30Gigs.com (Updates)

30Gigs.com has suddenly taken the IT world by storm...
30Gigs.com claims to offer 30 gigabtypes of email space... wow... stop and think... thats 12 times what Google currently offers (2.5 GB).

But lets get the facts straight first

1. 30Gigs.com appears to use SquirrelMail Stable Series 1.4
Check http://www.30gigs.com/mail/ChangeLog
Also see proof below:

2. A certain source of mine claims that 30Gigs has been online for about 2 months? And that originally it was just a few lines of text and what we see today is a huge improvement?

3. How on earth are they going to pay for this? Even with the best compression algorithm out there... its hard to see how its possible to suppost such a free service. Allow me to quote Om Malik's blog...

I tracked down the man behind the company, Dan Saltzman, spoke to him, on his Louisiana area-code phone #, but did not get too satisfactory answers on this. When I asked him, how they are going to pay for it, he said, “we have a method of paying for it.”

But that is not the end of the story... 30Gigs write on its main page (after you login)

Notice: We are in the process of adding new servers to our network, so you may experience delays. You may also encounter errors when trying to read and send mail. Please be patient as we complete this upgrade. Thank you.

4. According to 30Gigs's developement blog,

a) Anonymous email, the ability to press "send as anonymous" instead of send.
Is this not very dangerous? Think SPAM! And what if your email get filtered out?

b) GD2 Geo targeting which will show you on a map where that email you just got came from.
Wow... how accurate is this? Trace IP?

c) FILE UPLOAD SYSTEM .... There will be a 600 meg limit for uploaded files via this system.
I admit... that is a lot of space... sufficient to upload the contents of 80% of a CD ROM... (or ISO file)... but how feasible is this? (Also note: Although 30Gigs offers 30 GB... you can only send 2 MB of attachments [think PHP default configuration upload_max_filesize]) But I think it is also time for Google to provide webhosting (or maybe they think its not feasible?).

d) and they also claim that they are considering...
30Gig web hosting. This will include 30 gigs of transfer and 30 gigs of space. Mysql and ftp access will be included.
I think this is sufficient to make 50% of the world's web hosting service poof!

5) Their copyright information... available at http://www.30gigs.com/copyright/
Comprehensive enough to protect them?

6) Their privacy information ... available at http://www.30gigs.com/privacy/

We use outside ad companies to display ads on our site. These ads may contain cookies. While we use cookies in other parts of our web site, cookies received with banner ads are collected by our ad company, and we do not have access to this information.

It really seems that 30Gigs is trying to copy tactics from Google - Email invites, Email Notifier, Ads-based revenue, etc.

7) This email service is PHP based! Google, Microsft and Yahoo don't use PHP! Why? How safe is it? Is SquirrelMail hack proof?

8) We also did a whois on http://whois.godaddy.com. It provided us the following details:

Registrant:
Thona Network

9200 milliken ave
Suite 4303
rancho cucamonga, California 91730
United States

For full information, see for yourself here.



My verdict? Is this a scam? I don't know (unlikely). I think it is safe to wait and see what happens.
I just tried sending an email from my 30Gigs account to Gmail, and it works! (It should work, but someone complained to me that it could not work.)

Technorati: 30gigs, 30gigs.com