Gmail Takes Largest Webmail Service Crown 383
redletterdave writes "After several years of dominance, Microsoft's Web-based email service, Hotmail, has been unseated by Google's significantly younger webmail service, Gmail. Google announced it had about 350 million monthly active users in January; since then, that number has ballooned to 425 million."
Remember when people ran their own mail servers?
FIFO (Score:5, Funny)
First in, First out. Cya, hotmail.
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I read that it depends on whether or not you are logged in. You have to log out before posting anonymous. Posting logged-in-anonymous is not good enough.
Mod parent up. (Score:5, Funny)
...then post anonymously to reverse it.
Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa (Score:5, Informative)
This is indeed true, although the moderator FAQ makes no mention of it anymore. An oversight that shall be rectified.
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Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa (Score:5, Insightful)
Currently we have a considerable number of "resetting moderation" posts that just serve to spam threads.
Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe selection bias (Score:4)
Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the main difference is that AOL is US only, while hotmail had a lot of worldwide users. I must know about 45% hotmail, 45% gmail, and 10% "all the rest". I'm guessing that's pretty much how modern distribution goes as well.
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AOL isn't US only, though I have no idea why anyone else would use it. As I said in another post here, I have a small business with about 1000 customers, and of my ~40 AOL addresses in my customer list, 2 of them are in the UK.
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Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:5, Informative)
America Online wasn't based in and focused on America?
Indeed not [aol.co.uk]. They were a reasonably significant broadband ISP in the UK too, though their decline here has paralelled that in the USA.
Yes I remember their famous "faux pas", like telling the residents of Scunthorpe that they should rename their town Sconthorpe [plokta.com] to register, thinking people from Penistone [wikipedia.org] were taking the piss - there couldn't be a town called that could there?, and telling the Welsh that they has to use English in the Welsh language forum. They even blocked emails in Welsh [bbc.co.uk]. Needless to say they were not the biggest ISP in the UK!
Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:4, Insightful)
Why on earth does the government need to be running not one, but two luxury car companies, for instance? (And one of those isn't just any luxury car company, it's probably one of the two most outrageously expensive makes on earth.)
Rolls Royce were a company that made both luxury cars and military-grade aircraft parts. They were nationalised as a whole when they went bust in the 70s due to the need to keep the military gear flowing; the car brand was immediately separated off and sold. The aircraft-part manufacturer stayed on the public books for a couple of decades before being sold off again. The two are still separate to this day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_plc [wikipedia.org]
My view on nationalisation versus privatisation has always been: if it's too big or important to fail, it has to be state owned. Otherwise the state is only underwriting the company anyway. The current Tory government is looking to sell off the Royal Mail; this would mean that in any year where they make a profit, some shareholders will get to keep that money as a dividend. But if the Royal Mail makes huge losses and heads towards bankruptcy, you can be damned sure the government will bail them out; the country without a postal system is unimaginable. So all they'll have done is privatise the profits, nationalised the losses. Ridiculous.
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Ok, the explanation about RR makes perfect sense; I didn't realize they were separated but with the same name, much like Volvo (the car company is owned by Gealy of China, the heavy equipment company is entirely separate and still Swedish).
However, this still doesn't explain Jaguar.
I totally agree about privatization. We have the same problem here in the US; there's a handful of "too big to fail" banks, and when they were on the verge of failing, the government rushed in and bailed them out, but they get t
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I bought myname.com about ten years ago, but it forwards to whatever project of mine I feel is most important at the time, i don't use it for email. For that, I use an email address I set up on a domain I got in '97 (and access that through gmail's web interface now). I ran my own server for a decade before realizing google would do it for me, and save me all sorts of problems.
Re:hunh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Same here. I've had my own domain since 1999. Over the years I've had mail provided by a number of services (at one point having it hosted on a server under my desk at home). When Google Apps came out (in what, 2006?) I switched to them and have been with them since.
