Gmail Adds POP3 To Email Accounts

VaultX writes "Gmail has recently added POP3 services to their free email accounts. This would allow someone to use gmail without ever seeing any of their advertisements. They are also providing SMTP, both POP3 and SMTP are forcing the use of SSL/TLS. Very interesting...now where's IMAP and what's the catch?" It's being phased in, though, so not every gmail account yet has POP access.

The catch is..

[Ckwop]

..now where's IMAP and what's the catch

My guess is that they'll inject adverts in to your e-mail when you download it using pop. The move wouldn't make sense otherwise.

Simon.

Re:The catch is..

[Vicsun]

The other possibility is that they only keep it free until they iron the bugs out.

Frankly I like your suggestion better.

Doesn't seem to fit popmail model

[HDlife]

It seems like it would map better to IMAP. POP is more of a download to client and delete-off-server thing. This certainly would crush the webmail competition if Google can find a way to profitibably do this!

A common sense move

[VAXGeek]

I would have used gmail more, but it's annoying having to load up the site. PLUS it was annoying not being able to get a mail count without downloading some off the cuff utility. POP3 is no IMAP, but it is a good start and shows that Google really DOES have a good corporate mindset.

fantastic

[nmec]

This is a great addition to gmail's long list of advantages over other free web-mail services.

Thing is though, the gmail web interface is so good I don't want to use pop3.

*sigh* ignorance is bliss...

Now I can use gmail on my PocketPC!

[VE3ECM]

Fantastic! I can finally use gmail on my PDAphone... Google doesn't support gmail on PocketPC... but I can d/l my mail to my desktop mail prog, then sync that way. Bravo Google. Keep pumpin.

Re:The catch is..

[Tim C]

That was my first thought too. Easy enough to do; they already have the tech to parse your emails and suggest ads based on content. Easy enough to append them to the end of the mail.

Gmail needs the *opposite*

[sulli]

I already have plenty of POP3 accounts. I would use Gmail if it has a nice way to read messages there. The webmail I get from my various ISPs isn't very good - Gmail is better.

Goodbye screenscrapers

[kamelkev]

The fact of the matter is that many people had already circumvented the web based service to use it as pop3 anyway. Search on google (kinda ironic that this is how you'd find the screenscrapers?) for pop3 and gmail, and a ton of links showing screenscrapers and converters pop up. Worse yet, some of them came with spyware...

I think google realizes that many people prefer the benefits of web-email anyway (there are major advantages) and if a few people want to use pop3, then it won't hurt them too much.

Now the question is, does it cache everything on their end sort of like imap? i.e. is it working as a true pop3 service, or is it just a pop3 frontend hack.

Re:The catch is..

[Anonymous Coward]

The catch is simple. They are building a social map, that's why you have to get an invite to use the service. Once they have that they won't need advertisements, they'll just sell their subscriber list to spammers and sell their social maps to governments for law enforcement purposes.

Re:Doesn't seem to fit popmail model

[HDlife]

Ahh, tie-in to the "creepy desktop search" might be the ticket.

Of course, you can select "leave on server" but POP client software really can't take advantage of all that stored email. Desktop search, or even an online Google search, while logged-in, could draw from all of those old emails even while you filed and deleted to your heart's content with your local copy in your POP client.

Very sneaky indeed!

Again, this only works because Google is golden. If MS or AOL announced that they were going to keep a permanent record of all of your email, whether you deleted it or not with your client, would raise a firestorm!

Re:What's the Point?

[3770]

The people who use POP3 are much cheaper just because they won't be using 1GB.

Google can probably aim to get a 10th of the revenue off of a POP3 user compared to a web mail user.

Also, Google is entering a mature market. They have to really stand out if they want to persuade users to move from other web mail systems.

Re:The catch is..

[rudy_wayne]

" The other possibility is that they only keep it free until they iron the bugs out."

A few years ago, I signed up with a company that advertised "free e-mail for life" and it included POP3 access. After a short time, only web-based access was free and POP3 required you to pay. I think that's exactly where Google is headed.

Re:What's the Point?

[eliphas_levy]

You can configure gmail to archive your email when you pull it off via pop3. That way, you end with a very large backup of all your mail.
And a SMTP server, which I think is the best thing they've added.
I will start to forward all my addresses to gmail right now :)

Re:What's the Point?

[gspira]

It's not useful to me. All my mail coming into my domain gets forwarded to gmail and my normal pop3. The normal pop3 is accessed at home, and I can get to it through gmail if I am at work or on the road.

