One thing can hold us, one thing can break us. It's the same thing.

[reddragdiva]

I'd heard from assorted high-spec geeks that Gmail was actually good and usable, with a novel webmail interface that actually wasn't crap. So when kineticfactory offered accounts, I asked for one.

Then I noticed the nice feature where you can't ever get your mail out once it's in. But they might let you at some unspecified future date. If you pay them. 'Cos it's not like it's your mail, is it.

There are third party tools that claim to extract your mail. That's not really good enough, because vendor lockin is intrinsically evil; why should I sign up for it?

(It's dgerard at gmail dot com, for the curious.)

Note: I realise the others do the same. That doesn't give me a reason to switch. Nor does it sound appealing when Gmail's explicit goal is to become your primary email store.

Comments

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Do the likes of Hotmail provide any way of getting your mail out of their system? I'm pretty sure this is a problem common to most webmail services.

The approach I'm taking is to still use my usual address. When mail gets to the mail server, the alias for me sends it to both Gmail and my home system.

That way I get the best of both worlds.

My only real problem with Gmail right now is the crappy text-edit widget in Firefox. Wonder if there's a plugin that'll let me use an external editor for TEXTAREAs? Hm...

[reddragdiva]

No, they don't, but they're Microsoft. This distinctly jars with Google's alleged "Don't Be Evil" policy. I've dropped them a note with my concerns.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

How about Yahoo? Or any of the bazillion other webmail services?

It'd be nice if they *did* provide some way of extracting your mail, short of forwarding every single item to some other address, but not doing so doesn't make them particularly evil, at least in relative terms.

[greap.livejournal.com]

Yahoo has free POP3 access on to your mailbox. Id asume most of the others would as well.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I had thought that was a "premium" feature. Not that I've been paying very close attention, hating webmail in general as I do.

[greap.livejournal.com]

Id have to agree with you, ive always found webmail lacking completly compared to just using a mail client which makes me wonder why so many people bother with poxy webmail accounts.

If i do have the need to check my mail when i can't access pop3 for some reason (firewall, bofh etc) i use www.mail2web.com which is free and rather nice, reads directly from your mail server rather then being a fully fledged email account.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

I run my own mail servers (both at home and work) so have Squirrelmail looking at each of them for remote access. Don't use it often in either case.

I'm copying all my mail to Gmail (i.e., I still have it going to the usual places as well) so that I can play with their interface using a realistic workload. If it were Yet Another Webmail System I wouldn't be bothering, but the tricks they've done with the interface make it quite usable, and it does at least one thing not much else does yet.

[juliet]

and it does at least one thing not much else does yet.

Which is? (out of interest)

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

The way they handle threading. It's a little bit like TIN, in that you get one entry in the index per thread, and when you drill down into the thread the stuff you've already read is there collapsed while the new stuff is displayed in full.

They also do some tricks with hiding vast slabs of quoted material without losing context. Works a treat when you're dealing with a top-poster, doesn't disrupt "traditional" quoting.

There are other nice things about it (the keyboard support, the way they've made the thing so fast, the search foo, the archiving) that set it apart from other webmail systems but not much from my usual clients.

Oh. One other neat trick is how they handle filing. You don't stick stuff in folders, you attach labels to threads (manually, or by using filters). A thread can have many labels attached. The label names sit on the left side of the screen below the "real" folders.

So I could, for example, have automatically-applied labels for mail from a particular high-volume correspondent (who might have multiple addresses, hence using a label) and another for anything mentioning Diplomacy. Mail from that person about Diplomacy would get both labels and would show up when viewing either set of threads.

[wednesday]

Last time I checked, it was only free if you were down with them advertising at you.

[redcountess]

That's what I thought too, but look at http://help.yahoo.com/help/uk/mail/pop/pop-03.html They've not only made it more user friendly but the spam tools are better (although there is the contention that yahoo invites the spam) and thanks to competition from Gmail, they've increased mailboxes to 100 meg for free (it used to be 6!)

[redcountess]

And unfortunately, as Thunderbird doesn't support smtp authentication I can't get my yahoo messages through it :-/

[redcountess]

scratch that, Thunderbird does support SMTP authentication. However, to get the pop3 access you have to sign up for Yahoo! Delivers, I get so much spam a bit more isn't going to matter, so I signed up, and made sure I turned on pop3 access in my mail options but it still won't work on the Yahoo side :-/

[adrasteah.livejournal.com]

It's a free service that allows you to collect your mail in a specified way, ie via their interface.

