Gmail Mail Fetcher
Yesterday a user mentioned on the Google Blogoscoped forums that Google had added a help page for a Mail Fetcher. I followed the link but it had no body to the help page. It seems that they have now removed the page but it still shows up in the Google cache. Here is a screenshot of the Google Cache version if they remove it: -
A Mail Fetcher could be the answer most professional/corporate people are looking for as an alternative to forwarding. I currently forward all of my university email to my gmail address so that I can get access to it when I am not at uni. If native support for IMAP or incoming POP is included in Gmail you could see a lot of people using Gmail as an alternative to Microsoft Outlook/Mozilla Thunderbird. Sure it would be nice to also have a offline browser based (XUL) Gmail interface but this could be a first step in trying to get a big chunk of the market who only have a pop based email account and have to use Outlook/Thunderbird as their interface.
In my view it would be good for Google to offer a different version of Gmail specialised for corporate use. This would mean that the email would be stored on the company's premises and would be completely searchable with a desktop interface. The web based interface would work in tandum with the desktop version in that they would sync together since the emails would be got directly from the company's server rather than Google's. Of course Gmail would probably need to provide a more secure version (all traffic would need to be encrypted not just the login) to encourage the swap over.
On that subject you can currently get all traffic to be encrypted by using https:// as the protocol. Therefore, instead of going to http://mail.google.com/mail bookmark the following URL to get all your traffic encrypted: -
https://mail.google.com/mail
I think they used to encrypt all the traffic but it caused too big an overhead in traffic to manage on a long term scale since their https protocol goes to a slower server. Now only if you specify the https header then the traffic is encrypted.
A Mail Fetcher could be the answer most professional/corporate people are looking for as an alternative to forwarding. I currently forward all of my university email to my gmail address so that I can get access to it when I am not at uni. If native support for IMAP or incoming POP is included in Gmail you could see a lot of people using Gmail as an alternative to Microsoft Outlook/Mozilla Thunderbird. Sure it would be nice to also have a offline browser based (XUL) Gmail interface but this could be a first step in trying to get a big chunk of the market who only have a pop based email account and have to use Outlook/Thunderbird as their interface.
In my view it would be good for Google to offer a different version of Gmail specialised for corporate use. This would mean that the email would be stored on the company's premises and would be completely searchable with a desktop interface. The web based interface would work in tandum with the desktop version in that they would sync together since the emails would be got directly from the company's server rather than Google's. Of course Gmail would probably need to provide a more secure version (all traffic would need to be encrypted not just the login) to encourage the swap over.
On that subject you can currently get all traffic to be encrypted by using https:// as the protocol. Therefore, instead of going to http://mail.google.com/mail bookmark the following URL to get all your traffic encrypted: -
https://mail.google.com/mail
I think they used to encrypt all the traffic but it caused too big an overhead in traffic to manage on a long term scale since their https protocol goes to a slower server. Now only if you specify the https header then the traffic is encrypted.
posted by Utills at
Friday, December 02, 2005
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