Is Google evil?

I have gotten the word from Gmail’s Product Manager that my service is no longer tolerable. At midnight PDT June 7th, 2005, this service was disabled. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all who contributed to this service. Your generosity helped out a vast number of people and for that you should be proud.

The gmail spooler email account is now deactivated and any mail sent to it will bounce. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to drop me a line: email@isnoop.net

via [isnoop.net]

I have been out of pocket for several months (summer vacation) and I have not been giving the site the focus I have in the past. I find it sad that Google asked that Ian shut down the GMail spooler. It was a fine service that helped hundreds of thousands of people (at least it looks that way based on the spooler stats) jump on the GMail bandwagon. Of course you can now get an invite delivered directly to your SMS-enabled phone here but you couldn’t in June, July, and early August 2005. Did the spooler impact the GMail service negatively? I suppose it is possible given that the spooler held almost a million invites the last time I looked. Sort of defeats the purpose of the invite scheme.

In any case I would like to thank Ian for the awesome service he provided the web community!

Google added the ability to customize the From: text on emails in the last day or so. Unlike the mythical Web Clips function, this feature seems to be available to all users NOW. Simply Choose Settings -> Accounts -> Send Mail As:

Get an invite via SMS on your phone. Okay, sure, seems reasonable. They also offer up a new password recovery feature using SMS. Get yours now.

GMail Drive 1.07 has been released in response to a change in the GMail email enumeration routine. This release was still being tested when given to me so there might be a bug or two. Get it here. Also, don’t forget to read full notes here.