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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.
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.
Simon.
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.
Fantastic! I can finally use gmail on my PDAphone... Google doesn't support gmail on PocketPC... but I can d/l my mail to my desktop mail prog, then sync that way. Bravo Google. Keep pumpin.
I already have plenty of POP3 accounts. I would use Gmail if it has a nice way to read messages there. The webmail I get from my various ISPs isn't very good - Gmail is better.
sulli
RTFJ.
I can't believe they would do that. It's just too resource intensive. If they did though, I think a lot of us would give up our self-hosted vanity domains. The gmail interface beats the crap out of squirrelmail.
Free the West Memphis Three!
It's being phased in, though, so not every gmail account yet has POP access.
/. in order to get an invite to use the POP3 access.
Apparently, you have to go around begging people on
From http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answ er=10339
Q: Does G-mail support IMAP?
Gmail doesn't currently support IMAP access. As part of our ongoing commitment to give our users easy access to their email, we have introduced POP access. We look forward to announcing more features as they become available.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
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.
Of course, you can select "leave on server" but POP client software really can't take advantage of all that stored email. Desktop search, or even an online Google search, while logged-in, could draw from all of those old emails even while you filed and deleted to your heart's content with your local copy in your POP client.
Very sneaky indeed!
Again, this only works because Google is golden. If MS or AOL announced that they were going to keep a permanent record of all of your email, whether you deleted it or not with your client, would raise a firestorm!
Google would do well to start turning themselves into an all-in-one computing provider. This may portend the next step.
... it is my hope that Google has what it takes to finally relegate the PC to the junk heap where it belongs.
Nobody has figured out better than Google how to turn a zillion servers into the world's biggest distributed mainframe. Search and mail could be just the beginning. Google has built a platform upon which any variety of multiuser, Internet-wide applications can be built. Yesterday, it was search; today, it is mail; tomorrow... who knows? Maybe an office suite with built-in document management? Wasn't Microsoft supposed to have done this by now? (Hint: they can't because they're saddled with millions of lines of legacy crud.) Google can. Google has the know-how to truly put computing behind the glass again, where it belongs. And once they've delivered it to your desktop computer, they can deliver it to your phone, your set-top box, your refrigerator
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Hardly a week after the coup on November 2nd, and they've already ripped the guts out.
This is precisely -- precisely -- what Hitler did after gaining power, except that instead of enabling POP3, it was putting people in concentration camps. But I mean, it's obviously the same thing, basically. Same general idea. Anybody who's seen that smirking chimp on TV can see what he's driving at. He practically said it. I mean when he said he was going to do stuff, like be in charge of the country. He thinks he's the president now, which is just like Hitler: The Leader. He thinks he's the leader of the country. It's incredible, it's so similar.
I mean it's just exactly the same thing. And nobody voted in Ohio. Nobody. It's all a scam. A total scam. A fraud. A child could see through it.
And now they're trying to make you look at ads on your Outlook. In your email, in the ads. It's so totally corporate. This is corporate, that's what it is, Google is a corporation, in case you hadn't noticed, okay? OKAY? The corporations all voted for Hitler.
God, it's so totally just like Hitler. And now they have the zeppelins, I saw a blimp over Boston today, it was red and white just like the Japanese flag when they were on the same side as Hitler. Didn't you know Hitler had the zeppelins? He did, they had the swastika on them on the tail, they used to be over the rallies in Germany, just like Ashcroft's blimp today. Just the same. Just exactly the same. It's phallic, because they're Christians, they hate black people, that's why. They made people rape Cameron Diaz, because she's black, they hate people.
I saw this coming but nobody listened to me, and now nobody can say it, they haven't said on CBS news that Bush is Hitler! It's censorship, stifling censorship, it's incredible that they have that much control over the TV news that the news can't even tell us the truth that Bush is Hitler.
I tried the SMTP server, since it would be very handy to have a free SMTP relay out there that uses userid/password for SMTP AUTH. Saves the trouble of the complex setup required in many mail agents to get this going at home.
It works, but it rewrites your From: line to be user@gmail.com, which is OK if you are using gmail as your home base, but not OK if it is just one of your mailboxes. However, it's their server so they are free to put this limitation on it, I guess.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
IMAP is much better, in that it only downloads the headers of the messages until you read the body. For someone that travels and has to dial-up and has moron co-workers that email large attachments around, this is a must.
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.
One thing I've noticed recently, that I don't remember from before, when you log out, it now says your full e-mail address (user@gmail.com) where previously I thought it just said the username. I don't remember for sure, but I think this is something new.
This makes me wonder, is it possible Google will be adding support for other domains? Maybe you'll be able to get a Gmail address for free, but if you buy your own domain, you can use Google/Gmail for your mail server (either free or with a slight cost). That would be pretty neat, especially with this recent development of POP3 support.
I can imagine Google selling a rackmount Gmail appliance (to go along with the search appliance) for businesses, free @gmail.com accounts for everyone, and free/cheap mail hosting (with your own domain) for power users.
Who knows, that is just my speculation.
Andrew
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
They completely rewrote all of office as a broswer based application suite. They evaluated it internally against Office XP and apparently Office XP won. Now, we'll never know why XP won. I suspect that it was deemed more profitable than the browser based alternative. It would take a lot of work to get companies to switch over to a browser based office suite, especially if it meant that the coperate data was going to be stored on external servers.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
So if gmail allows pop3 and smtp, I should now be able to send an encrypted email to another Gmail account or receive one in mine and Google will not be able to parse since they will not have access to the key pair.
Does anyone know if Google has put anything in place to prevent pre-encrypting email or are they just assuming that the majority of the people using their service will not bother with this?
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Okay, this is an issue I've been trying to figure out for quite sometime. I'n currently locked-in to an old hotmail account because:
1. I cant use the email my ISP provides beacause once I leave them its over.
2. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the web is that everyone uses email addresses for verification. At this point a migration away from hotmail to gmail (or whoever) is a serious work-load and would cause all sorts of problems.
3. I get pop access through the Hot Popper program.
So, what are some alternatives? Maybe there can be a publically funded email service for "identification purposes," but I really dont want to depend on the whim of congress for funding. PBS/NPR get treated like shit, and I would expect them to do the same to "socialized" email.
Maybe we really a geek backed, volunteer email service running as a non-profit. For a nominal fee (or even free) you can have an email address for life. This can be given to the public trust like how ICANN (not the best example) run the internet/domain names.
If gmail does offer pop3, Id like to get off hotmail, but both solutions means if these companies go bankrupt or change their policies in some way that affects me negatively then I'm screwed.
Also, very few of these email outlets even defend freedom of speech. I believe I'm more protected than most because Im a paying hotmail customer, but if I were to reply to a spammer or someone I'm angry at with "fuck you," then I might be subject to account termination. That's not right.
Or perhaps this could be solved with a better TOS/Contract. An email provider who puts aside x amount of money in a savings account to defend a "if we go bankrupt we will run for 6 months as you migrate" policy will get my money, and probably lots of others.