(bwack) Who ruffled your feathers today Ken? ;0)
Actually Gmail is great. And yes I have a Yahoo account too.
SpamGuard, at least on the free service, is a joke. Plain and simple. I have not yet tested the waters on Gmails spam filtering yet, but I think they will win in that department hands down.
I use Gmail to store web content. I see an article or story, and I stow it away. It is like my little (well large) scrapbook. The targeted ads offer "additional info" more or less, and that is a bonus.
Labels, while hard to adjust to, actually are a very good way of filing. As my scrapbook fills up, I will be able to leverage Google search to find what I need.
Privacy concerns, hah. It is kind of hypocritical to talk about how Yahoo is so innocent when they have signed on with Plaxo which is Search Utility for POP3 accounts (using Outlook, Eudora, etc.) This reads the text of your email too and is connected to the Yahoo engine, and I would trust Google over Plaxo-Yahoo any day of the week.
As far as the Address Book, Calendar, and oh boy Messenger -- who needs it. More of your stuff hanging out there on the Net. But in all fairness, I am sure Yahoo is very respective of your Privacy.
I have only ran into a couple of people who use all of that stuff anyway, mostly kids or somebody who used it once and never used it again. It is not one of those types of things that I would use on a professional basis.
It is amazing though. Google is only beta testing this Gmail, and it caused a hell of a lot of knee-jerk reactions from the likes of Yahoo and MicroSoft. Both of which are going to great expense to up their services -- and for what??? A little old search engine who is playing around with mail now. It is quite funny to see really.
Back to Gmail. It is very lightweight and loads instantly. Mail delivery is quick -- almost instantaneous. I have found no buggy behaviour in it at all, and I have been using it since the beginning. Outside of those (oh my gosh) hideous text ads that everyone is in an uproar over, I will take those over the Flash Banners and Ape Man who flys across the screen at Yahoo and plops his butt right on top of the paragraph you are reading any day of the week.
I use Yahoo as my throw away address. I filter all mail from the Yahoo and Hotmail domains and toss it in my spam bucket automatically on my POP3 account, for I have no personal or business contacts coming from those domains. (this is a good spam filtering technique people).
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Yahoo!s have breathed a sigh of relief that the GMail offering is not going to take off with the ferocity that had been anticipated.
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Sure. That is why Yahoo is tossing all Gmail invites into the Bulk Mail folder. I think they are very scared -- they are the ones that really got the ball rolling on all these other services getting hyped up all over it too.
Lets take an estimate of how many users of Gmail there are. How many bloggers are there. They all got 3 invites to hand out in the beginning. A month ago they got another 6, I heard of some people getting 10. Lets say that they handed 7 out total each.
According to this article
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...ss/5195814.htm back in Feb 2003
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Just 3 1/2 years old, Pyra's Blogger software (www.blogger.com) has 1.1 million registered users, Williams said. He estimated that about 200,000 of them are actively running weblogs. Pyra charges for some higher-capability services not available in the base configuration, but most of its registered users don't pay.
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200,000 active users. Lets say that it is double that. There is a boom in blogging since Google took over.
- 400,000 x 7 =
2.8 million + 400,000 original Gmail accounts =
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3.2 million Gmail accounts Total
Hmmm...I think Google is doing pretty good in just a few months out of the gate, eh?
This is what I see happening
E-mail as a platform - Why Gmail Will Win . Very plausible.
Yahoo!
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