GameBanshee Forums

when it comes down to it, its just a better mailing system. do any of the others have advantages that this does not? no. you say that you dont NEED 1 gb of storage, but i certainly need more than teh 2mb or 100mb that hotmail and yahoo offer, because i send and recieve alot of graphic design stuff, including short films. nobody else gives me the opportunity to do that, save perhaps outlook express, which is inconvenient as i move from computer to computer a lot. (it seems kinda silly to debate whether or not you need it, i mean they are offering it, and maybe it will never come in handy, but why COMPLAIN abouut it?) none of the other systems have as much of this freedom, and as far as i am concerned nobody comes close. the conversation logs make it a lot less cluttered, i have had NO spam, i like the search engines, and pretty darn near everythign else about it. this is all my opinion of course, and i could know less about such things than the rest of you, but thats my two cents worth.

kinda off topic, but i have gmail and its great. also if anybody is interested i can invite anybody to use it for free. fully functional, and even when it is all the way out of testing you dont have to pay for it. ya PM me if you are interested, no trouble at all.

edit: didnt see someone had already offered. lol.

I just got gMail a couple of days ago and haven't had that much time to use it yet, but I'm really impressed with it. Especially when it is combined with a nice little firefox extension that notifies you when you get mail. The only thing that I'm really missing is the ability to group two mails with different subjects into the same conversation as when people using swedish mail respond to me the mails get prefixed with SV instead of RE and hence a new conversation is started... apart from that I cannot see anything bad at all with it, a friends of mine also told me that there is supposedly someway to mount you gmail as a network drive in windows, much like spymac does. I'll have to look into that more later.

[QUOTE=Xandax]I have access to and uses my own private mail account associated with my webdomain from anywhere as well - cause it also has a webmail interface
(Hope that didn't ruin your day .... to much )

But anyways - If you have that many accounts "to give away", then hit me with one please, so I can check it out as well [/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=dragon wench]@Vicsun,
If you have a spare account, I'd be much obliged if you could send one my way as well, cheers [/QUOTE]


[QUOTE=giles337]Hey Viscun....
I would be much obliged (and would worship you forever ) if i could use one of your invitations? Thanks In Advance

Giles[/QUOTE]

Check your PMs.



edit: I still have a couple of accounts to give away. So ask away.

Now GMail could start to become usefull

edit: thanks for PM - will look at it when I get home from work (can't sit and do something like that at work )

[QUOTE=garazdawi]apart from that I cannot see anything bad at all with it, a friends of mine also told me that there is supposedly someway to mount you gmail as a network drive in windows, much like spymac does. I'll have to look into that more later.[/QUOTE]

I believe you are talking about this. I installed it the other day, but I didn't really find it useful. You still can't store attachments bigger than 10MBs, and while I find drag-and-drop easier than logging in and sending the file as an attachment, I found it dissapointing that files sent with the extension can't be accessed from a computer without it.
It's certainly neat, and I can definitely see its usefulness to a person who only checks his mail from one computer...


The only thing that I'm really missing is the ability to group two mails with different subjects into the same conversation as when people using swedish mail respond to me the mails get prefixed with SV instead of RE and hence a new conversation is started...

Really? I don't have the problem. When I write to someone in Denmark my subject line starts looking something like Re: Svar: Re: actual subject but all the emails still get grouped into a conversation. Try writing to google - after all that's what beta testers are here for


edit: arr! Xan beat me to the link! Need... to... type... faster!

[QUOTE=Vicsun]<snip>
edit: arr! Xan beat me to the link! Need... to... type... faster! [/QUOTE]

Need to type real fast to beat me

[QUOTE=Xandax]Need to type real fast to beat me [/QUOTE]
Shouldn't you be working



And I'm out of invites for now. Just to let you know It only took me three forums and a day to get rid of 12 invites! Yay!

[QUOTE=Vicsun]Shouldn't you be working
<snip>[/QUOTE]

Well ... eehhh.... I .... I haven't got the designs yet.

Thanks Vicsun,
I've been spending a bit of time checking Gmail out and it looks pretty good, I especially like the little email toolbar notifier.
Now if they also make the system compatible with Opera (I'm using it with Firefox right now), that will be perfect !

I like my GMail. And to whoever said they should change the name. No. Gmail is perfect since it's from Google and it gives you 1 Gig of storage.

And I have yet to see any ads in my inbox.

Oh, and I am allowed to delete stuff permanently. I don't know where you got the idea that that wasn't allowed.

If software reading one's mail is deemed legal for the purposes of advertising, will it get acceptable for the government & the CIA etc?

I see Gmail as thoroughly dodgy - it spells the end of the Wire act, and seems to set a precedent that I am uncomfortable with.

It's not that I specifrically mind targeted advertisement, but when a piece of software (apparently not interpretational) looks for keywords in your mail and reacts to them, I think a genuine civil liberty is lost. Woe betide.

[QUOTE=frogus23]It's not that I specifrically mind targeted advertisement, but when a piece of software (apparently not interpretational) looks for keywords in your mail and reacts to them, I think a genuine civil liberty is lost. Woe betide.[/QUOTE]
In this case, would I be correct to assume you don't and never will use any webmail service?
How do you think spam filtering works?

It's a choice. It's not like you have to use the gmail or hotmail. If you don't want your stuff read, get something else.

How does spam filtering work?

