Google Mail is coming

[david chaney]

Well I'm surprised this hasn't been brought up yet, but Google today announced gMail is coming.

http://gmail.google.com/

The article is here:

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040331/315958_1.html

Here are some exerts:

Today, a handful of users will begin testing the preview version of Gmail. Unlike other free webmail services, Gmail is built on the idea that users should never have to file or delete a message, or struggle to find an email they've sent or received. Key features of Gmail include:

Search: Built on Google search technology, Gmail enables people to quickly search every email they've ever sent or received. Using keywords or advanced search features, Gmail users can find what they need, when they need it.
Storage: Google believes people should be able to hold onto their mail forever. That's why Gmail comes with 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of free storage -- more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offer.
Speed: Gmail makes using email faster and more efficient by eliminating the need to file messages into folders, and by automatically organizing individual emails into meaningful "conversations" that show messages in the context of all the replies sent in response to them. And it turns annoying spam e-mail messages into the equivalent of canned meat.
According to Page and Brin, Google will make the preview test version of Gmail available to a small number of email aficionados. With luck, Gmail will prove popular to them -- and to the original user who sparked the idea.

Those interested in learning more about Gmail can visit http://gmail.google.com.

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Comments?

I especially like the part that users get 1GB of storage space.

Take that Hotmail!

Regards,
David

[marc1]

gmail.google.com does not seem to be working...can anyone else access it?

[david chaney]

Originally posted by marc1
gmail.google.com does not seem to be working...can anyone else access it?

All that comes up is a "coming soon" on a white background.

[kaptitsky]

This is being announced very close to April 1.

[Edwin]

It was announced ON April 1st - see the date on:-
http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gmail.html

Most likely (90%) I'd say it's a joke, but one that somehow got distributed a few hours too early. News.com (not necessarily the last word in reliable journalism) are reporting it as fact.

The irony is that Google probably IS planning to launch an email service soon, and this will give them a brilliant way of gauging how much "instant reaction" there would be to such a launch. After all, they're only doing a limited private test - it's not as if it's a public launch or anything of that magnitude...

[psalzer]

You saying it's an April Fool's joke? Well, a free gig does sound a little unlikely. The way they're talking about organizing it sounds somewhat like Opera's e-mail client, though and that's real enough. Don't much like it though.

[Spin]

This is really cool. I hope its not a joke. But I really want to see how google ranks with other free email providers. And to mainly compare them to yahoo.

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[Edwin]

A few other points to note (analysing this "as if it was real" - which as I've said above it may very well not be)

A) Storage is cheap if you're "big enough". They have terabytes and terabytes of data already for search, news etc. so storing huge amounts of email won't be too difficult. It's not trivial, but for a company with the know-how that Google can throw at the problem it's not that hard.

B) If you assume they can compress email (text/HTML messages definitely compress very well) before storing it, then they probably need less than half the stated maximum per user in order to give an "effective" 1GB storage.

C) The average usage patterns (even with such a generous allocation) will probably mean that they'll end up with a typical user having a few dozen or perhaps a hundred MB of mail or so. So if you assume that, by zapping the extreme left (a couple of MB) and the extreme right (maxing out that 1GB) of the storage curve, their average is around the 100MB mark, they'd only have to be providing an actual 50MB of storage per user.

D) The "secret weapon" in the plan (again, if real - always that proviso!) is that they plan to deploy Adsense to monetize the service. In other words, they would be showing ads inside the interface that directly target the content of that particular message. It only takes a relatively small number of "actions" by any given user over the course of a year to make the service very lucrative indeed.

E) The final part of the plan is that by going with such a totally outrageous "spec" on launch, they will basically suck the oxygen out of the email market just like they killed off Search - while Google's total domination of search-space has taken a few years, the writing was on the wall very soon after they launched, simply because their results were really NOTICEABLY better than anything the competition could offer. This is especially important to Google, since unlike Yahoo!/Hotmail (Microsoft) they don't have a registered userbase of any kind to work with.

