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Gmail Adds POP3 To Email Accounts
VaultX writes "Gmail has recently added POP3 services to their free email accounts. This would allow someone to use gmail without ever seeing any of their advertisements. They are also providing SMTP, both POP3 and SMTP are forcing the use of SSL/TLS. Very interesting...now where's IMAP and what's the catch?" It's being phased in, though, so not every gmail account yet has POP access.
If you're using POP3, you're probably deleting the mail from the server, so they don't have to buy as many storage devices.
I must say that after Yahoo! decided to charge for POP access I said "never again will I rely on a 'free' service." Once you grow to rely on this account for POP access to your pdas. phones, etc. they have you by the short hairs.
Maybe they will prove me wrong and they wont pull a Yahoo, but for now, I am staying put and using my gmail account as my spam catch all and for its very best feature: geek street cred.
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?
What's the point of 1 gig online if everyone uses pop to turn it into offline email?
The thing is you can leave a copy on the server, and have them locally and on webmail. THAT's what's usefull about this.
My guess is that they'll inject adverts in to your e-mail when you download it using pop.
I thought they'd do just that too, but I currently use the Forwarding feature that lets you send any mail that comes to your Gmail account to another address. Forwarded gmails come into my inbox ad-free.
If they didn't add adverts when forwarding, I don't see why they'd do it when using POP3.
I like his suggestion better, too. However, everybody seems to forget the Gmail is still in BETA. This is BETA software and they are testing BETA features. These features don't have to be available when Gmail comes out of BETA and they most certainly don't have to be free.
Noticed how I emphasized the BETA and the BETA, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Yeah, I read this, and initially thought "cool!". However then I realized: wait: their interface is faster, sleeker, and easier than any local mail client I have. So I actually don't think I'll be using this
is the same as it has always been. They are algorithmically analysing your entire email corpus (well, that was sent or received with Gmail, anyway) and correlating the data to determine trends, demographics, etc.
It's not like they are hiding this; it's part of the agreement you make to get free email. They have built a pipe through which a huge portion of the world's information flow can pass, and they are using it to learn things about the world and about the structure and hierarchy of human relationships.
The data is saleable, but they can profit from it without ever selling it, or ever letting any human agents access information that uniquely identifies YOU.
Remember, they sell advertising. At a premium price. All marketing and advertising agencies do data gathering, and Gmail is how Google is doing it.
It's a straight-up, informed-consent deal (at least for Gmail account holders- the issues get stickier if you send mail to Gmail because you never clicked through a use agreement) and if you don't want their robots reading your email you shouldn't use the service.
And how would that be different from spam? If it's a free e-mail company tagline at the end of the message it may be understandable, but if they start injecting full-fledged ads like
Hey Joe,
Good seeing you the other day. We're gonna catch the game next weekend, interested?
Sponsored Google Ad
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Let me know.
Bob
Not only may it be illegal in some states, people will not use the service. People already get extremely annoyed by bloated Hotmail taglines as it is; this type of thing would be a complete disaster.
My guess is that they'll inject adverts in to your e-mail when you download it using pop. The move wouldn't make sense otherwise.
Have you used Gmail before?
Having used their web interface.. it DOESN'T MAKE SENSE to actually download all my mail and read it on a mail client.
The interface is so clean, and things load so fast, it is amazing.
Contrast that with email clients.
I'd say there is a lot more appeal to the web interface that just the ability to POP and the 1GB space.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
It makes their algorithms more accurate with more data available.
So even if you never see an ad, and they never make a cent through some kind of clickthrough on you, every email that goes through their system tells them more about the contextual online universe.
Google is ultimately in a data mining position. Data is money for them. Email is data.
GPL Deconstructed
The interface is nice, but when I have 5 other email accounts that I check via Thunderbird, it's quite nice to now be able to check all my email accounts via Thunderbird instead of making 2 trips to do my email.
Who doesn't like free music?
Simple solution to avoid all of the hassle of webmail.
1. Pay $5-$15/year (depending on which registar you choose) for www.yourname.com.
2. Pay $5-$20/month (depending on which host you choose) for web-hosting. If you only want email, I'd imagine you'd be looking at the $5 end of the spectrum.
You now have unlimited POP3 accounts, your choice of webmail applications, at least 500 megs of space on even the cheapest of hosts, a clean email address (no more your_name9387943894793@hotmail.com) and it's yours for life unless you stop paying the bills. If the host or registar changes their policies to something you disagree with or if they go out of business, it takes 24 hours at the most to transfer it to another company.