100 GB Email Account

soccrates writes "An article on Toms Hardware describes a Californian company giving out 100 GB email accounts to its customers. They even extended a challenge to get the first user to completely fill up the account, the winner getting a 1 terabyte account ! "

Slashdot Effect

[typobox43 (677545)]

I think Slashdot could easily fill this mailbox. If everyone switches their email address to one of these mailboxes, the viruses and spambots would certainly do the work for us.

Re:Spam Harvesting

[BlackHawk-666 (560896)]

Not so. Feed this spam harvest into the bayes classifier for SpamAssassin or another filter system and train it to recognise that as all spam. This will seriously increase the quality of it's spam checking in future. I fed about 12,000 into mine, the result of about five months worth of harvesting.

Re:Spam Harvesting

[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

The problem is, one persons spam is another persons ham.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"

It all depends on perspective.

Of course, there are common things that neither party wants, but giving a one size fits all filter for all but the most obvious will cause false positives.

Don't you think the big mail companies would have sorted it out by now if they could? They have the largest harvest of spam around.

[I was going to stop here, below are just random ramblings]

Having said all that, I believe every person should be allocated a bloom filter with their mail classification preferences. This filter is used against the results of all the identification rules.

All the mail companies should accept this token and display mail which passes. Currently, I have 4 mail providers who deal with spam differently, I would like to setup one set of rules.
The good thing about using a bloom is that preferences can be merged increasing the effectiveness, for instance, a virus filter, a fakes filter, a childsafe filter, or an office filter, developers filter etc.

Of course, this way, we don't change the front end mailing system itself, and people who don't use this token are free to handle the mail however they like.

I'll stop wafflin now.

Re:Spam Harvesting

[MagicM (85041)]

Of course, there are common things that neither party wants

Spam isn't about what someone wants or doesn't want. It's about what's unsolicited. Yeah some people like looking at the pictures in their porn spam, but that doesn't make it any less spam.

But is it a . . .

[by Anonymous Coward]

Gmail account?

Ugh

[ShatteredDream (636520)]

I can't even imagine how much time you'd have to spend finding unique porn mailing lists to get enough spam to fill one of these babies up. You'd see so much T&A that sex would be just... boring....

Re:Ugh

[by Anonymous Coward]

I can't even imagine how much time you'd have to spend finding unique porn mailing lists to get enough spam to fill one of these babies up. You'd see so much T&A that sex would be just... boring....

Amateur.

Ugh-Fragile-this ego side down.

[by Anonymous Coward]

"You'd see so much T&A that sex would be just... boring...."

Well I guess we know were your moniker came from.

Re:Ugh

[Kris_J (10111)]

"attachments in sizes up to 500 MByte."

Anyone with an archive of, say, video files on around 24 DVDs (or a dozen DL DVDs) and access to a nice fast link could fill 100Gig in an afternoon.

Re:Ugh

[Pieroxy (222434)]

could fill 100Gig in an afternoon
Sorry to spoil the fun, but you would sure need a heck of a lot of bandwidth to do that. Home DSL/Cable connections are de-facto excluded here.

Re:Ugh

[Dark Lord Seth (584963)]

The site in your sig currently has nothing but a few dozen cheap referer-style links to pay sites.

http://www.empornium.us/ [empornium.us]
http://www.thehun.com/ [thehun.com]
http://www.madthumbs.com/ [madthumbs.com]

Re:Ugh

[Progoth (98669)]

you mean something like

for i in `seq 20`; do dd if=/dev/random of=file$i bs=5M count=100; done

?

Re:Ugh

[Rufus211 (221883)]

or use /dev/urandom which is psudo-random numbers but will give you as many as you want.

*Sigh*

[Pantero Blanco (792776)]

It appears that Google has started the email equivalent of a penis contest. First they came along with 1 GB...then MSN with 2 GB...and now this.

Re:*Sigh*

[typhoonius (611834)]

Yeah, they've forced other free e-mail providers to compete, and the consumers are benefiting.

What a rip.

Re:*Sigh*

[Pantero Blanco (792776)]

How are they benefiting, exactly? On a practical level, a terabyte-sized email account isn't really any better than a gigabyte-sized one. Anyone who needs an account that big probably runs their own.

I'm not attacking Google for coming out with the initial 1 GB service; I'm attacking the idiots who feel they have to outdo it as an advertising gimmick.

Re:*Sigh*

[Red Alastor (742410)]

They are benifiting before they were getting 1 mb from hotmail and 4 from yahoo (6 for those who had an account since some time). Google with it's offer made all the other companies offer enough disk space for everyone.

Re:*Sigh*

[kyrre (197103)]

Heh. Even .Mac upped their accounts from 15mb to 250mb. (shared with iDisk). Thanks a bunch Google.

Re:*Sigh*

[by Anonymous Coward]

What happens to all the consumers that use one of the gimmicky new webmail accounts that goes out of business or loses emails because they don't have backups?

Re:*Sigh*

[suckmysav (763172)]

You would have to be a complete knob to keep anything important in a free webmail account.

