7 ms·
Easy prediction: they'll disable imap access within a year.
by antifuchs 13y ago
Easy prediction: they'll disable imap access within a year.
- psykovsky 13y agono worries, Microsoft now has free IMAP on outlook. back to hotmail :-)
- themodelplumber 13y agoWhy would they do that? It seems like disabling IMAP would drive away huge numbers of users and give their competition more advantage.
- LoganCale 13y agoI'd certainly leave immediately.
- meese_ 13y agoWhy haven't you already?
- LoganCale 13y agoBecause it's a hassle and it's easier to keep using it so far, and the alternatives aren't as nice in other ways. It's going to be a bigger pain to do it once I'm forced to, but…
- nandhp 13y agoI haven't left because: (1) I don't have a server where I can run my own mail infrastructure -- I don't think my ISP would be happy with me running a mail server off my cable modem). And (2) I don't trust Outlook.com not to silently discard mail from randomly selected senders (as I believe Hotmail was known to do). Gmail is reliable. But otherwise, I'm ready. I've already stopped using the Gmail web interface (retaliation for killing Google Reader). And once I'm no longer tied to Gmail anymore, I can switch to a better IMAP client than Thunderbird.
- meese_ 13y agoHave you tried Fastmail? I switched to them a while ago and haven't looked back. Their web UI isn't as nice, but they have an honest business model with a much better privacy policy and migrating is pretty straightforward.
- stock_toaster 13y agoAnother anecdote here -- I also use them and like the service.
- danieldk 13y agoTheir web UI isn't as nice, I like their web UI better than GMail. It is cleaner than GMail and much faster most of the time. It's also worth noting that they now have a beta version of a calendar (with CalDAV) support: http://blog.fastmail.fm/2014/01/23/calendar-now-available-on-beta-fastmail-fm-for-testing/ http://blog.fastmail.fm/2014/01/23/calendar-now-available-on... And they are apparently working on CardDAV.
- msh 13y agoI have a fastmail account, it is worse than gmail in these respects: - the spam filter is not very effective. I have marked as spam a certain kind of spammy newsletters many times but they still come throught. - No calendar or contacts you can sync to your phone.
- alextingle 13y agoIn all fairness, every mail server discards mail from some senders. Your junk folder would explode if everything got through.
- janinge 13y agoHopefully they reject this mail, not simply discard it.
- mikeash 13y agoI'm not him, but I'm in the same situation: I currently use Gmail almost exclusively through IMAP, and I'd jump ship instantaneously if they turned it off. Why haven't I left already? Because it works fine and does everything I need. Why would I leave? The way you ask, you seem to think it's obvious, but I have no idea.
- XorNot 13y agoYeah if IMAP access goes on Gmail that would be it for me. I'd probably bounce back to hosting my own IMAP and using some utility to download my Gmail to it with Push or whatever protocol (HTTP?) that Gmail uses for push. It would be nice to have Sieve scripts again to filter my mail (Gmail's filtering leaves much to be desired).
- parennoob 13y ago"disabling IMAP would drive away huge numbers of users" -- Why? Ask 10 random people on the street in any large American city if they've ever heard of Gmail, and then if they have ever heard of IMAP. Fair chance the numbers will be something like 8 and (maybe) 1 on average. On the other hand, disabling IMAP will make sure that people have to look at the webapp, and tie into the Google ecosystem to read their mail. Looking forward five more years, you might even have to have a Google+ account to read your email.
- smileysteve 13y agoask people if they use Apple Maik (on iPhone too) and that drastically changes
- parennoob 13y agoPossibly there might be obvious technical hurdles I'm missing here, but why wouldn't Google just release a Gmail app for the iPhone?
- yscale 13y agoThey already did, but many people are satisfied with the Apple app and wouldn't appreciate being forced to switch to a different and not-meaningfully-better app.
- ucpete 13y agoYou got it. For me, I like getting my personal and work emails pushed to my iPhone in the same place (the Mail app). Though I have the Gmail app I don't use it.
- krrrh 13y agoI only keep the gmail app around for search, because the way gmail or iphone Mail.app implement IMAP search is not so good.
- 13y ago
- runn1ng 13y agoJust as they would never turn off Jabber support in Google Talk, right?
- waps 13y agoJabber support, in the sense of any client being able to connect to google talk, is perfectly active, hell I've got it open on my desktop right now. Federation, the ability for having your own jabber network contactable by google talk users and vice-versa, that was (partially) turned off, after a string of spam abuses.
- pyre 13y agoIIRC, using XMPP is going through the legacy "Google Talk" infrastructure which they want to axe in favor of Google+ Hangouts.