Why exactly should they be expected to provide POP3 access at all or for free? If you want POP3 access then it's not the service for you.

It does what it says on the tin *shrug*

[reddragdiva]

The point is that this is supposed to be better; this clearly isn't, and is a sufficient degree of suction for me not to want to go near the thing.

[adrasteah.livejournal.com]

No, the point is that they've said it gives you XYZ functionality which in their opinion makes it better (than other webmail accounts)

They have not promised every feature under the sun and it's free. They are not compelled and should not be expected to give a bunch of functionality for free plus more functionality which enables people to not actually use the service as it is intended and in the way which allows them to provide it for free. If people used POP3 then they wouldn't have to log in, they wouldn't see the ads which pay for the 1000mb storage and therefore they couldn't get the revenue and eventually there wouldn't be a service for anyone.

If you want it for POP3 or forwarding then you're just using it for the convenience of having an @gmail.com address and as they're giving away resources that cost them, they are totally entitled to stop that. Last I heard they weren't a charity and the people who work there need salaries.

[reddragdiva]

So I should sign up anyway despite the explicit suction? Your point is unclear. They're not obligated to offer particular features, but I'm quite entitled to say that vendor lockin is unacceptable if they want me to use their service, put all my mail into it, be the eyeballs for their ads and so on. Crapness is crapness, whether obligatory or not and whether others are also crap or not.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

So I should sign up anyway despite the explicit suction?

Nah. Clearly your requirements aren't met by any bog-standard webmail service, so you shouldn't use such a thing.

The workaround is simple enough, if you happen to find their interface more useful than the alternatives.

[reddragdiva]

I'm not even asking for POP3. Just a way to ever get my gigabyte of mail out again should I decide after using it that it's not for me.

I could send messages to both places, though that resembles work ...

I may try using it for firehose-like mailing lists for the moment - things I really don't care so much about.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

The workaround requires little work at all. In your case, you'd whack "dgerard@gmail.com" in your .forward on thingy along with the call to procmail (I assume you're filtering stuff on thingy, if not throw in an explicit save-to-mailbox).

Then you have your mail in Gmail for play, and your mail where it always has been for normal use or as a backout option.

[reddragdiva]

I mean it'd resemble work to deal with the buckets of mail that come into that account anyway. I don't use folders on thingy, it gets spamfiltered (though you wouldn't think so if you didn't know how bad the spam problem is now) and then I suck it into Thunderbird and put it into folders there. I may give it a go if I can be bothered.

[adrasteah.livejournal.com]

So I should sign up anyway despite the explicit suction?

No, I'm saying don't sign up if it's not the product that best suits your needs or doesn't offer you what you're looking for.

vendor lockin is unacceptable if they want me to use their service

They're offering a free service, take it or leave it.

I agree with Open Source ideals, but I think it's unreasonable to expect companies to change the products they're offering and spend money and use resources developing a tool that specifially allows you to bypass the way that they make money. Hardware costs real money, staff cost real money, bandwidth costs real money. And the technology they've developed and the features they offer and base their service on become redundant if the account if the account is used for forwarding only.

Why is this any different from saying that a shop is wrong to only except products for exchange or refund if you can prove you bought it from their shop?

[reddragdiva]

They claim to be better than others, and they explicitly want to take over your email life. This misfeature is why I have a problem with them, and you're really not convincing me I shouldn't feel free to say so, nor to warn others who may feel similarly.

Your exchange policy example is not at all analogous to vendor lockin.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

They're offering a free service, take it or leave it.

This post appears to be a pretty clear statement to the effect of "I am leaving it and here's why". What's your damage?

[vatine]

I would certainly have expected a "OK, I want a unix mailspool file with all my messages, now, please" link, even though I can see both of POP3 and IMAP to be contrary to the business proposal. I think I'd find it OK even with a "close my account and give me all my mail now, please" link. Producing something Outlook can access (a .pab, I think) would be nice too, for those in that world.

[owdbetts.livejournal.com]

Though people might get into the habit of downloading their mailbox on a regular basis in order to keep a backup, and that would really impact the bandwidth requirements of the service.

So actually the idea of having to pay a nominal bandwidth charge for downloading a copy of the mailbox might be reasonable...

-roy

[vampwillow]

I agree with you in many ways, but I working on filtering my email so that the 'good' email comes to my existing servers, but 'unsure' or 'bad that I can't delete immediately' goes to the Gmail place. I can then resend it back to a valid address if required and tune the filtering better.

