Google Beta Testing "Gmail For Your Domain"

ndansmith writes "Google is looking for organizations to beta test its new hosted email service. From the information page: 'This special beta test lets you give Gmail, Google's webmail service, to every user at your domain. Gmail for your domain is hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.' The beta test is limited, but Google is accepting open applications."

Comments

Do they intend to 'keep' everything

[tetrode]

I'd rather keep al my e-mail to my self, as a company...

Re:Do they intend to 'keep' everything

[bromoseltzer]

Understood. The test is whether they will be willing to encrypt all your files on their servers and let you have the only key. In any case, they can index or scarf your e-mail between SMTP reception and encrypted storage, or on the way out to your browser.

Sounds like a loser if you're reasonably paranoid. On the other hand, how many in-house e-mail operations are carefully managed for security and legal liability?

Re:Do they intend to 'keep' everything

[Billosaur]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't public companies supposed to archive all their corporate e-mails anyway, under Sarbanes-Oxley? Megacorps aren't going to use this service anyway, of course, but I can see it being useful for a mid-sized company to be able to say, "Yeah, Google has all of it."

And who's to say that when the government decides it needs to read your emails, that Google won't just hand them over? I wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot pole, business or personal.

Re:Do they intend to 'keep' everything

[Zeinfeld]

Agreed. I might be tempted to use it for my personal domains, but given their desire to store and archive EVERYTHING I would never recommend it for corporate use if they plan to do this. The issue of e-mail trails in litigation alone would be enough to keep most organizations away from their service.

The concern there is not the fear of unearthing the evidence, its the sheer cost of processing the subpoena.

Shifting that cost to google sounds real sweet to me. Plus they can probably charge the plaintif for the reasonable costs if they are not a direct party to the suit.

Take that, Exchange

[SmithSmytheSmith]

If they price this right, it could really take off, especially for small companies. I know we've been considering hosted Exchange solutions for a while and have been putting it off due to the price. And our POP/SMTP based solution is just too clunky. Does anyone think they'll try the all-in-one approach that Exchange provides?

Re:Take that, Exchange

[Bungopolis]

If they price this right Why are we assuming that there will be a price? By incorporating the domains of organizations, Google will be getting a massively increased userbase to which they can continue to target ads. Hosting 1000 accounts as part of an organization's domain costs Google no more than hosting 1000 regular GMail accounts, so I see no reason to think they would charge the organization (unless they remove the ads).

Outlook and Exchange

[KilobyteKnight]

Add Exchange type calendaring and this could seriously hurt Outlook and Microsoft in general.

My domain is for me

[Gyorg_Lavode]

I personally bought my domain simply because I wanted my information to reside on my hardware. I think in the future people will finding giving up control of their information wasn't the best idea.

Re:Maybe if they offered IMAP

[Em Ellel]

Yeah, I am with you in some respects, but how do you reconcile IMAP with the GMail's way of creating "folders" (labels)? You'd end up downloading messages (or at least headers) multiple times and with 2.5GB of storage, the bandwidth required will be insane.

On the other hand, what I see as a bigger issue for companies, is the fact that you probably do not want to store your email on some unrelated big corporation's servers.

If they had a gmail appliance however, this may solve both of the above issues - but now you own the software/hardware - going agains google's pitch.

How to piss off an entire industry..

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Be the size Google is.
2. Offer hosted e-mail with a domain.
3. Wipe out a core part of thousands of hosting provider's business.
4. Laugh that they can't possible complete with your behemoth of a company.
5. Profit!

How long until they offer webhosting too? Don't be evil? Don't make me laugh.

Re:How to piss off an entire industry..

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be evil? Don't make me laugh. How is participating in the system known as capitalism "evil"? I thought we [slashdot] had, as an information culture, moved past the "that company is big and a corporation, so therefore, it is bad" mentality.

Re:How to piss off an entire industry..

[gatzke]

So now competition is evil?

Microsoft abused monopoly power to gain unfair advantage over other in the market.

Is google the only mail provider? No? Then they are not a monopoly.

Are they offering something either better than other offering or cheaper than other offerings? Yes.