I get enormous amounts of spam (these days it's around 4,000 messages a month. A few years ago it was in the 30,000-40,000/month range.) so dealing with spam filtering was a massive hassle. Gmail's filters are outstanding, and maybe 1-2 spams slip through per month. They're usually novel attempts to avoid filtering and are quickly blocked. Google's trivial "mark this message as spam" button makes things quite easy. The support for IMAP, POP, and Exchange ActiveSync is nice too, as is their XMPP support (both with a separate client and their web-based one). I'm a heavy user of email (but routinely delete rather than archive messages) and am only using about 5% of the total storage space allocated to me as a free user.
Gmail's also been doing quite well on the security front: their accounts support two-factor authentication using open standards and their service defaults to using HTTPS (with ephemeral ECDH key exchange, no less!).
My parents, who are not very technical people, have used Gmail for years and have been quite satisfied. I'm pleased that the system choses sane defaults to help keep them secure.
Sure, I *could* set up and run my own email server, but why bother? High availability costs money and time, servers are not cheap, I'd have to pay for electricity/network connectivity for an underutilized system, and I'd have to constantly be fending off spammers and other baddies. I'd rather use my time to do something else that's more productive.
Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging by my own defunct hotmail account, I wouldn't want to do that. So much spam.
But it'd all get run through Gmail's spam filters, so you wouldn't actually see it.
Re:IMAP (Score:5, Informative)
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I stopped using my hotmail account before Microsoft bought it, back when frames were still considered a bright idea. At this point my Gmail address is a magnet for spam and idiots using it to sign up fo
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They do? Not everywhere I guess ... a static IPv4 address is a $5/month add-on for my current home DSL plan. And even without paying that, my IPv6 address is static (or rather, the /56 prefix they assign me is static).
But despite that I still don't really want to go to the trouble of self hosting - buying a cheap domain and using free Google Apps for mail works great and gives me high reliability while still letting me fully control my own mail.
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I don't think you need a static to run a mail server as long as you have a dynamic DNS.
Most DHCP addresses are pretty damn static anyways. I know with DynDns you can set the TTL to be very short (in seconds on a paid account) which would take care of an address that changes every 24 hours.
As long as you can control basic DNS records for your domain (GoDaddy even lets you do that) you can set the MX record for the domain to be the Dynamic DNS address and the whole thing should work just fine.
I've never actu
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Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with this. I've been running a very small internet business for a few years now, and have about 1000 customers so far; out of those 1000, about 150 have hotmail.com addresses, while only about 40 have aol.com addresses. The customers aren't really computer experts either, so it's a crowd where I'm not surprised to have AOL users, but still, there's lots more hotmail users. In fact, there's actually more hotmail users than Yahoo users, of which there's about 120. Not surprisingly, Gmail tops the list, at over 230. The rest is things like comcast.net (a little over 30, close to the aol.com number in fact), roadrunner.com, etc. along with some business email addresses and various other ISPs, large and small.
Re:Maybe selection bias (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm surprised Hotmail just lost its crown. It has millions of spam accounts on there.
Either their spam detection just got better, or the spammers themselves are leaving Hotmail because no one takes Hotmail seriously anymore.
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Nah, Hotmail was THE webmail service in the late 90s to early 2000s when the internet was growing very fast, and thus I think most people have or had a Hotmail address around here. Not in the US so 'AOL' never existed.
In the 2001-2005 period when I was at university easily 2/3rds of people used a Hotmail address (and the remainder used their ISP-provided email address). Now it's a lot lot less as Gmail has pretty much taken over. I still use my Hotmail address, but only as a 'throwaway' address for website
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At least in the past with Hotmail and yahoo you still had to log in every now and then or the account would be disabled (or even deleted), and the emails wiped..
Own email server (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when people ran their own mail servers?
I do, because I still run my own, as plenty of power-users do. Of course, the masses never ran their own e-mail servers, even before webmail, they just used POP3 or IMAP.
Re:Own email server (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh lots of people probably would still run their own, even on their home internet connections if they could. Unfortunately, most ISP's no longer allow people to run servers.
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Just sign up for a vpn account with prq, they give you straight unfirewalled vpn with it's own static IP address.
