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The Downide of Your ISP Turning to Gmail
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun May 20, 2007 11:26 PM
from the Google-Apps-Partner-Edition dept.
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."
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The Downide of Your ISP Turning to Gmail
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What's a 'Downide'? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.newsique.com/)
Re:What's a 'Downide'? (Score:5, Funny)
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-
Re:What's a 'Downide'? (Score:5, Informative)
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-
http://web.archive.org/web/20050116015142/http://
(Finally, after keeping that information for several years, it has become useful, and my struggle has not been in vain!!!)
Re:What's a 'Downide'? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What's a 'Downide'? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What's a 'Downide'? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://localhost:5800/)
there, fixed that for you.
Re:What's a 'Downide'? (Score:5, Funny)
Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
That comment doesn't make any sense.
Just so you know, the latest versions of Firefox have spell-checking built in
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.virtualblend.com/)
Disclosure: I run the site linked
Re:Thin end of the wedge (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 06, @07:16AM)
recursion and lawyers?
two things that should not be in the same phrase...
Re:Thin end of the wedge (Score:5, Funny)
That depends. Does the universe kill all the lawyer processes when it runs out of memory?
Re:Thin end of the wedge (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.atomjax.com/)
No, the lawyer processes just terminate automatically when the universe runs out of money.
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it really distant 3rd? (Score:5, Interesting)
And how strong is Yahoo's protection against fake accounts these days?
Re:Is it really distant 3rd? (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
And
I don't see what the difference would be. Whether your email is hosted by your ISP or by Google for your ISP. It's the same account name.
If anything was a problem it would be whether Google would "index" your email so it could target ads at you.
Blogspam (Score:5, Funny)
(http://members.cox.net/bungi/)
"People will have to switch email addresses" Mother of god, someone stop this company. They will be the end of us all.
The obvious downside... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The obvious downside... (Score:5, Insightful)
people probably didn't notice it was ninemsn because it ISN'T a ninemsn article. It is an APC article, APC are anything but Microsoft friendly, they even regularly ship linux distros on there included DVD/CD they ship with the magazine.
Your own domain (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.rogertheshrubber.net/)
Re:Your own domain (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://laurent.ca/)
Thus, I am free from *anyone's* uncertain future business practices. Will google ever charge? Will ads ever become too obstrusive? Will a general outage ever eat my emails for days while hundreds of google admins scramble to fix the problem?
It's becoming easier by the day to setup your own server, especially with all the linux distributions targeted for it and howtos and packages and blogs blogging on and on about how to setup your own Ubuntu server.
Plus, I have the added bonus of throwing whatever services I see fit on that box. A group of friends want a forum? Mom wants to put some pictures on the web? I have a ridiculously large file to use at work/friends or something? It does it all.
What do you call this? (Score:4, Insightful)
IMAP!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
If the ISP had IMAP support, that'd be a downside right there, since Gmail still doesn't!
Like shining a flashlight in a horse's mouth (Score:3, Interesting)
The gmail spam filter is also a marvel. For some reason, it isn't talked about much : but in my experience, the spam filter is almost bulletproof. It has caught thousands of spam, with maybe one or 2 false positives that I have noticed. Maybe 10 spam have leaked through in the 2 years I have had gmail.
The charging of isps for this service only makes sense : google needs to have other revenue sources than advertising to be healthy, and they offer a more space than free gmail, which has ads.
This is a good thing. A very good thing. The only potential negative is portable of email addresses : but the ISP is google's customer. Not the end user. If the ISP doesn't want their email to be portable, then google will cater to that. (and the isp owns the domain, in any case)
Why would google force people to switch emails? (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Thursday September 09 2004, @09:38PM)
Article Summary (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.chriscanfield.net/)
1. Google announces that ISP's will be able to release a google-apps branded for their users. This includes domain management, [google.com] 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.