But if, on the road, you want to look at an e-mail that you sent while at home, you can't. I'm presently using the exact same setup that you described, but I'm definitely going to stop using my "normal" pop3 once I have pop3 access to Gmail, because it simplifies things greatly, and ensures that my offline email and gmail are in sync.

Behind the glass

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Google would do well to start turning themselves into an all-in-one computing provider. This may portend the next step.

Nobody has figured out better than Google how to turn a zillion servers into the world's biggest distributed mainframe. Search and mail could be just the beginning. Google has built a platform upon which any variety of multiuser, Internet-wide applications can be built. Yesterday, it was search; today, it is mail; tomorrow... who knows? Maybe an office suite with built-in document management? Wasn't Microsoft supposed to have done this by now? (Hint: they can't because they're saddled with millions of lines of legacy crud.) Google can. Google has the know-how to truly put computing behind the glass again, where it belongs. And once they've delivered it to your desktop computer, they can deliver it to your phone, your set-top box, your refrigerator ... it is my hope that Google has what it takes to finally relegate the PC to the junk heap where it belongs.

Re:The catch is..

[Red Alastor]

They don't have to. Most people use web-based e-mail and don't want to use an e-mail client at all. And gmail interface is quite nice so they have little incensitives to switch.

But if *you*, prefer using an e-mail clients, you can. This way, you continue to use gmail and influence your friends, especially the ones that don't have much knowledge about computers to use gmail. Else, you would suggest them whatever you are using that supports pop (Yahoo for instance).

Re:IMAP?

[pete-classic]

Why do you need IMAP? Google doesn't use folders, and the label concept does not fit well.

I couldn't disagree more. If they just treat each label as a folder for IMAP purposes it should work fine. In fact, if they are really clever (and we know they are) they could design their server so that if you create a new folder from your IMAP client it automatically "populates" using Gmail's search functionality.

I think this could all work great.

The translation wouldn't be perfect, but it would certainly be workable.

-Peter

The catch seems obvious to me

[geekschmoe]

what's the catch?

The catch is they still have access to your email and will use very sophisticated algorithms involving complex "graphs" (similar to peer-to-peer algorithms) to generate useful information such as relationships (personal and business) and historical data sets. This is in addition to consumer information.

But don't listen to me, I haven't worked for any companies that do the same stuff with similar but more limited data sets.

will gmail support other domains?

[adpowers]

One thing I've noticed recently, that I don't remember from before, when you log out, it now says your full e-mail address ([e-mail]) where previously I thought it just said the username. I don't remember for sure, but I think this is something new.

This makes me wonder, is it possible Google will be adding support for other domains? Maybe you'll be able to get a Gmail address for free, but if you buy your own domain, you can use Google/Gmail for your mail server (either free or with a slight cost). That would be pretty neat, especially with this recent development of POP3 support.

I can imagine Google selling a rackmount Gmail appliance (to go along with the search appliance) for businesses, free @gmail.com accounts for everyone, and free/cheap mail hosting (with your own domain) for power users.

Who knows, that is just my speculation.
Andrew

Re:fantastic

[sapped]

I am in the same situation. I am currently paying for a 1 year POP subscription with Yahoo, but I will let that expire once it is used up. At first I wanted them to add POP to Gmail, but since using it more and more, I have come to love using it online too much. Plus all the sent mail stays with the received mail on the server where it is supposed to.

In fact I liked the Gmail interface so much that about 2 weeks ago I killed my email client and uploaded all my old mail into Gmail.

Re:The catch is..

[Milican]

USA.net is still around. I have been using their e-mail since 1996. They did switch to a pay option a while back, but if you pay two years at a time you get a discount. In the time they have switched they have consistently stayed ahead or near the front of the pack in features. They have spam filtering through brightmail, you can view e-mail through phones and PDAs, they have IMAP, 20 MB+ e-mail boxes (used to be big before this year), etc... There are lots of other features I'm not mentioning.

They take their business pretty seriously and their service is great. I have used one e-mail as my primary e-mail address for the last eight, going on nine years. Thats quite crazy to think about. That being said I am switching to my own private e-mail addy when my subscription runs out, or I may renew for one more year to make sure people don't lose track of me. Its been a good run with usa.net and I wish them the best.

JOhn

Re:The catch is..

[mesach]

Am I the only jaded enough by the barrage of ads to not even notice them any more.

Seriously, I completely forgot that Gmail had ads, until someone i was showing it to pointed out that you have to look at the ads all the time.

I guess years of manually sifting usenet as fast as my mouse wheel can scroll has made my eyes impervious to spam and ads.

Re:I am a bit reluctant.