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Actually, ISP don't allow nor disallow it. The issue is you need a static IP (to receive mail). Even if you manage to get around that (low TTL on DNS, constantly updating data), and most large e-mail providers (google/hotmail/yahoo) will bounce emails from dynamically-allocated IP addresses. The issue is still not ISP side, but rather large-email-host-side.
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I don't think the static IP makes any difference. It probably is still listed in the PBLs.
Only need I ever came across for one was site-to-site VPN tunnels.
Most static IP addresses are on business accounts, and you are allowed to run servers on those.
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In the UK I had several (consumer) ISPs that were happy to sell me (for around 1 GBP per month) a static IP address, unblock incoming and outgoing port 25 and when requested politely even set up rDNS records for me.
YMMV as they say.
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$20/month isn't exactly cheap. A Netflix membership costs less than half of that, and most people probably don't pay more than 2.5 times that ($50) for internet service. Heck, you can get web hosting for $4/month these days easily. With the crappy economy, everyone's looking to cut costs, and $20/month really isn't pocket change, for something that you really don't need to do when free email accounts are so easy to get.
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I pay 15USD for a VPS in USA. Meanwhile, internet here (Argentina, third-world-ish), costs me about 100USD a month.
Internet actually gets expensiver as you distance yourself from first-world countries.
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Remember when people ran their own mail servers?
I do, because I still run my own, as plenty of power-users do. Of course, the masses never ran their own e-mail servers, even before webmail, they just used POP3 or IMAP.
I run my own mail server, but I still dump most of my mail into a Gmail account since their spam filtering works better than any open source alternatives I've found. I spent a lot of time training Spamassassin's bayesian filter, and though it was pretty good, I finally figured out that Gmail is just easier. Thousands of other users are training their filters and I've found that few spams make it through, and few hams are flagged as spams.
But I have a few email addresses only known to family and close frien
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Neither of those approaches is easier than (or necessarily better than) letting Gmail's spam filter handle your mail.
Re:Own email server (Score:5, Informative)
I do, because I still run my own, as plenty of power-users do. Of course, the masses never ran their own e-mail servers, even before webmail, they just used POP3 or IMAP.
I don't. Google Apps is free for 50 users, almost never goes down, configures itself automatically and does a better job of protecting my data than I could. I don't even use the web interface, I just hook my mail client up to it and away it goes. "Fire and forget".
Re:Own email server (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL. The one thing Google does NOT do is protect your data. To protect your data, you keep it to yourself, you don't let Google/FBI/CIA/TSA/MAFIAA/Obama snoop it up and either censor it or take it hostage etc.
American corporations are a terrible place to store your data, unless "you have nothing to hide".
Re:Own email server (Score:5, Insightful)
That would only be true if you send all encrypted email to only people using private, encrypted servers. Since the rest of us live in the real world where our friends and family use large webmail services, it really doesn't make a difference.
Re:Own email server (Score:5, Informative)
To protect your data, you keep it to yourself,
Keep it to yourself indeed. I mean, you really need to protect that data you transmitted in plaintext to someone else via smtp who is reading it right now via their own gmail account...er ... wait... you sent an email to someone using gmail? You might as well host your copy with them, they already have it anyway.
If you want to protect your data, you probably aren't emailing it.
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> Google Apps is free
> does a better job of protecting my data
Are you astroturfing, or really that naive? Just because you don't pay in a currency you recognize, does not mean that any of the web-mail services (or other "cloud services") are for free.
It depends on what you mean by free. I think the GP is using the normal meaning of the word "free". This is "I don't have to pay money for it". You might use the same meaning as I do but we are in a minority.
Re:Own email server (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, I used to run my own email server. And I would spend hours a week dealing with spam. And I made it a rule to spend an equal amount of time trying to prevent future spam, tweaking rule sets, blacklists, whitelists, filters... After having the same email address for nearly 20 years the amount of spam was truly astounding.
Now I just pipe it through Google Apps For Your Domain. Weekly time spent dealing with spam: 5 seconds. Sure, it doesn't have all the advantages of running your own, but I get hours back in my week, which is priceless.
