The Education Forum > Google Email

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John Simkin

Apr 5 2004, 10:47 AM

It appears that Google is to launch its own free email service. You can read about it at:

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,1...1185633,00.html

To quote the article:

New ideas tumble out of the Googleplex - the charmingly geeky name for the company's Californian headquarters - at a bewildering rate. Some are successful, some less so, but more often than not they attract a sizeable user base in next to no time. This is all down to Google's huge audience, with the search site handling more than 200m queries a day….

Ravaged by spam and with woefully inadequate storage limits unless you are prepared to pay, many people would jump at an alternative to Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. With most of the big portals trying to find ways of getting users to pay for email, it's the perfect time for Google to strike with the offer of a free service with huge storage capacity and effective spam filters. The fact that people trust Google as a brand should also help attract users, while opening up a whole new front on its push for more advertising revenues.

It appears that to get new ideas Google gives key workers a day off a week to develop their own projects. These are then tested out and the best ones become features of the site. Sounds like a good way to keep the company innovative. Maybe schools should adopt this strategy.

Graham Davies

Apr 5 2004, 11:34 AM

QUOTE

New ideas tumble out of the Googleplex - the charmingly geeky name for the company's Californian headquarters

A "googol" is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Maybe this is this origin of the name.

Google is a great search engine. I have rarely failed to find what I want with Google.

QUOTE

Ravaged by spam and with woefully inadequate storage limits unless you are prepared to pay, many people would jump at an alternative to Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail.

Most of the spam hitting my mailboxes comes from Yahoo and Hotmail addresses. I had to block incoming mail from Yahoo and Hotmail late last year as it was getting totally out of hand. I have a more efficient filter now: MailWasher Pro.

Andrew Field

Apr 5 2004, 02:00 PM

QUOTE (Graham @ Apr 5 2004, 10:34 AM)

A "googol" is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Maybe this is this origin of the name.

It is - http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

QUOTE

Google is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, to refer to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. A googol is a very large number. There isn't a googol of anything in the universe. Not stars, not dust particles, not atoms. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.

Andrew Moore

Apr 6 2004, 01:14 AM

You can try it out by going to http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/about.html and submitting your name.

Marco Koene

Apr 19 2004, 06:57 PM

I read you need to give them permission /access to scan your email when in the test fase. Any truth in that?

Derek McMillan

Apr 19 2004, 09:39 PM

QUOTE

I read you need to give them permission /access to scan your email when in the test fase. Any truth in that?

If you do not want ppl to read your emails then you need to encrypt them. I have never known whether the FBI *really* cannot read PGP (or GPG) encoded emails or if it was a double bluff on their part......but it is better than nothing!

Marco Koene

Apr 28 2004, 07:52 AM

Well i do not fear the fbi, but I do fear spammers! Has anybody got a good remedy against that?

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