[Kupek]

Honestly, if they start charging, I'll pay. It's an email account that will move with me, and I like the interface. I pay for a phone line because I want to be able to communicate with people, and I'd pay for my gmail account because I want to be able to communicate with people. I'd just consider a bill like phone, electric, cable or gas.

Re:The catch, and the profit model,

[DanteBlack]

It's a straight-up, informed-consent deal (at least for Gmail account holders- the issues get stickier if you send mail to Gmail because you never clicked through a use agreement) and if you don't want their robots reading your email you shouldn't use the service.

You make an implied agreement with mail providers when you send email, whether to or from. It's a realitiy. If you don't like that they may scan your email then either don't use email or use some sort of encryption to prevent it. Societaly it is increasingly impractical to not use email though. There are a few notable people who've made this decision (ie. Donald Knuth), but it's simply not a reasonable option in most business situations. Further many of us have become dependant enought that not using email is simply unacceptable to us. Personaly when I need to deal in sensitive materials (email, im, etc) I pass it through gpg and be done with it. *shrug* Price we pay for convienice. Regardless I love my Gmail.

Microsoft Already did it.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

They completely rewrote all of office as a broswer based application suite. They evaluated it internally against Office XP and apparently Office XP won. Now, we'll never know why XP won. I suspect that it was deemed more profitable than the browser based alternative. It would take a lot of work to get companies to switch over to a browser based office suite, especially if it meant that the coperate data was going to be stored on external servers.

Modernizing (G)Mail

[SkankinMonkey]

This is starting to get better and better. Pop3 is very conveniant. They make note that they may implement IMAP soon, but don't hold your breath. Don't get me wrong though, I still love the web based interface, it's very good for when I'm not at my home computer, but I think I'd prefer pop3 over web-based anyday. By the way, there are still a handfull of free pop3/smtp providers out there, ifrance being one of them, you just have to look a little harder than you did a few years ago.

Re:Microsoft Already did it.

[Phiu-x]

"especially if it meant that the coperate(sic) data was going to be stored on external servers."

Or not...

They can sell the application only, not the storage space, you run their apps and save locally.We can already do that with standard office suits anyways. The matter is that they would now be served from the web, browser based.

Encryption

[manganese4]

So if gmail allows pop3 and smtp, I should now be able to send an encrypted email to another Gmail account or receive one in mine and Google will not be able to parse since they will not have access to the key pair.

Does anyone know if Google has put anything in place to prevent pre-encrypting email or are they just assuming that the majority of the people using their service will not bother with this?

lifetime email?

[gad_zuki!]

Okay, this is an issue I've been trying to figure out for quite sometime. I'n currently locked-in to an old hotmail account because:

1. I cant use the email my ISP provides beacause once I leave them its over.

2. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the web is that everyone uses email addresses for verification. At this point a migration away from hotmail to gmail (or whoever) is a serious work-load and would cause all sorts of problems.

3. I get pop access through the Hot Popper program.

So, what are some alternatives? Maybe there can be a publically funded email service for "identification purposes," but I really dont want to depend on the whim of congress for funding. PBS/NPR get treated like shit, and I would expect them to do the same to "socialized" email.

Maybe we really a geek backed, volunteer email service running as a non-profit. For a nominal fee (or even free) you can have an email address for life. This can be given to the public trust like how ICANN (not the best example) run the internet/domain names.

If gmail does offer pop3, Id like to get off hotmail, but both solutions means if these companies go bankrupt or change their policies in some way that affects me negatively then I'm screwed.

Also, very few of these email outlets even defend freedom of speech. I believe I'm more protected than most because Im a paying hotmail customer, but if I were to reply to a spammer or someone I'm angry at with "fuck you," then I might be subject to account termination. That's not right.

Or perhaps this could be solved with a better TOS/Contract. An email provider who puts aside x amount of money in a savings account to defend a "if we go bankrupt we will run for 6 months as you migrate" policy will get my money, and probably lots of others.

Re:The catch is..

[Repton]

Not only may it be illegal in some states, people will not use the service.

Exactly ... If it is substantially annoying, people won't use it. If people don't use it, it will lose money. Ergo, google won't make it substantially annoying.

(unless they are idiots, but history suggests they are not).

Clients w/ Label support?

[bucky0]

Hey guys-

Does anyone know of webmail/local clients that can do labels like gmail does? To me, that's the slickest thing about gmail, and i'd kill a man for that feature in thunderbird (I'd code it myself, but my stuff would never past QA, even if I could get it to work :( )

thanks-

Re:lifetime email?

[Ctrl-Z]

And if you want to save yourself the hosting fee and you have an "always on" high-speed connection, set up a dynamic DNS account and host your own mail server.