I don't even use Spamhaus (Score:5, Informative)
Good set of postfix rules and a very mild tweaking of Spamassassin and I have nearly no spam reach my inbox.
smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
reject_unknown_client_hostname,
reject_unauth_pipelining,
check_client_access pcre:/etc/postfix/reject-domains,
permit
smtpd_helo_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
check_helo_access pcre:/etc/postfix/nomail-domains,
check_helo_access mysql:/etc/postfix/reject-helo-mydomains.cf,
reject_invalid_helo_hostname,
reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostname,
permit
smtpd_sender_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
check_sender_access pcre:/etc/postfix/nomail-domains,
check_sender_access mysql:/etc/postfix/reject-sender-mydomains.cf,
reject_non_fqdn_sender,
reject_unknown_sender_domain,
permit
smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
reject_unauth_destination,
check_recipient_access pcre:/etc/postfix/reject-users,
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I run my own. Always did. There, in the living room rack, under the TV. As natural as a mailbox streetside.
Re:Own email server (Score:5, Informative)
I'm in the process of shifting our 2000 accounts from our own mail server to google apps for education.
Running your own mail server is a pain in the ass these days. With the massive torrent of spam - including pornographic spam - that gets ever harder to filter, without also blocking legitimate mail. RBLs on SMTP, greylisting, bayesian filters, image-to-text converters to then run bayesian analysis on... it's not even close to enough. Then you have virus infected laptops stealing credentials from the legit mail client and trying to send spam, finding a decent web-mail client that doesn't suck and keeping it updated (roundcube, BTW, is miles better than squirrelmail), the headmaster getting his password stolen so a spammer starts using his legit account to access our external access relay and send a bunch of spam for a few hours before we shut it down, still dealing with being on random blacklists for two weeks afterwards; but the ISP relay smtp server gets blacklisted even more often, setting up SPF and domain keys so some staff members email to a parent doesn't get randomly blocked because of yet another new anti-spam standard you have to adhere to...
Dealing with user complaints of why this was marked with spam when it shouldn't be, why this wasn't, why I can't send this 40MB powerpoint, where's this email gone that I swear was there a minute ago, making sure the VM server doesn't run out of drive space, neither does the backup server, making sure the backups don't slow the system down, making sure the backups work; keeping the system up 100% of the time and still doing maintenance, updates and changes to work around yet another 'email bounced' problem, making sure the various cluster boxes keep in sync, debugging why the logging server has choked this time...
I have a 100 other systems jobs to do. Babysitting the multiple postfix, dovecot and nginx servers to keep mail service up and running reliably spam free (ish) takes up a lot of my time that could be more profitably spent improving and add new services/software. Thank god we never met the cost/benefit pass-grade of exchange to add that too and only had to have simple IMAP support.
Instead, I can move the entire system to google apps, ad free, for free because we're education, and google have obviously learned from microsoft that catching students early means they'll end up a customers themselves later. And I'm fine with that. They have far better spam filtering than I can ever hope to achieve on my own even with my battery of different open-source tools. They have far more engineers. They have coverage round the clock, so I'll hopefully stop getting phone calls on christmas morning about the bloody email system. They can store 25GB a user without stressing me out about whether we're going to hit the limits of our budget on FC SAN storage.
They have a nice web interface; and shared docs, calendars and contact lists thrown in for free. I can clone all mail live, so I can still backup everything off site.
All in all, I'm going to be _very_ glad to see the back of running my own mail server.
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Be prepared for dealing with such stuff on Google Apps too. A couple of years ago I moved an institution to Google Apps. Overall, it has been a positive experience, but it took them awhile to understand that I can't do much if "this email is gone that I swear was there a minute ago" or stuff like that.
Also, you
POP3 access. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hotmail was great... (Score:5, Insightful)
... before Microsoft bought it. It used to run on Unix and was a good reliable service. Then it was bought up and run down and now it is rubbish. Gmail is getting better every week. I use docs to collaborate with people on things and even though I know most of them copy and paste the finished article into Word before they print it, that facility is fantastic. My calendar etc. and spreadsheets, I could go on (POP3 etc.) but my point is that while one keeps getting more useful the other is stagnant. Why would anyone choose to use Hotmail unless they are already known to be there?
