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."

Is it really distant 3rd?

[rolfwind]

I have multiple accounts on Yahoo I don't use anymore because Gmail is so much better, but which I keep around incase there are accounts I signed up for that I forgot to transfer over.

And how strong is Yahoo's protection against fake accounts these days?

Re:Is it really distant 3rd?

[ZakuSage]

Perhaps more importantly, how many of them are actual users? I get spam from "*@yahoo.com" emails on a daily basis.

Re:What's the point?

[WannaBeGeekGirl]

Well, it seems "the user" isn't. If your ISP did, then an account would automatically be created when you signed up with your ISP, increasing Gmail's numbers, if not usage.

Well its not "the" point but here's a point: If Google does this and gobbles up a lot of the non-major ISP mail systems, at least they'll all be standard as far as the mail goes. That makes less headaches for all those completely computer illiterate people that just won't stop asking me for free tech support because I'm too nice to say no.

Your own domain

[dj245]

I bought my own domain some time ago. Its a small price to pay for an email address that never changes and you can carry through physical and ISP moves. I haven't figured out what to do with the website (aside from important document backups which are not search engine indexed) but the email service has been great. I do use the catchall service to try to track which companies sell my email address. So far I haven't caught anybody doing anything sneaky, although Prosound Stage and Lighting refuses to take me off their list (don't buy anything from them, you'll never get off the list)

It'll all come down to the price...

[kcbrown]

Customers who make use of their ISPs email have a significant disincentive to switch ISPs: their email address will change. This is similar to the situation most cellphone customers used to be in before legislation required cellphone providers to implement number portability.

So the cost the ISP will have to consider isn't just the cost of Google mail versus the cost of hosting their own, they'll also have to consider the effect going with Google mail will have on their customer retention rates. ISPs that don't suck will have less of a problem with that.

The ISP can minimize that issue by insisting that the user's email address remain [e-mail] (or whatever). In other words, Google becomes the MX for ispname.net, and users who use the email service would log in by using their email address as opposed to just their username.

I can see it going either way, but I expect ultimately that Google will offer the service tied to the ISP's domain name, and expect that most ISPs will select that in order to retain the lock-in effect that ISP-specific email has on the customer base. I don't see any advantage to Google of providing their standard Google mail service to ISPs at a lower price than the one tied to the ISP's domain name.

Re:ADD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently the guy who wrote the article had ADD or something.

there should be a way to mod people down for making stereotypical remarks.

assuming that someone who misspells or types too fast has ADD just contributes to the stigmas of mental health. stigmas lead to intolerance which leads to hate and gets people beat up and stuff ultimately. go read up on ADD/ADHD at ADDA [add.org] before you make assumptions.

i maybe be OT, but the OP is ignorant.

Re:Your own domain

[Wayne247]

Bingo. I do exactly that as well. Not only do I have the luxury to obtain an insanely easy to remember and spell email address, but I can create as many accounts as I need. Some throw-aways for website registrations, some permanent for family members.

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.

Like shining a flashlight in a horse's mouth

[ShooterNeo]

This article seems force itself to make up reasons why this new service could be a bad thing. Whatever. Google may not be the second coming, but they offer some of the most reliable software I've ever used. It also works quickly and seamlessly : gmail and google are both faster than trying to do email and search using applications on my own computer!

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?

[doormat]

Why not just let users keep using [e-mail] and just tweak gmail to use that as the primary email address instead of [e-mail]. If ISPs are paying for it, who cares about how many gmail addresses people see and just take the money and run.

Not just ISPs

[grilled-cheese]

The new google partner program doesn't just benefit corperations. There is a very tempting for educational institutions aswell http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/edu_be nefits.html [google.com] with benefits such as being free.

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. html [acu.edu]. One of the more beneficial changes for us was that students don't have their email expire after they graduate.

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.

Re:Eh?

[lilo_booter]

Well, I have read the article now - it's a bit speculative ('google doesn't say if...'). Who's to say they won't allow you to keep the email address when you change ISP? Just 'downgrading' it to a regular gmail account (without all the isp specific branding) but with the same domain name? Even if they just allow you to migrate (notifying people in your address book automatically), that'd be a huge step up from your normal ISP lock in.

B.S.

[RKBA]

SBC offered their Internet customers the option of switching from their own Prodigy provider to Yahoo email. I declined for obvious reasons (privacy primarily), but switching ISP's is trivial for me because most of my email is sent to Spamex.com email addresses of my choosing such as [e-mail] [mailto] and all I have to do to switch ISP's is just change the redirection of my Spamex email forwarding account.

