Thursday, April 07, 2005

GMail Not Fixed Yet


On the web, we want to be in control. In particular we want to choose the email address we are using. Why are some free email providers trying to force us to use emails at their own domain. As Ashutosh Kadakia noted in his blob:

It’s seemingly unprofessional to use free email accounts and furthermore it may confuse people that email me. If they send a message to me@askthefool.com and get a reply a few days later from askthefool@gmail.com they may not put the two together.

His solution is to access his GMail account through POP3 and send emails with his address of choice through his own SMTP server. Of course, that solution has limitations: what happens if he wants to access his email from another machine? He will be able to access his email just fine through the GMail web interface, but not to send emails from his address. Hopefully GMail will recognize that there is a need for this feature and offer it soon. I would even be willing to pay the $20/year Yahoo! is asking for this!

The icon used in this post has been create by multivitamin