has signed up 52 million users in countries - a number which he wants to grow significantly to be recognized as record: "We would like to be included in the Guinness Book of Records for the world's largest mailing list," he said.

    Well, count me out. This is obviously a grab for attention, not to provide a legitimate service.
  • I wonder if free e-mail providers are using compression to make the provision of free 1GB+ accounts possible. Most e-mail is quite compressable. The only problem I see would be the CPU overhead of the compression/decompression. I've seen SSL accellerator PCI cards [soekris.com] and HTTP compression PCI-X cards [aha.com] but I don't think I've ever seen a card that can do offloaded gzip compression.

    Chris
  • ...if they aren'talready doing this. But from what I hear,text compresses fairly well. So... up the Gmail account quotas by compressing the text of the messages and you will have raised the bar yet again. On the fly compression should be a part of all mail filesystems.
  • Does anyone know an address there? I'd gladly re-send them all the spam I get - that should fill the 100 Gb...

  • only person left? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by itallushrt ( 148885 )
    Am I the only person left that still prefers to NOT leave email on someone elses server and POP it instead??????????

    My GMail account is basically useless as is because I don't want to use the Pop Goes The Gmail Hack [jaybe.org].
    • No, I do that too. Of course, my school only gives me a few MB of space and I get 50 or so emails a day, often with attachments. I forward stuff to my Gmail account if I know I'll need to get to it when I'm away from my computer, and I back up my Thunderbird mail folder every few days.
  • How on earth could anyone possibly need a hundred gigabytes of remote storage! The only data formats around that have an excuse to reach that size are hours of hifi video or the transaction database of a large corporation. What possible use could an ordinary user have for it?

    Seriously... How much space does your non-spam e-mail take up?

  • What about the GUI? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Wizarth ( 785742 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @01:26AM (#10391507) Homepage
    Sure, every-one signed up with GMail for the 1GB of Mail. But every-one I know who's used it, sticks with it for the GUI. It's so fast and easy to use. Thats the real power of GMail.

  • Can you imagine how long... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by innerweb ( 721995 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @01:42AM (#10391570)
    ...Getting your mail would take if your pop reader decides to redownload everything?

    InnerWeb

  • mp3 storage (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ralph Spoilsport ( 673134 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @02:24AM (#10391726) Journal
    email each mp3 file to yourself as a separate email. In the subject line label it artist / title / XX song title.

    This way, where ever you go, your tunage is on tap. It might takea while to DL, but so what! I know if my house was ravaged by some Tornado or Hurricane, and all my CDs were blown to flinders or washed out to sea, I would definitely appreciate the back up...

    RS

  • Uhh.. Duh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by piecewise ( 169377 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @03:29AM (#10391978) Journal
    Questioning the use of a 100GB email space?

    To backup my 100 gmail accounts, DUH.

  • Too bad it really doesn't matter (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @09:06AM (#10393285) Homepage
    Gmail's strength is certainly NOT its capacity, but how its fast interface, Labels, Conversations, and Search capabilities leverage that capacity. Mailbox size is really nothing more than an abused marketing point.

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