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 ;-), all I really want is a webhost with shell access, lots of cheap webspace, enough bandwidth for my needs (a few TB's per month plus decent download speeds), and none of the GUI interface nonsense and all the fancy web applications that most web hosts provide these days. All I want is the type of account a university student or professor might have at their institution for example. Anyone know of any *Nix/BSD based webhosts offering this type of bare-bones service? Thanks.

Google is your next ISP!

[antikronos]

Google offering email to ISP's does not surprise me. Google is investing the majority of their advertising profits into bandwidth and storage. There are a range of reasons why it is a logical next step for Google to become your next ISP:

• 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

[Yeechang Lee]

I agree that the so-called "dark side" the summary mentions is pretty lame. That said, anyone who uses an ISP (or a company) email address as his primary means of contact is, unless he owns the ISP or company, making a big mistake. Everyone should be using permanent, lifetime email addresses that can be changed as necessary to forward mail to whatever actual accounts (including ISP or company) they are using at the moment.

Three ways to get a lifetime address:

• A free email service. GMail offers free mail forwarding and I presume some other services do so as well.
  
• A university alumni address. There's a good chance your alma mater offers one. Universities benefit because they get to stay in contact with potential alumni donors. Institutions of higher education are more stable than almost any other entity in society, so the odds [e-mail] will still work 50 years from now are as high as you can hope for.
  
• A for-pay forwarding service. Pobox [pobox.com] has been around since 1995 and I've been a customer since 1996. The current price is $20 a year for three pobox.com addresses and some other features like spam filtering. As for whether customers can rely on any one company to stick around, Pobox's current FAQs have long since been "corporatized" but a rough paraphrase of a question in an earlier version went something like this:

  Q: How do I know you'll be around in the future?
  
  A: Will you? (Ha! Didn't think of that, did you?)

  
  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.

I agree.

[WindBourne]

Think it might have something to do with all those MS/MSN ads that I see on their site? If MS is really trying to buy Yahoo, then the last thing that they need is Google coming along and suddenly grabbing a HUGE percentage of that market. In fact, if MS could, they would probably buy nothing BUT Yahoo Mail. Right now, MS wants to make MS Live be their strategy to beating Google.

Not Really

[Anonymous Coward]

In 2002-2004, I worked at company designing and coding software for a hardware system sold to the feds and commercial. Basically, a high speed ( for commercial site; OC-48 speeds ) packet snooper with the ability to read, copy, and modify in real time with out detection on either end. During that time, I was privy to a few insights. In particular, a major spammer had made the mistake of approaching our local CLEC and offering a deal. They wanted bandwidth, IPs from their customer's DHCP pool, and harvested e-mail addresses. Turned out that they were currently doing this with MSN . Apparently, They were paying 1-2 million/month to do this, but MSN told them that it was to jack up to more than 5 mill/month. Since this CEO hated spam, they turned it down almost right away ( Richter made the mistake of approaching the CEO of a company who was friends with BG; the rest is history ). Supposedly, one of the execs asked him why not approach others, and he said that they were already using others including Yahoo.

Privacy

[Musfuut]

I was just thinking about the direction Google seems to be headed concerning privacy. They collect IP addresses related to search queries, and perhaps browsing to sites with Google ads. That isn't news. They have a good idea of what you like, where you go, when, and why. Then their Gmail service takes all of that and ties it into who you talk to, when, and about what, and further archives all of it. Also not news.

They offer their Google Earth and Desktop applications for download. Each of these seemingly useful applications are in a perfect position to record what applications are run and when, but that could just be frank paranoia.

However an IP address even resolved to give the domain name still only shows a general ISP and perhaps a general location.

If ISPs begin to use Gmail as their primary mail service what new specific information will Google gain? Exact city? Name (ISPs such as roadrunner by default use the actual account name for the primary email user name, for example BJohnson38). Combine that with the above information and it may be possible for Google to pin point the identity of someone just surfing the web.

That gives possibly a single location for government and law enforcement to obtain information, it also gives a single source to share or leak such information.

While the company itself may be against turning over information, they still have humans working for them, humans that can hold a grudge for a rude support request (I've had a couple ISPs/webhosts delete all my email when I complained about the level of service for simple problems), humans that can screw up. Hmm I wonder if I can compress user data to tunnel faster using AJAX and improve Gmail performance... oops where did the data just get sent to, uhh, damn.

Maybe all paranoia, maybe not. I'm not a mind reader and I can only make reasonable guesses towards certain future events. It still makes me uneasy to be setting Google up as the parent, responsible for everything, when it seems all too common for parents to neglect the well being of their children for personal gain, and we all should know those with the most trust will cause the most damage if that trust is misplaced.

Just a few things to think about, hope I'm not redundant by now.
-Musfuut

Forget ISP's

[Doctor Faustus]

What about offering GMail to companies for their own employees? I understand most companies wouldn't want Google hosting their data, so how about a GMail appliance?

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).