Just like WalMart is "evil" for providing cheap crap. They compete. Don't like good cheap crap? You are free to pay extra a a boutique or run your own mail server and thumb your nose at WalMart and Google.

yeah right

[cybrthng]

no sane business would outsource there email this way. Outlook as a rich client does a lot more than calendar and email and even small businesses wouldn't (shouldn't) do anything like this. Where is the google helpdesk? where is the google backup/restore policy? who takes the calles when it's slow? who will restore deleted messages? who will verify that email is fitting the corporate policies?

which company would allow people to integrate with a service that shows competitors ads as well as archives and allows you to interface with online chat?

not many that i know or would want to work with if you ask me. Businesses use services that can provide the above or they do it themselves. If it's a mom and pa shop sure it may work for them, but hardly an attack on Exchange if you ask me.

Re:yeah right

[petermgreen]

Yes, thats $96USD per person per year.

plus if your users are in the habbit of moving large files through the system i'd imagine the bandwidth costs and/or time waiting for transfers could be quite significant compared to in-house hosting (this partly depends on where you live ofc). and how much more productivity will it cost you if internet goes down when your internal e-mail is outsourced?

Re:yeah right

[PietjeJantje]

No sane company uses Outlook:
- Not RFC compliant and it should die horribly alone for reverting the order of replies;
- What a red flag is for a bull, is Outlook for script buddies and crackers. A company that runs Outlook is like a matador in red: not smart.
Personally, being outsourced so many times, I see Outlook used only in clueless companies where the PH management started using Outlook, and either don't know or don't want to know anything else. I agree that no sane company should use centralized e-mail as well, especially when in another country or continent.

Re:yeah right

[aaronl]

Well, considering that Mozilla, Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus, The Bat, Outlook Express, GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and I'm sure quite a few others, do not do "just basic calendar" or directory services, the vast majority of clients are "mind numbingly brain dead".

Outlook is one of a very few collaboration clients that do shared calendars at all, for example. This might seem basic to someone that doesn't know what is involved, I suppose. As I said, *these are not basic things*.

Having a directory service is easy. Having one that is useful is not, since you need to have global contacts and personal contacts, and a way to share those personal contacts. You need a friendly way to update these contacts.

Having a calendar is easy. Having one that is useful is not, since you need to have global calendaring, personal calendaring, things like room and equipment reservations, personal calendars, and a mechanism to share them, the ability to invite a person to a meeting, having them accept, and have a the meeting roster updated, the ability to determine when your potential invitees are availabe, etc. You need a friendly way to manage these calendars.

That is before delegation gets added in. Most mid-size and larger businesses want to be able to delegate such things. Many smaller business and institutions want to delegate as well. You don't want to do this by sharing passwords.

Again, this stuff is *not easy*. There aren't a lot of options, in general, and the OSS options are rather useless; the client support is abyssmal. If you need these functions, and run Windows or MacOS, then you are going to spend money. A web page interface is not a usable option (which is to say that the usability, bluntly, sucks on them). Evolution, KMail, and Kontact don't run on Windows, and they are the OSS alternatives.

Re:Maybe if they offered IMAP

[Em Ellel]

Well, in Thunderbird, I'd just have one big inbox folder, then use saved searches on labels (which I presume Google would add as some sort of standard header). So I could just as easily use my labeling there.

Yeah, but then how is this different from using POP to do same? The main benefit of IMAP is consistent multi-folder support.

I did not mean to say that it is an unsolvable problem, just one that does not have an EASY GOOD solution, and while I use IMAP everywhere - I do not see immediate benefit of using it with GMail.

And when your connection goes down...

[Richard_at_work]

you not only lose new email for the duration, but also all your stored email unless you take the step of pop3ing stuff down, and if you do that then whats the point of using this service?

Re:And when your connection goes down...

[SuperQ]

That's why gmail supports pop3. You can keep a backup copy if you're paranoid.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic= 1555

Gmail has a huge back-end and very reliable infrastructure. I've never heard anyone complain about lost mail sent through Gmail.

Re:Their servers, your data. Not good for most.

[tomhudson]

If they were serious about eating Exchange's lunch, they would offer Gmail as a self-hosted solution.

The majority of businesses are small businesses lf less than 50 employees. If they have to have 33 "computer people" because they do all their own stuff internally, they're less competitive than their competitor, who has one "local geek" and hires everyone else on an as-needed basis.

A lot of them will look at this and say, "hey, who not?" No more lost email, no more hard time finding it ... we're nt talking technical sophisticates here - we're talking ordinary people who thing that "the Internet == the web," and whose web site is 4 pages of "brochure-ware" that hasn't been updated since the dot-com bust. They'll go for this because it makes sense for them.

