I imagine Yahoo is feeling the heat of GMail going public:

Yahoo Inc. will increase the inbox capacity of its free Web mail service for the third time in the past 9 months, now raising storage to 1GB, exceeding Microsoft Corp.’s Hotmail and matching Google Inc.’s Gmail.

Yahoo Mail users all over the world will begin to see the larger inboxes between late April and early May, said Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s vice president of communications products.

(Via MacWorld.)

?

So the web would have me believe. Makes sense given that GMail was announced April 1, 2004 but this would be counter to Google’s long held practice of not declaring a product version of 1.0 until at least a couple of years have passed.

Of course, they are a public company now. Perhaps, perhaps…

Google Butler is an interesting little piece of software for Firefox. It does some aggresive things to various Google services that mimic the AutoLink feature of the new Google Toolbar in intent. It changes Googles pages by removing ads, adds links to competing services, and according to the source code, will remove ads from GMail in future versions. For those of you not in the know, the new Google toolbar introduced autolinking of ISBNs and other objects that result in links appearing on Barne’s & Noble’s site that lead to Amazon. When Microsoft tried this recently, they quickly backed down.

Source code is available.

If I’m not mistaken, this software is more of a political statement against Google’s AutoLink feature than anything else. The AutoLink feature, introduced by the Google Toolbar 3, changes other site’s content as well. Some accused it of repeating the Smart Tags disaster Microsoft got into a while ago. Others pointed out the AutoLink feature is not enabled by default, but has to be activated (clicked on) for every single page. It has been defended by pro-AutoLinkers by using a butler analogy – your butler may sort your mail for you, or underline certain passages in a newspaper.

Source: Google Blogoscoped

Source: Google Butler

Looks like Google is now offering GMail accounts to random searchers. The story linked has a screen capture as well as a archived example of an offer to sign up for GMail. Before you go nuts searching on Google keep in mind that the story mentions that the offers do not seem to appear for all browser types..

Source: SeattlePI.com

I have been busy lately and failed to post when Google publicly opened the HTML, non-javascript version of GMail. It is OK. It is simple and lacks some of the features you have likely come to depend on but if you are in a bind and don’t have javascript support available, give it a spin.

Source: HTML-only GMail