Tech 01 Apr 2004 10:04 pm
G marks the spot
Ok, question of the day: is Gmail for real?
For those recently arriving from another planet, Google has announced today, of all days, that in the near future it will start to provide e-mail for anyone for free, in a service called Gmail, and that users’ mailboxes will hold up to 1 gigabyte (250 times as much as competitor Yahoo! Mail, for example).
The press release is definitely a tad too informal, so it does look like a hoax. However, it is clear that Google already has a good experience managing very large volumes of storage, and it certainly has the expertise required to do so at a reasonably low cost. So, if anyone can do it, they can.
Another thing that makes this look real is that, well, Google is heading towards an IPO; if it is a hoax, it is way too credible not to cause any damage (and, had the IPO already happened, it would certainly impact their valuation) (by the way, did it impact YHOO or MSFT?).
Just in case, I submitted my e-mail address in their registration form (as did most of the Internet, I’m sure). Maybe tomorrow I’ll receive a message from them saying basically “gotcha!”. Or maybe not.
If it is real, I can’t wait to see how they will deal with abuse issues. I mean, if you have that much space, it becomes very profitable to write a small app that uses mailboxes as file repositories to hold whatever you want. One could register 100 accounts and mail oneself the whole content of a hard-disk for safe keeping, for example (and that is the most innocent kind of abuse I can think of). Bandwidth throttles and limitations may help, but I’m not sure they will be that effective; given some enthusiasm and a somewhat talented programmer, you could use Google’s storage as the new Napster…
Let’s wait and see.