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Gmail is NOT "getting better every week". It hit its peak about a year or so ago, before they forced this idiotic new UI change on us.
Re:Hotmail was great... (Score:4, Insightful)
Gmail is NOT "getting better every week". It hit its peak about a year or so ago, before they forced this idiotic new UI change on us.
Just wanted to second this. If I could go back to the way it was a year ago I'd be happy. I'm also tired of the Gmail Labs kludges that add functionality and break something somewhere else. (like the preview pane that makes it so I can no longer see the 'recent activity' at the bottom of the screen.)
I wouldn't be offended if they took what they know about it now and did a rewrite, thoughtfully including a number of the features from Labs. Do a little streamlining, reduce some of the bloat, all that jazz. Oh well, I can dream.
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What anti MS FUD. When was the last time Hotmail was down? It may have issues, but reliability is not one of them. Never was.
Re:Hotmail was great... (Score:4, Informative)
He's not entirely wrong. The Hotmail purchase was a bit of an embarrassment at the time for MS. They bought a successful service that was using FreeBSD for everything, while telling all of their customers that UNIX on the server was old and crappy while NT 4 was the new shiny. Then they tried to switch Hotmail to NT4, failed miserably, saw a load of downtime, and reverted to FreeBSD... which would have been fine if they hadn't made such a big deal about the migration. Hotmail now runs Windows Server {some year} - they learned from this experience, improved their server OS offering, and didn't tell anyone about the second migration until after it was done and working.
Hotmail was FreeBSD on the user facing services and Solaris for data storage.
We never tried NT4. We did eventually move to W2K (which was part of why I left).
-J
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Hotmail absolutely -NEVER- ran Linux. We gave it a test at the end of '96 but it didn't do SMP as well as FreeBSD did and we never really tried again.
-J
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Hotmail was great... before Microsoft bought it.
Hotmail was terrible before Microsoft took over. It could take several days for an email from one Hotmail address to reach the inbox of another Hotmail address.
Um, no. Hotmail to Hotmail email was directly delivered. It never touched a SMTP server. The process was to query the user database server, check the recipient's mailbox size, and then deliver directly to their mailbox.
I still have some of the original Perl source code on tape.
-J
Yeah, I remember. It was a pain. (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when people ran their own mail servers?
Yeah, I do. I also remember relay rape and all that fun stuff when you didn't have your mail server configured just right and a spammer would take it over and you'd get a nastygram from your provider.
--
BMO - Lumber Cartel member #2501
Re:Yeah, I remember. It was a pain. (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, nowadays spammers have a much easier job, they just send you "trojan.zip", and say "here's your photos from tokyo last night". People still download it and and run it.
As long as people unwilling to use their brain exists, spammers will always find a way to exploit them.
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>People still download it and and run it.
That. I gave up spamfighting as a hobby when the spammers stopped looking for open relays and went to just hijacking broadband connections and botnets. It's one thing when you could fire off a postmaster@example.com and cross your fingers that it would get read and an account nuked or a relay closed, but something entirely when a spammer's got his load spread among 1,000 (or tens or hundreds of thousand) broadband Wintel toybox machines.
--
BMO
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I gave up spamfighting as a hobby
All but a few noble souls have. The rest who run mailservers set up spamassassin to auto-update rules and go on to other tasks.
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>implying what I wrote must mean it was I in particular that had a misconfigured sendmail.
>implying that it was hard to have a misconfigured sendmail.
>implying my days of participation in NANAE back in 1998 as a freelance spamfighter (as a hobby, everybody needs one.) wasn't the basis of my previous message
>doesn't recognise the lumber cartel reference, which comes from NANAE.
>implying.
Yeah well, whatever.
--
BMO
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Wait, Sendmail? Hell, no wonder you had trouble. You, sir, have my deepest sympathies.
(from a happy mail admin using Postfix)
android (Score:5, Interesting)
I dunno, maybe the fact of requiring a gmail account to setup an android phone has something to do with it maybe?
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I dunno, maybe the fact of requiring a gmail account to setup an android phone has something to do with it maybe?
