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The Downide of Your ISP Turning to Gmail

Posted by kdawson on from the Google-Apps-Partner-Edition dept.

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."

1 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The obvious downside... by SmellsLike · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Agreed about MSN losing customers in Australia.

    I'm with optusnet ADSL and have webmail with them. I normally access the webmail through the homepage though I hardly check it as it just received account specific mail. Recently optus changed the homepage to be with nineMSN, requiring users to get a MSN passport account if they didn't have one. I didn't like the nineMSN portal and I accessed webmail even less. So when I got emailed that I was close to my bandwidth limit for the month - going over it throttles the speed to dialup - I didn't see it and got my speed throttled.

    I blamed myself for this and decided to take the effort to configure my gmail to retrieve my optusmail messages so that I wouldn't miss out on the message again.

    So I guess nineMSN wanted me to keep using Optus as a portal as much as possible so I'd see their content. The hell with that.