Google has announced that their Gmail service is going to start offering POP access to users’ email accounts, meaning that rather than having to log in through Gmail’s web interface, users will be able to download their Gmail to their own computer using Outlook, Eudora, or whatever other email client is their favourite.
According to a story in USA Today, Google expects the POP service to be available to all Gmail users within the next couple of weeks.
There are several interesting aspects to this. By making this move, on the one hand, Gmail becomes more flexible and accessible for potentially millions of users. On the other hand, it serves to dilute Gmail’s cachet: their signature 1gig of storage, and whizbang searching of your email archive. Once you start POPing your email to your own computer, you don’t have either that search access or, presumably, that 1giig of storage (otherwise why did you sign up for Gmail in the first place? It wasn’t just to be cool, was it?)
Of course, you could always download your email to your own computer, and then use the archive on the Gmail servers as your offsite searchable email archive, but how convenient is it to have to go back and forth between email client and web interface when wanting to do a quick lookup in your email archive?
And that brings up another interesting question: usually when you retrieve your email from a mail server via POP, the POP client deletes the email from the server. Will this be the case with POPping from Gmail, or will users be lulled into a false sense of security, imagining that they are removing their personal email from all but their own personal computer, when that won’t really be the case?
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And finally, ah, the ads. What about the ads? How does Google intend to serve up their AdSense ads in your POPped Gmail?
It will be interesting to see whether this move enhances the Gmail offering, or has a dilutory effect, or makes little difference at all.
You can read more about this here.
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i googled for something completely different, but found your page… and have to say thanks. nice read.
Hello. I’m using gmail from Germany where we have several free email services with service far better than that from yahoo, hotmail and soon. It’s not unusal to get lots of space. I have an account with 1GB for Email or file storage. So I can even use it for exchanging files with friends whom I give access to certain folders.
Comming back to the issue of using Pop on gmail. Hey, author, what software are you using? I use Outlook and can define to leave my files on the server and not delete them! So that is one issue solved. Concerning the searchability, how about using Google Desktop Search? It will help you search all your Outlook mail.
The last issue is advertisment. Well, when I use webmail I live with it but I won’t miss it. Most of my mails are in German and so I don’t get adds anyway; and I like it!
So, I think the whole discussion is based on nothing. Sorry. Perhaps you are a bit back in the States on modern ways of using the internet, but here in Europe the whole thing isn’t that big a thing.
Don’t mess a good thing up.
We really need to have a heart and help right a spam-wrong – Hormel’s reputation and future. Their product is being maligned daily via vicious wantom emailers and they deserve our help.
I say that we define a time period (4 years?) and during that time, a portion of all fines on commercial spammers be placed into an annuity fund for Hormel. This would allow them to transition their company to a new product and a new name, or just gracefully go out of business, realizing that their product – SPAM will never recover from this quirk of cyber-nomenclature.
Paul N.
It seems that choosing to leave e-mails on the server (an option in POP/SMTP e-mail clients) would take advantage of the 1GB storage/retireval problem to which you allude. Dale….