I use a non HTML email service on my dad's domain for personal mail, which I should hope it is impossible for anybody to read. But I am interested to know what keyword software hotmail for example uses to filter spam? If I sent a mail to you now saying 'hey Vicsun wanna buy cheap cheap ultimate sex viagra' , would hotmail shoot it down from keywords?

I don't know about an actual 'key word' filter, I believe this may be part of Hotmail's 'pay for' package, which I refuse to subscribe to because there are much better 'free' webmail providers out there.
But, Hotmail does have a very good system whereby you can set your account to only receive messages from your contacts. In this way, anything else is automatically channelled into your 'Junk Mail' folder which is automatically cleaned on a weekly basis.

[QUOTE=frogus23]How does spam filtering work?

I use a non HTML email service on my dad's domain for personal mail, which I should hope it is impossible for anybody to read. But I am interested to know what keyword software hotmail for example uses to filter spam? If I sent a mail to you now saying 'hey Vicsun wanna buy cheap cheap ultimate sex viagra' , would hotmail shoot it down from keywords?[/QUOTE]

Many spamfilters look at the contens of an e-mail and runs the words through an regular expresion checker which matches them with the contens of databases/known spam words. The most advanced of these will pick up Viagr@, Viiii@gr@, V|i|a|g|r|a combinations and so on.

Some also just sets up rules and allows things to pass that hasn't certain words in them. These aren't very sophisticated, and you need to set up rules for most any combination. Usually freebe software bundled with something (This was the spam filter in Norton Internet Security 2003 which I run - thank god I've found a much better free spamfilter)

Further some only allows e-mails from known contacts to pass through the filter, so you have to "clear" people to be able to send e-mails to you - somewhat similar to phonecalls where you screen incomming calls and only pick up from people whos number you know. These are the most safe, because you only accept e-mails you trust, but also the ones that bring most inconvience to both you and your e-mail partners.

Some uses a combination of all three.

There are more variations out there, but these 3 are the most common ways of checking for spam.

[QUOTE=frogus23]How does spam filtering work?

I use a non HTML email service on my dad's domain for personal mail, which I should hope it is impossible for anybody to read. But I am interested to know what keyword software hotmail for example uses to filter spam? If I sent a mail to you now saying 'hey Vicsun wanna buy cheap cheap ultimate sex viagra' , would hotmail shoot it down from keywords?[/QUOTE]

gMail and Hotmail basically do the same thing. They 'scan' (I don't like the phrase read through, as it implies understanding) your e-mail for certain words or phrases and then compare them to a set of words/phrases in some database.
What spam filters do next, is assign a value to each word. Most words would have a value of zero. Words which are common in spam would have a value higher than zero. For example the word V1/\gr@ might be assigned a value of 101 while the word discount and the phrase 50% off! might be assigned a value of 50. Then every e-mail which has a value higher than f.ex. 100 will get marked as spam. So a single occurrence of the word V1/\gr@ would be enough to mark the mail as spam.
But regardless of the actual mechanisms, spam filtering in webmail requires your e-mail to be 'read' by robots. This is no different than what gMail does, apart from the fact that gMail also uses gathered keywords to display text advertisments.
IMO it's not scanning you need to be worried about - it's trusting the webmail company (be it Google or Microsoft) with your emails stored on their servers.

As for POP3 (non-html) mail - while it isn't scanned by 3rd party robots for spam and ads, it is far from secure. Netiquette states that you shouldn't email anything you wouldn't want posted on the front page of your local newspaper . Reality isn't quite that scary, but unless you encrypt every email you send, it's trivially easy for someone else to intercept it - the email will pass through several servers and will most likely be stored in some log somewhere.

I also found the following bit of info on MS Exchange:
MS Exchange has settings for the email retention period. If you delete something from your mailbox in Outlook, then empty your Trash folder, it's effectively gone from your view and you've no way to retrieve it. It is however stored in Exchange for as long as the administrators wish to hang onto it (and that "deleted" email is, indeed, backed up and restorable).

If you shift-delete an object out of your Inbox, using that wonderful permanent-kill technique that the tech-savvy thinks protects and anonymizes their email... it's stored for the email retention period listed by the sysadmins, is backed up, and is restorable. It looks very dead to /you/, but not to /us/.

So in conclusion: e-mail isn't 100% secure, and it's not meant to be. gMail scanning your e-mail should be, however, the least of your concerns as no human being will actually read your e-mail. It's not impossible for them to read it, it's just unlikely (if you read the privacy policy it probably says something along the lines of 'we won't read your emails or disclose them to third parties')

edit: Xan beat me to it again! It doesn't pay to write long replies anymore

[QUOTE=dragon wench]I don't know about an actual 'key word' filter, I believe this may be part of Hotmail's 'pay for' package, which I refuse to subscribe to because there are much better 'free' webmail providers out there.
But, Hotmail does have a very good system whereby you can set your account to only receive messages from your contacts. In this way, anything else is automatically channelled into your 'Junk Mail' folder which is automatically cleaned on a weekly basis.[/QUOTE]
What do you mean by a 'key word' filter? If you are talking about a general spam filter, then I believe they have included one in their basic package as most of the spam going to my hotmail account gets recognized as such...

[QUOTE=Vicsun]<snip>
edit: Xan beat me to it again! It doesn't pay to write long replies anymore [/QUOTE]

- don't spend 30min. to write a post then

[QUOTE=Xandax] - don't spend 30min. to write a post then [/QUOTE]
But I don't have the attention span required to write the whole thing at one go