[psalzer]

If this is true, what other e-mail service is going to compete with that? It's kind of disturbing in a way.

[david chaney]

Originally posted by kaptitsky
This is being announced very close to April 1.

Could very well be, but if it is the media is falling for it.

A search from news.google.com:

http://news.google.com/news?q=gmail&...-8&sa=N&tab=wn

[s a]

Originally posted by psalzer
If this is true, what other e-mail service is going to compete with that? It's kind of disturbing in a way.

i think the whole thing is very exciting . Remember that they've had a loooong good look at the email market = they know what the weak points are (spam, lack of storage....).

Based on the quality of their search engine, i for one am dying to see what they can do with email (*very high expectations*).

[Edwin]

Any company with deep pockets can build a "huge" service. If they can build a system that relies on very cheap but redundant storage arrays (i.e. instead of paying a very high premium for fault tolerance, have basic safeguards, 2 of everything and good backups)

IDE HDDs are going for around $0.80 per GB if you buy them big enough, so a box with 6x250GB of storage (1.5TB) including a case, PSU and 6-channel RAID card would probably be "buildable" by somebody willing to get their hands dirty for $2,500-3,000. Double that and add a bit for redundancy/load-balancing and you're looking at perhaps $7,500 per 1.5TB or $5 per GB on the hardware storage side.

If my math was anything close to correct, that would mean that provisioning an "average" 1GB mailbox would cost $0.50 in storage costs (which will decrease every single day) plus whatever bandwidth is used, and one storage array pair could service 15,000 users.

Since Google already has experience of running multi-thousand-server server farms, a couple of rooms full of rack-mounted arrays shouldn't cause them too much undue trouble.

[Edwin]

More thoughts...

A) If they can really solve the "where did I put that email" problem by effectively indexing all the emails in a user's mailbox, that will put them heads and shoulders above everyone else.

B) If they have a competitor-crushing solution but the downside is that it comes with ads that essentially "read all your email" they may be able to persuade many more people to upgrade than the comparable metrics for Hotmail/Yahoo! Mail (or indeed any other free provider with a paid service level) given the paranoia factor. After all, $20 a year (or whatever) for a GB of ad-free email and a clever storage/filtering/search facility wipes the floor with Yahoo! and Hotmail's paid service offerings.

If it is real, the (large) company that will be hurt most is Hotmail. Yahoo! has users signed up for so many other things from a single account that it will be somewhat more isolated, but Hotmail is known for one thing and one thing only, and that's email!

[Edwin]

One more post (for fun) then I'm going to bow out of the discussion for now.

Crunching a few more numbers (and assuming bulk discounts etc.) you can get the following:-

A full rack (44 server space) in a datacenter from around $500 a month.
100Mbps of bandwidth for around $4,500 per month.

So for $10,000 a month you could provision 88 rack units. Assume 8 of those are lost on the load balancing stuff, and then halve the rest, and that leaves 40 slots x 1.5TB = 60TB of storage space - enough for 600,000 accounts. Aside from the up-front purchase costs of all the hardware (approx. $500,000 or less - less than $1 per account) that makes the annual running cost of the service for that many users just $0.20 per user per year.

Now scale the above times a factor of 50 or 100 and REAL discounts start kicking in.

Nope, I think if it's real Google are going to make a fortune on it. So long as they only provide web-based access, it's almost impossible (on average) that they can't recoup their costs over the course of 1 year by serving ultra-targeted advertising.

Where the service would make no sense at all is if POP3/IMAP were offered at the free level. While there's not much to go on yet, that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'm sure you could drive a truck through my estimates, btw - they're not meant to be "business plan ready" but simply an attempt to gauge the order of magnitude of the costs faced by a new ultra-large email service.

[Spin]

Originally posted by s a
 
Edwin, you may be right about "it" being a prank but their press release site located here lists the article on the 31st.

I think they have a HUGE market to tap into...i wonder what premium services (if any) they will offer.

I really dont think its a prank. If its on there release page I dont think it would be a prank. Its very exciting. I really cant wait to try them out, if there even is a gmail that is.

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