Will Google archive your email?

Will these guys stop at nothing?  Google's acquisition of Postini for $625 million sets it up to provide outsourced email and archiving services for large corporations.  Things that make you go hmm….

If you read this story, you'll see that Google was pretty open about the fact that this acquisiton is a major step in moving gmail to the desktops of enterprises.  Enterprises need archiving for their email, and this gives them that.

So how about it? Would your company consider moving their email to gmail?  It's got about as nice of an interface as a web app could have, I guess.  You don't have to worry about managing Exchange, backing it up, archiving it, etc.  You just have to read and respond to email.

I travel a lot and do a lot of responding when I'm not connected, so I'd have a hard time going completely to gmail.  I wonder what their answer is to that need? (I'm sure they'll think of something.)

Those guys at Google have sure done a lot to change the world.  I wonder what the folks in Redmond are thinking today. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data

4 comments
  • I know this because it’s one of the default-included options on my iPhone (which reads email on my own servers at home by way of IMAP with SSL and writes with with SASL authenticated and SASL enciphered SMTP, thanks much). So, they already do Disconnected.

    I… only use one of several gmail accounts for contexts in which I intend to remain mostly anonymous. ("Mostly" in that it’s not hard to pick out my writing if you know me, but unless it’s got my PGP signature on it, you can’t prove it was really me.) I think that a potential employer’s replacing Exchange or Notes with gmail (and its related calendaring and office bits) would be a definite pro. It’d mean that when I told them I really wanted them to give me a MacBook Pro for the work laptop rather than whatever Windows garbage they usually dished out, they might say yes.

  • Right, but other than the iPhone and POP, how do you do offline email with gmail? Does it support imap? If it’s imap, what client do you use? Outlook stinks with imap; I used it. All the good features of Outlook are for Exchange.

  • Glad to hear there’s something better than Outlook for non-Exchange users, but that’s not hard. 8)

    I just don’t see how gmail could appeal to Enterprise users until they get IMAP up. Although it allows for offline access, the problem with POP is the lack of folders. I remember having to use a POP client. I can’t imagine going back to that.