As a Gmail user, I have a number of free Gmail accounts to give away.
So this message is my attempt to give them away to folks who work in community based media or ICT... preferably (but not necessarily) in developing countries. One reason is that media folks often need to send larger files like photographs and audio files (especially when doing freelance work to support their non-commercial work).
With Gmail, you can send and receive messages up to 10 megabytes (MB) in size. However, the precise amount allowable will depend on the attachment.
When you add an attachment, the size of a file may increase because transport encodings are automatically added. (Transport encodings are the information that allows your message to be safely sent and read.)
This means that in some cases, attachments that are 6 to 10MB in size may push the total message size above 10MB. When this happens, Gmail displays a warning that your message exceeds the 10MB limit.
Gmail is a free, search-based webmail service that includes 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of storage. The backbone of Gmail is a powerful Google search engine that quickly finds any message an account owner has ever sent or received. That means there's no need to file messages in order to find them again.
When Gmail displays an email, it automatically shows all the replies to that email as well, so users can view a message in the context of a conversation. There are no pop-ups or untargeted banner ads in Gmail, which places relevant text ads and links to related web pages adjacent to email messages. (As they are text only, they do not greatly increase your page loading times like they do in Hotmail or Yahoomail)
Also.. you need a recent browser to use G-mail as it makes extensive use of Java scripts....
JavaScript and cookies must be enabled on all browsers
Supported Browsers:
- Microsoft IE 5.5+ (Windows )
- Netscape 7.1+ (Windows Mac Linux )
- Mozilla 1.4+ (Windows Mac Linux )
- Mozilla Firefox 0.8+ (Windows Mac Linux )
- Safari 1.2.1+ (Mac )
So if you would like a free Gmail account... send me a message telling me why you could use one to my Gmail account at:
mediamentorATgmailDOTcom
George]
E-mail is the new database
By Joia Shillingford
BBC News business reporter
[excerpt]
"If a friend is excited about a concert and that gives me an idea for a birthday gift, I will store the info on e-mail," says Georges Harik, the man in charge of search-engine Google's Gmail service.
Stuart Anderson, Microsoft's Hotmail business manager in the UK, keeps online shopping receipts in his mailbox in case he has to query anything later.
"People are keeping a lot more information in their e-mail accounts for retrieval at a later date," says Yahoo!
Web-based e-mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL Mail on the Web are becoming databases by default as a growing number of people use them, to store data and photos so they can retrieve them from anywhere.
Growing trend
The trend has become more pronounced as the services have dramatically increased their storage capacity in response to upstart Gmail offering a free service with 1,000 megabytes (Mb) of storage.
"E-mail is a way of interacting not just with others, but also with yourself, " says Mr Harik, who is director of Googlettes (new Google services). "You want to remember something, so you send it to your mailbox."
For all but the very organised, old e-mails will contain phone numbers that haven't been entered into a diary, names and addresses of contacts, meeting or customer information, useful statistics or competitor information and photos of products and people.
The market for web-based e-mail services is still growing. "In the US, it grew 3% between April and November 2004," said Andreas Gutjahr, marketing manager, UK & Germany, for Neilsen//NetRatings, a Nasdaq-listed internet research company.
He says the number of minutes users spend connected is also rising.
Money maker
But even where there is a small subscription fee, e-mail does not make much money in itself. The prize is in the number of users - and therefore advertisers - the providers can lure, not just to their online mailboxes but also to portals like MSN and search engines like Google and Yahoo!.
Gmail "will be very profitable for us," says Mr Harik.
But if web e-mail is being used for more than just sending and receiving messages, how will this affect the market shares of the different providers?
One possibility is that Hotmail's market dominance could be affected by rival services better equipped to search through thousands of e-mails.
Rival offerings
Both Yahoo! and Google have had internet search engines as part of their core business from the start. So they are well placed to offer efficient e-mail searching.
Gmail was designed with the idea of searching for unstructured, unfiled information in mind. Mr Harik says: "We've taken away about 70%-80% of the reason to file things."
However, he believes: "It might still be worth filing e-mails related to a specific project, where comprehensiveness (finding every single message on a topic) was important."
"We have a labelling system that enables you to label messages in more than one way. Also our conversation feature enables you to see all the messages in an e-mail conversation."
Google will also search users' e-mails for keywords so that it can place adverts in mailboxes relevant to users' interests. On the one hand, this may make adverts more useful. On the other - though users' identities won't be revealed to advertisers - it does raise privacy concerns.
Gmail is currently available by invitation only as it is still under development. But it recently increased the number of new users that existing customers can invite - from 10 to 50 - suggesting it is pushing Gmail out to more people.
Full text at
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/4167633.stm
So if you would like a free Gmail account... send me a message telling me why you could use one to my Gmail account at:
mediamentorATgmailDOTcom
