4 years of Gmail
4 years passed today since I signed up for a gmail account. I received an invitation via Blogger. This was about 3 weeks after Google announced the 1GB inbox.
This secured my best email address:
At that time, this was a mindbogglingly huge webmail inbox. Yahoo! & Hotmail offered few MegaBytes for each user, as far as I can remember nothing more than 5MB.
Gmail was also under attack from people concerned with privacy. The text ads displayed at the right side of the email, were scary. They were targeted ads, google scanned your email. That is, some computer program read your email, analysed it and decided to select which ads to show you. You have to trust google's terms of service.
One minute, but your mail is stored on google services. And you are encouraged not to delete it to make use of the Gigabytes of storage you have for archival and later on retrieval.
Both ways you have no choice other than to trust Google. Blindly.
My favourite take on this issue was a short piece of fiction called Scroogled written by Cory Doctorow.
I have to admit. Using Gmail is very convenient. But I stopped GPG signing my outgoing emails. I stopped checking emails with signatures. And I rarely encrypt emails now.
Gmail either treated my paranoid thinking or made me less secure.
I am currently using 1036 MB (15%) of my 6649 MB storage.
Mistaken identities
Khalid M. Baheyeldin usually makes fun of the strange emails he gets from strange people thinking he is someone else.
I get my share of mistaken identities nearly everyday. Almost half of it in Persian (Farsi). Many are from businesses, or people sending their resumes, etc..
I received this email a few days ago and saved it for a blog post. Enjoy!
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22 April 2008
3 years 41 weeks
hehe :D
it's 3 years and 8 months for me .got it in August 2004
that's how i got it with my name too .
but i used to delete emails for about 2 years then i finally stopped .
looking back at some of those emails always made me smile and they have much valuable info that I badly need today .
know i have 3458 emails in my inbox taking 7% of it .
allah yer7ak ayam el 2MB hotmail :) .
2 January 2005
3 days 4 hours
Actually I uploaded 2 years of pre-gmail emails via IMAP :)
4 May 2008
3 years 39 weeks
Hmmm...
I could have totally agreed with you had I commented here on March 27th!!
Gmail is great. I'm almost addicted to threads, labels, and I can't read scattered messages about same topics in other inboxes.
However, since March 28 2008, it's been a nightmare! My primary business Gmail has been either hacked or just abused by someone. The account is disabled most of the month. Google support agents are robots who act in a way similar to our immune system: any "antigenic" danger would lead to a severe response, even if it would harm the host! That's what's happening to me. Any abuser can just keep getting my account disabled by spending 10 minutes every day attempting to illegitimately access my account.
For a month, I still haven't managed to get a single "human" answer the tons of support requests I submitted.
It's even danger to tell people when you created your account or who invited you because these are one of the few ways to claim an old account (if you have no verification code)!!
Read the story here
2 January 2005
3 days 4 hours
Actually, I can't imagine my account getting cracked.
The amount of information I am going to lose (or privacy lost) could give me a heart attack. Not to mention emails, I have archives of hours of instant messaging too. It will not be my privacy alone.
I have read your horror story, and I totally forgot about it when I was writing this post. It deserves a special mention.
Man, I am starting to think about this. And it is going to be bad. Time for backup and a change of password.
4 May 2008
3 years 39 weeks
Hmmm...
I could have totally agreed with you had I commented here on March 27th!!
Gmail is great. I'm almost addicted to threads, labels, and I can't read scattered messages about same topics in other inboxes.
However, since March 28 2008, it's been a nightmare! My primary business Gmail has been either hacked or just abused by someone. The account is disabled most of the month. Google support agents are robots who act in a way similar to our immune system: any "antigenic" danger would lead to a severe response, even if it would harm the host! That's what's happening to me. Any abuser can just keep getting my account disabled by spending 10 minutes every day attempting to illegitimately access my account.
For a month, I still haven't managed to get a single "human" answer the tons of support requests I submitted.
It's even danger to tell people when you created your account or who invited you because these are one of the few ways to claim an old account (if you have no verification code)!!
Read the story here
4 May 2008
3 years 39 weeks
Hmmm...
I could have totally agreed with you had I commented here on March 27th!!
Gmail is great. I'm almost addicted to threads, labels, and I can't read scattered messages about same topics in other inboxes.
However, since March 28 2008, it's been a nightmare! My primary business Gmail has been either hacked or just abused by someone. The account is disabled most of the month. Google support agents are robots who act in a way similar to our immune system: any "antigenic" danger would lead to a severe response, even if it would harm the host! That's what's happening to me. Any abuser can just keep getting my account disabled by spending 10 minutes every day attempting to illegitimately access my account.
For a month, I still haven't managed to get a single "human" answer the tons of support requests I submitted.
It's even danger to tell people when you created your account or who invited you because these are one of the few ways to claim an old account (if you have no verification code)!!
Read the story here