Not just ISPs (Score:3, Interesting)
My university was plagued by unrelieability in several of its web services. After we made the transition there has been significantly reduced downtime for endusers http://www.acu.edu/news/2007/070410_google_launch
There are only a few drawbacks to the switch I've seen sofar. Migrating from one email server to another is not always easy. For us, it involved basically doing multiple pop3 fetches to move old email. The other drawback I've noticed is, while google may boast higher reliability, there is still one crucial piece that may have problems from time to time, Single Sign On (SSO). Google has to be able to cooperate with your SSO server sucessfully to syncronize properly.
The most interesting side effect I've noticed is that professors nolonger have any reason not to accept the odf and ods file formats, thanks to Google Docs&Spreadsheets. Definate boost for open file formats.
B.S. (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://ron.dotson.net/)
I also even purchased some cheap webhosting space so that I could run my own mail server and have as many email accounts that were independent of my ISP as I want. By the way, in my opinion StartLogic.com sucks really badly, but BlueHost.com has everything I want and more and works great. BlueHost is the only cheap webhost I know of that offers free SSH shell access.
While I'm off the topic
ISP to user issues (Score:3)
I work at a rather large ISP, and I really don't see the advantages. First off, customers always forget passwords, they already get 10MB of space per email account, and we allow 6 total, per account. (6x10=60MB)
The actual problem, is the people that just use the webmail interface, vs using a email client.(outlook, thunderbird, mac mail, etc) They use the email server as a storage space for picture attachments and such and they run out of space. Yep, over quota. Normally I explain to them that they are better off using a email client that actually downloads the mail to their computer, thus the quota issue won't effect them. Also, I recommend a good spam filter, besides the one we provide.
Re:ISP to user issues (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow. The local Unix BBS offers me a half gig.
Welcome to (deleted) Public Access Unix
Quotas: There is an unenforced limit of 500 megs per user.
Type "rules" for information on inappropriate use of the system.
Note: If you're a new Unix user, enter "(deleted)help" for some general hints.
>>>> No background processes are allowed!
I've got a couple of gmail accounts too. I hardly use my ISP's email because it's too limited. To top if off, you think that your company is magnanimous in "giving" 10 megs per user. Disk space is dirt cheap, and easily paid for by user subscriptions. If you're not offering a gig, which costs somewhere on the order of 30 to 50 cents in hardware, then you're not really offering anything that your customers are paying for. 10 megs/user, 60 total? Nickel and diming, literally.
--
BMO
Google is your next ISP! (Score:5, Interesting)
- They already host all websites (Google Cache). Since they already got storage, check-out, advertising, a HTML-editor(they might need an extra acquisition to really pursue this successfully), statistics and forms (Google grid), it is a small step for them to offer free hosting with all the tools you need. So the costs remain the same but the income doubles
- Offering free hosting will offer Google huge cost savings in processor-capacity and bandwidth. That is because they don't have to crawl sites anymore, because they already got them! This will save them exactly 25 times the size of a site, per site in terms of bandwith.
- They can even better trace users and thus increase advertising accuracy and income.
- Google does not only want to control Awareness and Interest of end-users, but also Trial and Adoption, so they can make money on purchases as well (Google check-out), not only advertising.
- Huge investments in storage, capacity and double-click are enabling them to do so
- Offering end-users bandwidth and connectivity, will dramatically increase Google's' ability to track behavior and allows them to be even more efficient
- Being better in advertising and having more economies of scale allows Google to compete successfully with the ISP's
So their actions over the last few years are completely logical from this perspective. From an ISP's perspective and an end-user perspective they are (or should) be terrifying.How to get lifetime addresses (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.pobox.com/~ylee/)
Three ways to get a lifetime address:
I prefer my pobox.com address over my university's alumni address because the latter assigns a letter-and-number userid I've never liked. I could always start using my gmail.com address instead, under the presumably-safe assumption Google and GMail will be around for a long time, but as a firm believer in TANSTAAFL [wikipedia.org] I can't believe that GMail and/or forwarding mail to another address will remain free forever. Meanwhile, Pobox has a more than ten-year history and counting with better than 99.44% uptime. Even were I to switch to GMail for my day-to-day email access as opposed to the Emacs-based mailer [wonderworks.com] I've been using for more than a decade, I suspect I'd still give out my pobox.com address instead of the gmail.com one.