Re:Excellent

[storem]

I keep saying "I wish we could use Gmail for our business email without having an @gmail.com in there."

You can actually do this today already. The only thing you need is an e-mail forwarding service for you own domainname. You first forward you@domain.com to you@gmail.com, then goto you gmail account settings. Under the option "accounts" (not available in all languages, but US English will do) you add the email address you@domain.com and make it the default for sending new mail (after account verification).

This is exactly what I have been waiting for

[stunt_penguin]

I'm the web designer in a 50 person company who does our sites, manages our email accounts, and does web design work for outside companies. I've been absolutely dying for google to do this since it occurred to me that they could do this.

This could be a great revenue stream for google if they want to resell this solution on at relatively modest cost to companies of various sizes- it'd unify instant messaging and email for users under that domain, with tracking & search of previous converstaions and emails for later reference, and itd allow normal POP3 use of the account for normal desktop use.

IMAP and privacy

[idlake]

I think for this sort of thing to work, Gmail needs to support IMAP.

Also, they need to make clear and specific commitments to data retention guidelines. It may or may not be a problem for you that your E-mail in your Gmail account could hang around forever, but for businesses, that is an unacceptable risk. E-mail data (like other business records) needs to be retained for a specific amount of time, no more and no less.

Google copying Windows Live?

[danielk1982]

https://domains.live.com/

I think so =)

Bad for companies, great for individuals.

[autopr0n]

I'd love to have all email for all my domains sent to google, with no need to host my own mail server.

Check your facts

[Anonymous Coward]

MSN has been offering this exact same service for months.

When is Microsoft going to get credit when their ideas are stolen by Google?

Is it because blogs like Slashdot make tons of cash off Google ads that we see this Google worship?

Re:Check your facts

[rm69990]

Ummm, the article blurb simply stated Google would be offering this service. How exactly is this "worship". And why is it that people posting comments like this are always AC?

You know, OSNews recently banned anonymous posting. The site instantly became a lot more bearable.

Re:Their servers, your data. Not good for most.

[Reaperducer]

I think you've totally hit it there, not just with the aim of Google e-mail, but with an entire Google strategy.

Google isn't after the megacorps -- it's after small business. Businesses that are nimble, willing to take chances, and small enough to made quick decisions. Google is never going to convince a huge company to offload its e-mail. But something like this could save thousands of small businesses money, time, and frustration while making their employees more productive.

Now expand mail to the whole range of Google rumors. Remember those Google desktop boxes we keep hearing about? Google is never going to wean the Fortune 500 to unhook from Microsoft's teat. But it can make serious inroads among the other 5,000,000 companies in America that can lay out $400 for a new computer with a trusted brand name that will let them get things done without worrying about viruses, spyware, or the constant upgrade cycle/Microsoft tax. Google, like many other companies would rather have 20% of five million businesses than 20% of the top five hundred businesses.

And since many of these small businesses are run by people who have things like Google Desktop on their home machines, and search the internet with Google already, Google isn't some strange name coming out of left field promising them the moon. They're a known quantity that the head of Joe's Antiques or Mary's Candy Shoppe can look at and say, "Well, it works great at home. I bet it would be good for my business, too!"

Think of all the Google things that don't work well in megacorp environments, but work well for small business:

> Google Desktop - Did the Kelley Girl lose a document? That's OK, Google Desktop will find it.
> Google Translate - OK for informal e-mails that small companies use to make a sale, but not robust enough for a real corporate contract
> Google Mail - Small companies don't have the time or technical know-how to manage mail servers.
> Google Alerts - Small companies can't afford clipping services, but Google can do the work for them.
> Google Catalogs - A B2B tool, and a method for keeping an eye on the competition and doing industry research.
> Froogle - Big business buys through contracts and channels and purchase orders and waits and waits and waits. Small business hits Froogle and gets it done.
> Google Maps - Great for small delivery companies, florists, pizza shops. Useless to megacorps like FedEx and UPS that have their own methods.

And obviously Google is thinking at least some about business, because front and center on their home page is a "Business Solutions" link.

Re:Live.com Custom Domain is great

[slashkitty]

uhm, only 60 addresses? only 250 mb storage? Windows requirement? It'll be easy to google to beat.

Re:Maybe if they offered IMAP

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Yeah, but then how is this different from using POP to do same?

IIRC, you can't *upload* messages using POP3, but you can using IMAP.