The Downide of Your ISP Turning to Gmail

SlinkySausage writes "Google is offering ISPs the opportunity to turn over their entire email operation to Google, with all customer email hosted as Gmail accounts. This would allow Google to grow its user base rapidly (Google is a distant third with 51M users compared to Yahoo's 250M and Hotmail's 228M). There are some obvious benefits to end users — Google is offering ISPs mailboxes of up to 10GB per user. APCMag.com has posted an interesting piece looking at the dark side of Google's offer. Not least is in its reinforcing of the attachment people have to their ISP's email address, making it harder to change ISPs if a better deal comes along."

Comments

Article Summary

[cgenman]

Since so few people seem to be RTFA...

1. Google announces that ISP's will be able to release a google-apps branded for their users. This includes domain management, docs, spreadsheets, calendar, web page creator, gmail, and 24 hour phone support.

2. MSN Austrailia points out that the ISP's will have to pay for the service. MSN Austrailia also points out that Google will tie users to their ISP account / domain instead of a more generic Google account. And they point out that Google's smallest ISP size bracket, 0 - 200,000 users, covers nearly all of the ISPs in Austrailia.

MSN Austrailia also takes pains to poke jabs at competing ISP's, specifically leaves out information, and otherwise sounds a lot like FUD.

Re:Eh?

[lilfields]

Thing is, for commercial accounts Google lets you use your own domain name, e.g. Fred@FredEnterprises.com, not limited to Fred@FredEnterprises.gmail.com. That's got to be more of an attractor than keeping the domain name of an ISP you're familiar with.

You can do this with free accounts too, as I assume by commercial you mean Google Apps? Anyhow, even if you are talking about free accounts, free accounts are able to pull email from POP3 servers into the Gmail account and use the pulled address to reply...here is an example; so really as long as you were able to keep the POP3, you could always keep your old account.

Disclosure: I run the site linked

Re:What's a 'Downide'?

[simon_clarkstone]

I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC;
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I've run this poem threw it,
I'm sure you're please too no,
It's letter perfect in it's weight,
My checker tolled me sew.

-Author Unknown- Actually, Author Known. It was written (slightly differently) by John Brophy as a humour piece in the June 1996 edition of the Farm Journalist, newsletter of the Canadian Farm Writers' Federation. The edition used to be online at http://www.cfwf.ca/farmj/fjjun96/#spell, and is still present in the Web Archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050116015142/http://w ww.cfwf.ca/farmj/fjjun96/#spell

(Finally, after keeping that information for several years, it has become useful, and my struggle has not been in vain!!!)