- cbsmith 13y agoThey actually temporarily broke Jabber support and then put it back on when people freaked out. I have noticed though that when I have hangouts conversations they don't seem to make it to my Jabber client...
- jadyoyster 13y agoThey are probably going to scrap Google Talk. Even now you can't participate in group chats on Hangouts over XMPP which is hugely annoying.
- wnevets 13y agowhich has drove away tons of users!
- sebastianavina 13y agoat least for google apps for bussiness, IMAP is a must.
- 27182818284 13y agoNo, not the same. Some of my least technical friends use imap without knowing they're using imap. Ask them about Jabber and their response would be "What??" which is why it got axed. Killing imap would cause 60-year-olds I know to complain at the same time that we would complain. You can't have that broad spectrum complaint. As much fuss as there was over whatever that RSS thing was, I signed up and used it for 6 months and then forgot it existed. In short: Let's put to bed the idea that Google is arbitrary, they're not. If they look at the numbers and see people not really using the product, they take it out back and put a hollow point through its head. (This is also why I'm bullish about Google Plus...they would have killed it otherwise.)
- joezydeco 13y agoAnd what about paying customers for hosted domains?
- coldtea 13y agoWhat about them? They're paying for the web mail service, not IMAP specifically. And their "terms of use" probably already cover that Google can do whatever it likes to the service.
- coldtea 13y agoHuge numbers of users who are not using the web interface/mobile app and are not seeing the ads. Those might as well not exist.
- AnthonyMouse 13y agoGoogle still gets to mine all the email they receive for data, and if they use the same Google account (or maybe IP address) for anything else, use it to target the ads there. It also brings network effects, since you don't have to convince the user to sign up for a new Google account for some other Google service if they already have one for gmail.
- coldtea 13y agoSure, it has some benefits. But if it can help push 60% of them to the Gmail app, if might be worth it to Google, even if it's to lose 40%. And I seriously doubt it will lose 40% even. It's not like people have many decent options for webmail + mobile mail, especially if you exclude paying for it.
- eli 13y agoI never really understood why anyone would want to use GMail but NOT use the web interface. I mean, it's cool that they offer it, but I don't recall it working especially well.
- JoshTriplett 13y agoAmong many other reasons: because the web interface is utterly incapable of sending and receiving unmangled patches, or more generally sending and receiving plain text without wrapping. Also: because people might want security, such as GPG.
- hobs 13y agoI wouldnt disagree with anything but the GPG, a dishearteningly small number of users use such features.
- eli 13y agoMoreover, if you regularly use GPG, the GMail web interface would be nearly unusable, no? So it seems you'd be much better off with nearly any other email provider.
- smileysteve 13y agothere are some browser extensions for that
- sp332 13y agoWhy are other email providers better than (Gmail - web interface)?
- wyager 13y agoMost GPG messages I get are signed, not encrypted, and I usually don't need to check the signature. So the web client is fine, but it's still good to have desktop client access.
- 13y ago
- cmelbye 13y agoAnd alienate millions of iPhone users that use Gmail but for one reason or another don't know about or haven't downloaded the Gmail app? Lol
- IBM 13y agoI think they'd definitely do it. Google has decided to flip the switch and monetize as much as possible lately, having to use the Gmail app would be in line with that.
- late2part 13y agoThe benefit of gmail to Google is the intelligence gained for targeted marketing by scanning your email. The worry that Google will disable IMAP misses this point. Google gains so much ancillary intelligence from scanning your email, that if they lose market share, their overall ability to target unrelated ads (e.g. during search).
- coldtea 13y agoNo need for knee-jerk "lols", it makes a lot of sense. For one, it will force most of them to download the Gmail app. Second, those iPhone users don't benefit Google -- Google needs to control the experience, the ads etc in order to make money off them.
- danieldk 13y agoSo, you have users who have years of e-mail in GMail, use GMail for free, use their @gmail.com everywhere, and probably don't know how to migrate their e-mail to another provider. Give them a choice: (1) go through a messy migration or (2) install another app. Most will probably do (2) without even thinking about it. And then you have to factor in that worldwide, over 80% of the smartphone users already have a platform where GMail is the default mail app: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24442013 http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24442013
- cmelbye 13y ago20% of a big pie is still pretty big.
- ihuman 13y agoThey already turned off Exchange access, but they grandfathered in any device that already added it. Unfortunately, now there is no way to get pushed gmail on phones like the iPhone without using the native application.
- irons 13y agoGoogle Sync was only disabled for free accounts. It's still available for paid accounts.
- userbinator 13y agoAs long as they keep POP3 (or maybe extend it), I'm happy.