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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."
POP is soooo 90's.
I'd rather keep al my e-mail to my self, as a company...
Will they have the chinese goverment spell check my e-mails & filter it for spam too?
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?
Add Exchange type calendaring and this could seriously hurt Outlook and Microsoft in general.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
Google offers a search appliance, why not an email and/or web office equivalent? You buy the rack mount brains and hook up some hard drives, and you would stay in possesion of your data/email.
My small business is dealing with so much spam - plus the difficulty of using several machines to check our mail on - that we're actually forwarding our stuff through Gmail in order to filter spam. Not only that, but the interface is far more usable than alternatives we've used.
I keep saying "I wish we could use Gmail for our business email without having an @gmail.com in there."
This is very exciting to me.
1). IMAP. Need simplicity of sorting messages in a local client or groupware application. POP is a one-way protocol and less than ideal for this.
2). Filtering or restrictions on some user or ability to review mailboxes
3). guarantee that ability to reset POP download count will be maintained, as business users have an absolute need to make remote backups of their mailboxes
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
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.
I do security
Invites insanity is so over - just sign up.
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
"I see you are doing personal emails during work-hours. Click here to see what your boss really wants you to be doing!"
Is there a difference between this and the service that I'm just not seeing?
skins for gmail
http://gmailskins.mozdev.org/
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.
My company threw a fit yesterday regarding the potential of internal documents ending up on Google's servers via Google Desktop 3.0. The IT department ordered that all copies of Desktop be uninstalled, even though the dubious functionality is turned off by default.
I can't see many large companies trusting Google with their internal email and documents. The ASP model will not be embraced by many. If they were serious about eating Exchange's lunch, they would offer Gmail as a self-hosted solution.
I was just looking at forwarding mail from my domain (just to me) through GMail, because I like their interface and I like not having to handle spam filters myself. I was sitting here literally moments ago thinking "how well will GMail handle auto-forwarded spam? It'd be nice if I could use the GMail interface for mail in my own domain." when they come out with this.
So it's as I suspected. The Google Desktop privacy infringements now include picking up my brain waves. That, and time travel, because they couldn't have developed this in 15 seconds.
And, you know, the scary thing is that I just spent a moment thinking "Google reaching into my mind and indexing my memory wouldn't necessarially be evil. It might be helpful, and --" And then I had to splash cold water on my face.
You're a seductive one, Google.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
I have been using http://domains.live.com/ along with a Live.com mail account.
I love the ease of use and the featuresets live.com provides.
I am going to give gmail a spin too.
But I believe Live.com custom domains will be hard to beat.
I've been wondering for a while if free webhosting (with or without normal domain names) wouldn't be a perfect fit for Google's business model, it would fit snugly with Gmail for domains.
:) the above would seamlessly coexist with other solutions imo.
- Google already has plenty of hardware and there might not be much need for additional hardware as becoming a hosting provider would remove the necessity of caching those sites (why cache something you have direct access to?)
- Google text advertising could easily be a mandatory part of any hosted websites (perhaps a minimum of 5 text-ads)
- however there should be no invisible frames, toolbars or similar unless a user/content owner/provider actually wants it (opt-in)
- mycoolsite.google.com or similar (I wouldn't actually expect them to use google.com for this) as free domain names (naturally with Google's control/TOC and approval) as well as support for regular domain names
- the TOC would allow for or mandate that sites do such-and-such for example in regard to robots.txt or better meta-info (and of course the Google-hosted site would have to agree to be siphoned for data)
- Google could sell (or also swap for ad revenue) ordinary domain names as well as different levels of mirroring, guaranteed bandwidth levels, statistics & analysis, increased hosting space and so on. Imo they would be smart to include such as php, python, and ruby by default
- if Google provided/made a micropayment system things would possibly become even simpler if a site was already hosted by Google
Unlimited hosting space as well as (transparent to/readable by Google) database support might actually be the best idea. I'm sure it would blow away plenty of the competitors for those not overly concerned about having Google dissecting every little piece of your website for information on a daily basis.
Doesn't Google already own Blogger? However Blogger is limited in comparison to a normal website. This is but a tiny step really, a win-win situation increasing Google's reach while providing a service essentially for free (just like Gmail).
I'm not too afraid of the internet becoming googlenet
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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.
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?
That doesn't work:
When you send your mail to someone who uses outlook and they reply they see "copy@gmail.com sending mail on bahalf of user@xyz.com" in the from line. That totally defats the purpose of doing it, as not your busness conatcts still see that you're using gmail, and cross you off the "serious clients" list.
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.
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.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
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.
https://domains.live.com/
I think so =)
I'd love to have all email for all my domains sent to google, with no need to host my own mail server.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
My bad. An extra 3 there. Of course, so many people consider themselves "computer people" because they can actually send an email (thought they can't find the ones they sent, or where the replies went, and their desktop is full of icons from stuff they downloaded and can't figure ut how to clean up ... that ca company of 50 may very well have 33 people who consider themselves "computer people". They are the target for this service.
And when Google get out their web-based document-writing software, look out ... that's the market they're really looking at.
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.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Of course they should hold copies of all my email, as well as records of all my Internet searches. How else are they supposed to help the government protect me, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing?
--
make install -not war
hey slashdotters, how much longer until you scream for a burning google logo to go with the m$ broken windows one? you wonder how monopolies take control? by offering great services for free, or even better, for easy, building up a HUGE user base, and exploiting it.
you've seen them take unexpected business risks like censoring results in china and europe, more recently (although it's ALL been recently...) you've seen them begin gathering user data via google desktop. how can you be sooo against wiretaps and surveillance when it comes to the us gov't, and sooo upset with the adware outfits, and yet gladly welcome google's intrusive technologies?
give them negative feedback when they grow somewhere that seems out of bounds. try their products, but remember to be a good consumer, and demand what you want from the market. google is seemingly unstoppable now, and granted their products and services are unparalleled now, but remember your computing history.
I'd rather keep al my e-mail to my self, as a company...
Having email handled off-site by an independent third party is a great way to have S-OX compliance, especially if it never gets deleted.