Same deal with Hotmail and MSN chat, isn't it?
I know a lot of people that still use MSN chat for some reason.
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It used to be that way, but now you just need a Windows Live ID to use MSN Messenger.
A Live ID can be attached to any email - doesn't need to be Hotmail.
That said, I still use my Hotmail address for Messenger... just legacy purposes ;)
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I signed up for an MSN Messenger account back in 2002 or early 2003 using my .edu address at the college I had just started at. Admittedly, it wasn't an obvious process to set it up, as I recall, since they did try to make it as difficult as possible to use an outside e-mail address, but the option has been there for probably a decade or more.
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Having never used an Android phone, I am interested in this statement - do you actually need a Gmail account to setup an Android phone? Or do you just need a Google ID (which is understandable - but my understanding was a Google ID can be tied to any old email address and doesn't necessarily have to have a Gmail account attached)...
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You need neither. You can set up an Android phone without any ties to Google whatsoever.
Re:android (Score:5, Interesting)
do you actually need a Gmail account to setup an Android phone?
A basic Google Account can be used to configure the phone but will fail if the user then tries to use the Android Market functionality; the Market requires a Gmail account.
There is a long, long thread on Google's "support" forum about this dating back to somewhere in 2009, but still no fix!
On a basic level the phone will work fine without any form of Google account, you just won't be able to use features such as sync or the Market. I do find the latter to be quite limiting, particularly when some vendors ( such as Amazon ) don't even provide a download of their own app from their own site but insist on directing the user to the Market. I had to ask a friend to send me a copy of the Kindle APK!
I -still- run my own mailserver (Score:2)
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Your point being? If "They" want you "They" will have you... boiled, fried, stewed, with or without a warrant...
Or have you forgotten The little rooms the NSA keeps on the backbones sniffing and sorting all the traffic. They don't need your server -- they already have it.
noia + noia = paranoia.
Still run my own... (Score:3)
...but have two Gmail accounts for other purposes. I have a TW Business Class account for QOS and trading response. It comes with a static IP and no server restrictions. When my neighbors complain about slow evening and weekend speed, I bob my head up and down and make sympathetic noises. I never see any problem but certainly do pay for it.
Several acquaintances still have Hotmail addresses but a quick scan of my address book only found three. I guess it is diminishing. It seems like they were a lot more common a few year ago.
Gmail defeated Exchange, not Hotmail (Score:5, Insightful)
Hotmail didn't even deserve the level of use it had: it was competing with AOL, and had the kind of ubiquitous "auto-installed with your computer as as default, and we'll keep trying to re-install it" that AOL used to have. Both services attempted to replace the rest of your desktop and were unusable without very specific clients.
Google's approach of working well, inside your normal web browsers, has been extremely effective. They've also been vastly more reliable than almost any in-house mail server for a lot of reasons: they were able to effectively implement basic spam filtering, they're big enough to survive denial of service attacks, and their distributed and well scaled architectures survive disasters most mail servers can only imagine being able to cope with. Also, they've avoided the religious wars about supported clients and usage models by keeping their systems off-site and their services well defined. The Exchange OWA, and the dozens of "plug-ins" connected to it to support other email clients, have driven people directly to GMail.
Hotmail, and Exchange, _never_ worked well with non-Microsoft clients, whether browsers or IMAP access. Google always did, Google always actually published and followed their API's so other people could integrate with it, and Microsoft _never_ published or followed their own API's. What little Microsoft published was always incomplete when it was not a blatant lie.
Google's use of and investment in open standards paid off.
How many are 'bots? (Score:4, Informative)
Google announced it had about 350 million monthly active users in January.
Of which a sizable fraction are spambots. [xgcmedia.com]
Re:How many are 'bots? (Score:4, Informative)
I sit next to the team that handles bulk account signups at Google. We are quite familiar with sellers like xgcmedia, buyaccs, vebxperts etc. As pointed out by others, Gmail accounts are significantly more expensive than other types of account. The reason is that we are very good at catching bulk attempts and requiring phone verification. This doesn't stop all bulk signup, but it does mean you have to buy a lot of SIM cards and swap them in/out all day, which is a lot of manual effort. Most of these guys are running account sweatshops in places like Pakistan or Bangladesh and just use a lot of manual labour.