If you prefer gaining a permanent address by supporting a worthy nonprofit, two possibilities are IEEE [ieee.org] and the Free Software Foundation [fsf.org]. Each costs annually considerably more than $20, of course; if FSF would offer some sort of lifetime membership for a reasonable sum I'd probably do it, though.
Can anything be worse than AT&T/SBC/Yahoo? (Score:4, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
I had a DSL account with AT&T/SBC/Yahoo in Connecticut. The e-mail address is @snet.net. I have similar accounts for my wife and daughter.
I recently moved to Ohio, and pickup up a new DSL subscription from AT&T/SBC/Yahoo. At the time, I asked about keeping my old e-mail addresses. I was told, "no problem". I spoke with tech support when I put my DSL modem online, and they said the transfer would be taken care of.
After about two months, the old e-mail addresses were "suspended", evidently because they were no longer "linked" with an active DSL account. After EIGHT attempts (phone, e-mail, IM) to get this fixed, I have been given a combination of contradictory answers, finger-pointing, and "the runaround". Level 2 tech support seems to have no avenue of escalation to get this fixed. One of the more common answers goes like this: "We can register e-mail addresses from ANY other SBC domain, EXCEPT the SNET.NET region.
I managed to persuade a level 2 tech to "un-suspend" my e-mail accounts, but she warned me, "They're just going to get re-suspended in two months..." Now, THAT'S customer service!!!
The problem seems to be related to some kind of internal billing software issue. Evidently, the left hand is unable to work cooperatively with the right hand. AT&T/SBC bought SNET several years ago. If they can't move a customer smoothly across domains, they need a wholesale reorg of IT until they can operate like one company.
Gmail can't possibly be any worse than AT&T/SBC/Yahoo. NEVER, EVER RELY ON AT&T/SBC/YAHOO FOR E-MAIL. THEIR MIND-BOGGLING STUPIDITY MAKES THEM UNSUITABLE FOR RUNNING AN E-MAIL SYSTEM. I honestly don't think Google can be any worse. And besides, Gmail works reasonably well on my Blackberry.
Forget ISP's (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.livejournal.com/users/pstscrpt)
I try not to do it often or with anything sensitive, because again, I know my company probably doesn't want Google hosting their data, but when I really need to be able to find something again, I send it to my GMail account. There, a single search will bring it up in under a second, vs. a 20 minute search through Outlook that may or may not find anything (when we were on GroupWise, it was more like five minutes, and it would be found).
Cost? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday February 27 2006, @09:54PM)
Honestly, nowadays, it's hard to imagine Google being able to price Gmail high enough that ISPs will think they can do it cheaper, better, in-house. Running email services is one of the worst shit jobs you can find in technology. Good, competent people who can actually do it right aren't cheap, because the work sucks. Keeping clueless users safe from spam and viruses (something you're actually expected to do, no matter how much they like to click on .exes from strangers who claim to be selling porno) is labor-intensive, no matter how much you automate it, just keeping up is a bitch. And the storage, CPU, and network resources required to keep things going will be increasing (faster and faster) indefinitely.
Every ISP in the world would be happy to unload their email problems on someone else. I expect Google will find a lot of takers, even if they gouge them a bit. FWIW, at least Gmail gets more things right than most ISPs.
(Note that running your own personal inbound mailserver still isn't that bad. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about large ISPs running mail farms for tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of users. I've been there, and will never touch the shit again. Hell, when I did it things were a lot easier than they are now, because the spam deluge hadn't even really started and users didn't expect all their attachments to be virus-scanned and their mail to be collaboratively filtered.)