Google Beta Testing "Gmail For Your Domain" 283
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."
the email / office appliance (Score:4, Interesting)
Excellent (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
what they need next (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Do they intend to 'keep' everything (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Maybe if they offered IMAP (Score:2, Interesting)
So let me get this straight... (Score:2, Interesting)
Is there a difference between this and the service that I'm just not seeing?
Their servers, your data. Not good for most. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Live.com Custom Domain is great (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
GoogleBox hosting (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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
Re:Do they intend to 'keep' everything (Score:4, Interesting)
Aggh! Typo alert! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Maybe if they offered IMAP (Score:1, Interesting)
Deleted
SPAM
Inbox
-Friends
--Jokes
-Jokes
-Work
--Boss
--Jokes
--Projects
Google would use its awesome powers to work out that Jokes can be a subset of Friend emails and Work emails, and not the other way around.
Re:Outlook and Exchange (Score:2, Interesting)
Get a look on :
Microsoft Live Custom Domains http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=
And
Microsoft Office Live http://www.microsoft.com/office/officelive/defaul
Let's go for a new battle..
Round 1
Fight!
tssss
Privatized Privacy (Score:2, Interesting)
history repeating (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Interesting)
"true" address as well as associate my multiple accounts with each other. I've asked them not to do this, but so far no response. Fortunately, most home mail readers don't seem to do this, only the full blown Outlook as far as I know.
Re: Mod Parent Down. It's called Sarbanes-Oxley (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:yeah right (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but what I'm also wondering is: can I use Gmail as my mail service for my free software project? It's often easier to find (or provide your own) web hosting than (good) mail hosting. If I could use Gmail for my very small email domain (4-6 email addresses) then I'd be a happy guy.
Google: Are you listening?
Re:Do they intend to 'keep' everything (Score:3, Interesting)
Despite your percenption of freedom you too are supposed to hand over the contents of your hard drive if the govt serves you with a warrant. With the partiot act the feds can even come to your house when you are out and suck out the contents without ever telling you. All they have to do is to say that they suspect you of terrorist ectivities without specifying what, how or where.
Also consider this.
Lots of businesses oursource their email. They outsource spam tracking, they outsource their entire exchange hosting. This is where google is going with this. Think about it. They already have chat, they have email, they have file storage (two gigs per employee!), all they need is a shared calendar they are pretty much done. Since they have an API and since you can already mount your gmail account as a file system you already have shared folders.
This is googles attempt at a
Weak arguments (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm at a big company, and we use Outlook. I know in theory it does a lot more, but in practice it does a lot less: sometimes we have trouble just getting it to do email. Would you rather have a server that does email+calendars+kitchen sink but goes down all the time, or one that doel email+calendars reliably?
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?
As a big-business user of Outlook/Exchange, I have to say: WTF? Do you think we can call up Microsoft when Exchange goes down? when it's slow? Do you think our corporate helpdesk provides any of this?
Microsoft provides the illusion of good support, plus a lousy system. Eventually, people are going to learn that a solid app (even with no guaranteed support) can beat this -- they're already starting to with Firefox, for example.
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.
I don't know what you mean by "integrate" in this context, but in case you hadn't noticed, every company worth its salt is already using Google (for web searches) on pretty much every desktop, so they're already seeing ads for their competitors.
Would you switch to a different system just to avoid unobtrusive text ads? I wouldn't. I don't know anybody else who would, either: if that was a real concern, we'd all still be using AltaVista or Lycos.
Now, I can't see my big business (or any other) doing this, but just because they're so set in their ways that they'll probably *never* change, not because it's necessarily a horrible idea.
Re:Maybe if they offered IMAP (Score:3, Interesting)
Regards,
Steve