Hotmail used to have an IMAP-extract option that worked in Outlook btw. Might even still do ...

[reddragdiva]

Yes, Hotmail works transparently with Outlook Express (not sure about Outlook), and the protocol has been reverse-engineered for use with Mozilla and so on.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

Got details handy?
This came up at work yesterday, would like to pass clue to internal M$ mail admins.

[reddragdiva]

HotPOP - a Win32 app that retrieves your Hotmail and offers it up on POP.

Hermes - a Mozilla plugin.

[wednesday]

Pop Goes the Gmail suggests we're on our way to a similar situation with Gmail.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

OK, I hadn't followed that link in to their support area.

At this point I'd just shrug my shoulders and say "it's a beta, it's not feature-complete" and then wait and see what they do.

Because, as noted, while I am using it as a primary interface to my mail, it is not the only mailstore I have. If they start doing objectionable crap I can pull out easily enough.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

You've put no small amount of planning into a backout plan. That's an excellent thing. Few people are going to invest that level of planning and thought into creating their plan. I'm reading David's point as "Gmail has no tools to retrofit a backout plan to an user that has invested more than a trivial amount of mail in Google's system." That tends to tie the typically naive user to the Google system. If or when Gmail adds objectionable policies, then the typical user faces the burden of abandoning a substantial backlog of mail in addition to the usual hassle of changing addresses. It's not hard to imagine an organization building a userbase on the basis of "trust us, we're better!" then once a suitable size of basically locked-in users has been established, adding the "Users will accept marketing communications from Google and carefully-selected business partners" that can even bypass Gmail-established antispam filters.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Again, "it's a beta, it's not feature-complete".

When it goes into "production" mode, if there still isn't some way to extract mail then I'll be quite happy to agree that it's at least moderately evil.

That random people are stupid enough to put all their mail into the hands of a service that is still very much in beta without having any sort of escape route planned is not Google's fault, and it doesn't somehow make them evil.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

ou make out that they're actively stopping you from getting to your own mail. This is nothing but FUD - of course you can save, store, download, archive your messages,

Unless I'm misreading, that's exactly what the post is about. There is no download. And storing the email on gmail isn't the point if someone later decides that they don't want to use gmail anymore. POP is only one possibility to meet the need. A zipfile full of text files would do. An mbox file would be wonderful. If there is such a download function, I suspect RDD would be very happy to hear about it.

[reddragdiva]

Yes, but that's a PITA too. Vendor lockin remains evil.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Then again, I've heard it claimed that Google aren't in the search engine business, or the mail business, but the massively parallel computing technology business. According to their reports, the revenue they get from AdWords is negligible. So, it could be that they're running their search engine and Gmail as a massive, attention-grabbing demo of their technology (their distributed-computing systems, built of tens of thousands of cheap commodity PCs running custom filesystems and software on top of Linux), with their real income coming from whoever's interested in buying this sort of technology for their own uses. As such, they could run these services for something other than direct profits.

Also, the thing that differentiates Gmail from other mail services is the interface and its special features, into which AdWords are tied. Were people to access it over POP/IMAP, it'd become just another mail service. Besides which, AdWords are unobstrusive (unlike the irritating Flash ads other sites have). As such, I don't think that many users would choose to routinely use POP/IMAP to access Gmail.

[andricongirl.livejournal.com]

you seen http://gmail-is-too-creepy.com ?

at least yahoo lets you switch off the spying web surfing cookie thing they have indroduced now ..

[redcountess]

See my follow-up to Blithe's post.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

That site was set up by a crank with a grudge against Google (http://www.google-watch-watch.org/) because they wouldn't give his site #1 listings for the names of various famous people (and thus were corrupt and evil). (Though the vaguely schizophrenic-looking clip-art, looking more like something from a flyer about psychic persecution and mind control than from any sort of sane web site, sort of gives away the site's psychoceramic origins.)

[andricongirl.livejournal.com]

well I thought it was amusing.
;]

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

That policy doesn't sound too evil. Assuming that a "nominal fee" is fairly low, I'd be happy to pay it for the ability to download my mail, especially with my getting the mail service for free.

The other thing stopping me from moving my live mail to Gmail (so far I'm just playing with it) is the fact that it plays fast and loose with attachments (I mailed it a photo from my futurephone and it neatly discarded the JPEG, giving me just the Telstra MMS promotional wrapper). Other than that, it's a much nicer interface than SpamCop's Horde webmail. (And these days I only use mutt for downloading/archiving mail.)