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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.

25 of 527 comments (clear)

  1. The catch is.. by Ckwop · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ..now where's IMAP and what's the catch

    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.

    1. Re:The catch is.. by Vicsun · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The other possibility is that they only keep it free until they iron the bugs out.

      Frankly I like your suggestion better.

    2. Re:The catch is.. by orion024 · · Score: 5, Informative

      From the gMail FAQ

      "Access: Free automatic forwarding. POP3 access is not yet available, but will be in the future for free or at a nominal fee."

      In other words, once they go live I would expect pop3 access to either be a paid service, or have injected google text ads.

    3. Re:The catch is.. by rudy_wayne · · Score: 5, Interesting

      " The other possibility is that they only keep it free until they iron the bugs out."

      A few years ago, I signed up with a company that advertised "free e-mail for life" and it included POP3 access. After a short time, only web-based access was free and POP3 required you to pay. I think that's exactly where Google is headed.

    4. Re:The catch is.. by sik0fewl · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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
    5. Re:The catch is.. by debilo · · Score: 5, Funny


      I think you missed a BETA there.

    6. Re:The catch is.. by Gentlewhisper · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:The catch is.. by JPDeckers · · Score: 5, Informative

      Can confirm this one.

      Sent and received messages, and no ads where added.

      Furthermore, when you enable pop3, you have 3 options:
      * Enable POP for all mail
      * Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now
      * Disable Pop3 (Doh)

      You can also choose to
      * Keep GMail's copy in inbox
      * Archive GMail's copy
      * Trash GMail's copy

      Sending and receiving is done through SSL-ports, and sending requires authentication.

    8. Re:The catch is.. by mav[LAG] · · Score: 5, Funny

      so beta beta beta beta beta?

      mushroom mushroom?

      --
      --- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
    9. Re:The catch is.. by galaxy300 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Speaking of ads...

      NICE SIG!

    10. Re:The catch is.. by notthe9 · · Score: 5, Funny

      SPAM! A SPAM! Oooo... It's a SPAM!

  2. I am a bit reluctant. by DeepFried · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
    1. Re:I am a bit reluctant. by bsdfish · · Score: 5, Informative

      I believe they've always stated somewhere in their documentation (FAQ, I think) that they were planning to add POP access, for which they may charge at some point in the future. I haven't seen any promises of POP being always free.

    2. Re:I am a bit reluctant. by Ruprecht+the+Monkeyb · · Score: 5, Funny

      Sorry. I gave my Mom a gmail account. This pretty much ruined the chance of anybody getting 'geek street cred' from having one.

      My apologies to all concerned.

  3. What's the Point? by substatica · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What's the point of 1 gig online if everyone uses pop to turn it into offline email?

  4. Catch by Beuno · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. POP3 access by artemis67 · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's being phased in, though, so not every gmail account yet has POP access.

    Apparently, you have to go around begging people on /. in order to get an invite to use the POP3 access.

  6. IMAP and Gmail by echocharlie · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Forwarding by andyrut · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:Doesn't seem to fit popmail model by HDlife · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Ahh, tie-in to the "creepy desktop search" might be the ticket.

    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!

  9. Behind the glass by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Google would do well to start turning themselves into an all-in-one computing provider. This may portend the next step.

    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 ... it is my hope that Google has what it takes to finally relegate the PC to the junk heap where it belongs.

    --
    Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
  10. This is it. It's begun already. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  11. Unfortunately SMTP server rewrites From line by btempleton · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  12. The catch, and the profit model, by Medievalist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  13. Encryption by manganese4 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.