I sent the announcement from Spymac about their upgraded mail system to Stan/Larry but got no response, maybe they feel that Spymac is competition, I'm not sure. If you haven't been following what's going on at Spymac these days you should really check it out as a complete alternative to .Mac.<br><br>Earlier in the week Google announced "Gmail" beta which is a 1GB webmail service. It has received a lot of praise, but also a load of criticism (see below). Since it gives you more disk space for free than Yahoo will give you for $60/year its a pretty big deal, because it raises the bar so much higher for Yahoo, MS and others.<br><br>However, Spymac has also upgraded their free mail system to 1GB, but because of the way their system works I think it provides a significant advantage over any mail system out there, including Google. The biggest advantage is that Spymac mail offers POP3 access. That means no ads and you can use Mail.app or any mail system you desire with filters, your address book, etc. That is huge, IMO.<br><br>The only downside to Spymac's offering is their name. Google is an industry standard, known for their quaility and consistency. The question about Spymac is can it/will it survive and will it remain free? Also can they handle all the traffic and keep from having large periods of inaccessibility? (although it could be said that even Apple's .Mac pay-for-play service hasn't been a bastion of success in this area)<br><br>Another reason why I think Spymac is a better option than Google are privacy concerns. Both companies collect data about you in the form of cookies to push advertisements on their web banners, but because Google runs the world's largest search engine also, this raises more concerns than just ads. In this article at The Register they discuss how the personal data from your account could end up in the entire "search cookie". From the article:<br><br>"But it isn't so much Google searching email that has caused the anxiety from privacy watchdogs this week, as the company's confused retention policy. What will Google do with that data? Google's cookie is an index for all your searches until 2038, and sits alongside an Orkut cookie that tells Google - or friendly law enforcement officials or marketeers - exactly who you are. Google's Gmail will complete the picture, indexing private electronic discourse under the main Google search cookie. <br><br>Rather than allay these fears, Google's accident-prone co-founder Larry Page refused to rule out a future policy of 'joining the dots'. A simple "No, Never" would have prevented much of the damage. But asked if Google planned to link Gmail users to their Web search queries, Page replied: <br><br>"It might be really useful for us to know that information. I'd hate to rule anything like that out."<br><br>Google's Gmail privacy policy points out that your email will be retained even after you close your account." <br><br>I know I'm a bit paranoid about privacy, but that just doesn't sound so hot. I'm sure I'll sign up for one of these Gmail accounts, but it may just take the place of my rarely used hotmail account as a spam repository.<br>

unless you have something to hide... who cares about privacy... if you do, you need to use strong encryption anyway<br><br>

<blockquote><font size=1>In reply to:</font><hr><p>unless you have something to hide... who cares about privacy...<p><hr></blockquote><p>I do.<br><br>

Yes, I like my privacy. And no, I don't have anything to hide.<br><br>

it's not logical to me, but i respect your opinion.<br><br>

Yeah. I mentioned SpyMac a while back and got a quick email from Larry about it.<br><br>Spymac is about 10 levels higher than MM, MC and any other Mac web site at the moment - as far as what they offer, anyway.<br><br>The forum software (which they wrote themselves, if I recall) is far and away the very best available. It has every feature you could need in a forum. The "Gallery" is soooooo cool. Then they go and add free web sites, free blog sites, free email, free auctions.... did I miss anything?<br><br>Heck, they even offer domain hosting. Here's a sample of their middle of the road package:<br><br>12 months: $17 per month ($204 every 12 months)<br>This Package Includes<br><br>• 2 free .com, .net or .org domains<br>• Free domain transfers<br>• 1000 MB of storage space<br>• 40 GB of transfer bandwidth<br>• FTP access<br>• Unlimited e-mail aliases<br>• 100 POP3 and IMAP e-mail accounts with 50 MB of space each<br>• Unlimited e-mail forwarding<br>• 50 auto-responders<br>• Catch-all e-mail address<br>• Unlimited sub-domains<br>• Two MySQL databases<br>• PHP3 and PHP4 support with GD, ImageMagick and FreeType<br>• Perl support (free CGI-Bin)<br>• Server Side Includes (SSI)<br>• Mod_Rewrite<br>• Password protected directories<br>• Daily backups of your website<br>• Access to log files<br>• Webalizer stats<br>• Customizable error pages<br>• Easy to use control panel for account management<br><br><br> My uptime is longer than yours, therefore my e-penis is longer.

wow, that's hard to beat!<br><br>

<blockquote><font size=1>In reply to:</font><hr><p>Then they go and add free web sites, free blog sites, free email, free auctions.... did I miss anything?<p><hr></blockquote><p>Not much. The website is run from what they call a "spydisk" which is a 100MB virtual disk, like the iDisk.... but free and it has FTP support, which is much faster than Webdav.<br><br>I don't need their hosting function right now, but I'll definitely give it a shot in the future if those prices hold up.<br><br><br><br>

once they add iPhoto, iSync and Safari bookmark support I'll sign up.<br><br>

I'm confused a bit here ...<br><br>Why would one need 1GB of e-mail space? Does this mean that I cold theoretically send you a 50MB e-mail attachment or something? Or is it so you'd never have to clean-out your e-mail boxes? Just curious =)<br><br>Also, assuming that "web space" is equivalent to .Mac's iDisk space, what is "Picture Space"? Is it essentially just more storage? And how would that differ from "Web space"? Or are they essentially offering 350MB of general storage?<br><br>Personally, if I had the choice, I'd want the 1GB of space to be for storage, not for e-mail - I mean, 1GB of HD space is 1GB, what does it matter to them what function it's used with?<br><br>=)<br><br>***matt<br><br>Turn up the signal, wipe out the noise ...