Re:*Sigh*

[slarshdot (211836)]

soon I will be releasing my email service which will allow u to store 1 million bytes!!

muwhaha!!

Re:*Sigh*

[dcw3 (649211)]

soon I will be releasing my email service which will allow u to store 1 million bytes!!

Can't imagine why anyone would need more than 640k!

Re:*Sigh*

[slyckshoes (174544)]

Yes, but fortunately (or unfortunately?) penises aren't growing at the rate that mailboxes are. Size is good up to a point, but a 1Tb penis would make it hard to walk. It would have to be on a dedicated server, so to speak.

Re:*Sigh*

[Council (514577)]

Clearly, the solution is 1TB of email explaining how to make our penises grow fast enough to keep up.

Re:*Sigh*

[Dusabre (176445)]

It would also need a dedicated client with a modified female port the size of a SUV. Which brings to mind a blue whale which I don't find appealing.

To win 1TB

[erick99 (743982)]

You are allowed 500MB attachments so I assume you could upload 200 or so of them sequentially until you have filled up 100GB and then you win the 1TB mailbox. And then.... Profit?

Re:To win 1TB

[OverlordQ (264228)]

Yes but how many services allow you to *send* 500MB attachments (excluding running your own mailserver). Then again you need to upload *100GB* which would still take alot of time none-the-less. Either way 100GB/1TB at that point everything is just gravy.

Rediculous

[FiberOpPraise (607416)]

Okay, 1GB was fine, a reasonable limit that was more of a marketing ploy than a palpable number for the average user. Soon, 2GB and 5GB email accounts were offered in response to Gmails initial 1GB. This was really pushing the limit of being reasonable. 100GB totally crosses the line. When the advertised size of email accounts becomes larger than most people's hard drives, there is a problem. This is getting absurd. Please stop.

Somewhere in Redmond today...

[g3000 (799075)]

...an unnamed software company executive was overheard saying "1 GB ought to be enough for anyone." (A subsqeunt discussion was spawned discussing whether or not he actually said it.)

Re:

[Fluid-X (722858)]

With 100 Gb, they can hardcode the "You are using 0% of your mailbox" message.

HORRIBLE Website

[Grey Ninja (739021)]

For the people too lazy to read the article, the link is here. [hriders.com]. But the site's design is just the most horrible thing I've ever seen, and the email capacity seems to be only 10GB.

I would still love to see these idiots slashdotted. Go get em boys.

Re:HORRIBLE Website

[cmacb (547347)]

This looks a lot to me like one of those thrown together PHP/MySQL web sites (that I'm sorry to say I've been responsible for at one time or another). It's also quite slow. If they can't handle a Slashdotting I wonder if they can handle all multi-meg photo messages that some people will be tempted to throw at it. Whether it's 1G, 10G, or 1T, it doesn't do anyone any good if the server is too slow to handle the traffic.

Too Easy

[Nova Express (100383)]

This is too easy to win, assuming you have broadband.

Step 1: Rip all three Star Wars and the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings Movies (yeah yeah, the third isn't out yet) to your HD.

Step 2: Mail copies to 25 of your friends with GMail accounts as attachments.

Step 3: Have your friends change each of the file names and mail them back.

Bingo! Instant excession of 100 GB.

Alternately, you could just post your e-mail address here and say something like "You wussy, panty-wasted Linux hackers couldn't spam-bomb my account even if you wanted to! Your hacking skills are pathetic and lame! Besides, everyone knows that REAL MEN use Windows!"

I figured that's good for getting mailed 500 full distros within an hour. That should do the trick. ;-)

What they didn't tell you is...

[kylemonger (686302)]

... their mail server is behind a 2400 baud modem.

I can win...

[Keebler71 (520908)]

They even extended a challenge to get the first user to completely fill up the account

Piece of cake...is there a way to auto-forward my hotmail account? Should take about a week...

A real use for this stuff

[Deep Fried Geekboy (807607)]

I dunno about anyone else but I USE this stuff. I gave all my gmail invites to myself so I now have many Gmail accounts, which are all used for the same thing ... offsite backup.

The 100 G account would be great for backing up digital images, something that is extremely hard to do otherwise (bit rot on CDs, DVDs and even naked hard drives, which is what I use now). Yeah, I take a lot of pictures.

I just got notified that because I purchased extra .mac storage, mine has been upped to 1.2 Gb. Hooray!

You cannot have too many backup strategies. I use .mac for all keychains (containing serial numbers, passwords and private banking details), plus current 'work' folder... then I have a Retrospect backup to a remote FTP server for my boot drive, plus a nightly mirror onto a second hard drive. You CANNOT have too much of this stuff.

The day I walked into my office and my HD was dead, I saved the entire accumulated cost of all this by being able to boot up from the second drive within seconds and carry on working.

36 million subscribers * 100Gb = ????

[seanvaandering (604658)]

In order to attract interest, the company launched a 3-Gigabyte free email service a little over a month ago and since then has signed up more than 36 million users...

Another alternative is, of course, to post it on Slashdot. But the question that lingers, is how in the hell did a little unknown magazine end up signing up 36 million people?