The massive price difference means that bulk spam from @gmail.com is not a big problem like it used to be. Small amounts still go out occasionally, but it's rare. I gave a public talk on the topic of account abuse at Google [ripe.net] back in April.
centralization = danger (Score:4, Informative)
Centralization of almost every service onto just a few commercial services is dangerous to the future openness and non-censored nature of the internet. We just haven't seen it yet on a big enough scale. It's too much all in one place.
The original purpose of the internet was very much the opposite of centralization, and it was that way for many years with great success... but for some reason, everyone suddenly decided to give a single company access to all their private, financial, and even medical conversations, web browsing, and more.
I pay for hotmail (Score:3, Funny)
and I'm not ashamed to say it. The pay service ( I think its still 20 a year) has very good spam detection and its online gui is quite similar to a desktop client. I primarily use gmail, but I still do hop back into hotmail for password resets or to look up old receipts.
Gmail: simple, clean and functional (Score:2)
Gmail's interface is addictively clean and at the same time functional and powerful. Once you've tried Gmail, it's unlikely you'll go back to Hotmail or Yahoo Mail.
When I look at Hotmail I now feel like stabbing myself in the eyes. Sorry, but Gmail has spoiled me.
Most users, but not most storage space (Score:2)
Facebook? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe for a short time. Just curious... do you trust Zuckerberg with your private email?
the statistics are not about the number of mail sent/received/read. just about the number of accounts.
thus, facebook is the biggest webmail provider.
I switched to Fastmail (Score:3)
I pay for my email now, because I want to be someone's customer, not someone's product
Fastmail is great. No ads, a decent Web UI when I want it, and a dedicated sysadmin team that does nothing but mail. All the Bayesian filtering, Sieve rules and DKIM signing you could want. Plus, I keep my conversations and business dealings out of Google's maw (although it's hard to avoid people who use GMail), and there's Yubikey authentication for when I'm on someone else's machine.
fastmail.fm [fastmail.fm] (full disclosure: referral link included)
I have administered mail servers professionally before and have quite a bit of experience with it. If I'm not being paid to do it I'm sure as hell paying someone else to deal with the hassle.
Re:Classic interface? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, not many entities are better than that these days. Royally fucking up perfectly-good UIs is all the rage right now.
Re: (Score:2)
Has its UI changed significantly in the last couple of years? If not, expect the worst; some "UI designer" is going to decide that its UI is "too old" and "too unlike mobile device UIs" and that it needs to be "improved" and "simplified".
Re: (Score:2)
Because there isn't a -1 I disagree with you.
Re: (Score:3)
You won't have better service with Hover. I haven't tried their domain services, but I have used their email services, and they're famous for having week-long outages.
Gmail's labels are easy; think of them like folders, except that you can put a single email into multiple folders. They even have hierarchies set up now, so your labels can be nested like: Work, Work/CompanyA, Work/CompanyB, Work/CompanyA/CustomerA, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Your provider still filters even though you turned it off. There are multiple levels of filtering at major providers with the most basic filtering happening before it hits the controls to which you have access. They're filtering out viruses, mail from known spam sources, etc. before it goes through any heuristic analysis, white/black lists, customer preferences, etc. The last big provider I worked with called the first level of filtering "the gateway filter".
You may think you're raw-dogging it but the on
Re:there's a middle ground too (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with this approach is that it ties you to your ISP. When you move or they get bought in ten years, you have to try to recall EVERYONE who has your email address, and convince them to update their address books.
Re:there's a middle ground too (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this approach is that it ties you to your ISP. When you move or they get bought in ten years, you have to try to recall EVERYONE who has your email address, and convince them to update their address books.
This. ISP-provided email is a form of vendor lock-in.
Personally, I avoided the issue by buying my own domain years ago and using it for my email. Google Apps provides the backend for it now, but I can switch off them to a different provider (including my own server) within the time it takes for DNS TTLs to expire (24 hours or so) without needing to change my address. Very convenient.