Now I'm not a biker myself, but you'd think with that many e-mail addresses from this company I'd of seen it once or twice working in tech support...

100gb mail? just give me the stinkin drive!

[tonyz2k (178027)]

Where are they getting all this cheap storage? Instead of giving me a 100GB mailbox (with annoying blinking GIF ads), how about they just send me a 100GB hard drive (and a bunch of regular snail-mail junkmail that i can just throw away)?

Yes, chide me, fellow slashdotters.. for I did not know that they are relying on sparse mailboxes.

This company would terminate the service (or file for Chapter 11) long before the millionth user took their first gig.

1 TB free service

[microsopht (811294)]

When 10 GB email account is considered unfillable, so much that the owner is willing to give 1 server of 1 TB for the winner, the even better idea - to that owner and my fellow slashdotters ( if u wanna st art up a email service BTW },
would be to offer 1 TB space for all- that would really be unprecedented and gain the maximum publicity and no one in this world would probably use more than a few GB - and the owner wouldnt have to worry about providing 1 Tb since as and when a user signs up , 1 Tb space doesnt need to be allocated and can be scaled up as and when required.

hriders.com

[pmsyyz (23514)]

Worst website EVAR.

Not so wierd

[photon317 (208409)]

I think Google (or anyone) shouldn't have a problem just giving people "unlimited" email space (and then whacking abuser accounts who mount gmail-based filesystems to store terabytes of pr0n...). For legitimate users of the system:

1) It's text, compress it, save space.

2) If you have a large user base, chances are there are many duplicate emails floating around the system. Hash everyone's email body-content globally. Then when that stupid email gets forwarded to 6000 of your customers, it only gets stored once for each unique form it arrives in. Ditto for mailing list emails.

3) Make sure that your spam filter is really good, and especially that it never falses tosses legit emails, so that people trust it. Anything that's in the spam box gets autokilled in a week.

4) Limit attachments to reasonable sizes. You're trying to stop people from email-attaching a 700MB uncompressed cd rip, or whatever. Gmail currently limits the entire message, all attachments included, to 10MB in size. They do other stupid things too though, like not letting you send zipfiles... A better system that leaves more freedom for the user might be to say that all attachment types are legal, but if a message's total length exceeds 10MB, then attachments in it will be "flagged for deletion", starting with the largest attachment in the message first, until the number is under 10MB. These larger "flagged for deletion" attachments get forceably deleted from your email archives after 24 hours, or 3 days, or something of that nature. In this way you can still transport large files via email, you just can't archive them there.

Once those simple measures are in place, you can largely rely on statistics and reasonability. If a reasonably average webmail user actually received and archived over a gig of mail in a year under such a system I'd be impressed.

What about the GUI?

[Wizarth (785742)]

Sure, every-one signed up with GMail for the 1GB of Mail. But every-one I know who's used it, sticks with it for the GUI. It's so fast and easy to use. Thats the real power of GMail.

mp3 storage

[Ralph Spoilsport (673134)]

email each mp3 file to yourself as a separate email. In the subject line label it artist / title / XX song title.

This way, where ever you go, your tunage is on tap. It might takea while to DL, but so what! I know if my house was ravaged by some Tornado or Hurricane, and all my CDs were blown to flinders or washed out to sea, I would definitely appreciate the back up...

RS

Uhh.. Duh?

[piecewise (169377)]

Questioning the use of a 100GB email space?

To backup my 100 gmail accounts, DUH.

Re:Slashdot Network - p2p

[by Anonymous Coward]

Imagine All the slashdot guys sharing all their interesting stuff!This email account could very well serve that purpose

Yeah but what would the rest of the 100 gigs be used for?

Already unlimited

[suso (153703)]

suso.org has already been doing this for 7 years for over 80 local customers. I basically don't have quota support in the kernel. So its not just for email. My philosophy is that if you don't give people a limit, they won't try to reach it. And guess what? It works. People don't abuse the service. They use it normally. A couple of users are exceptions and have over 1GB worth of email that has amassed over the past several years.

I'm getting ready to install a server with 200GB of home space, so thus its like I offer 200GB email accounts. Whenever I get close to running out of space, I upgrade.

Re:Unlimited!

[JUSTONEMORELATTE (584508)]

Now I'm just waiting for the next company to offer true unlimited servce

Uhh... You've come to the right place [slashmail.org]
Of course, OSDN isn't giving them away, but they are also giving add-free access for $14/year.


--
Free gmail invites [slashdot.org]

Re:Good to know

[Hadlock (143607)]

pic [photobucket.com]

Re:Size Doesn't Matter

[MagicDude (727944)]

Uh, what? You want less space an a harder interface? Intuitive [reference.com] would mean that the functionality is relatively understandable and easy to use because the layout makes sense and is easily deductible. Why would you want something half as intuitive? Wouldn't that be the same as twice as hard?

Re:only person left?

[KillerHamster (645942)]

No, I do that too. Of course, my school only gives me a few MB of space and I get 50 or so emails a day, often with attachments. I forward stuff to my Gmail account if I know I'll need to get to it when I'm away from my computer, and I back up my Thunderbird mail folder every few days.