Once you own a domain can you also have an email @ that domain or do you need website hosting?

[mirhagk]

Why would you not just create a mail server that simply forwards everything to gmail.

You get gmail's UI and spam filter, without paying for the business account.

You also could just hook up outlook or thuderbird or something to your mail server, any web based mail server that isn't (new) hotmail or gmail is useless anyways lol.

[Tony]

mirhagk @ Mon Dec 17, 2012 10:08 pm wrote:

Why would you not just create a mail server that simply forwards everything to gmail.

Dan @ Mon Dec 17, 2012 3:41 pm wrote:

I can't recommended trying to run your own e-mail server. It is possible and not that hard to setup but controlling spam and ensuring you have 100% uptime (and no messages are lost) can be a massive pain in the ass.

And then you get all kinds of issues if you actually wanted to reply to any of the messages that you receive...

[mirhagk]

you don't even need to host your own email server if you can find something with free space. You can quite easily send and recieve messages from another mailbox, and gmail makes it even easier to do so.

[BigBear]

Sounds like Gmail should be open source

[Tony]

BigBear @ Tue Dec 18, 2012 4:43 pm wrote:

Sounds like Gmail should be open source

why?

[mirhagk]

Google doesn't like to make things open source, they like to make a project open source and then close it off and make custom changes before they release it (cough cough chromium)

[BigBear]

Tony @ Tue Dec 18, 2012 4:57 pm wrote:

BigBear @ Tue Dec 18, 2012 4:43 pm wrote:

Sounds like Gmail should be open source

why?

So then anyone can use it for free

[mirhagk]

I think Google provides enough services for free lol. You need to realize that companies do need to make money, they can't just do all their work for free.

[Tony]

BigBear @ Tue Dec 18, 2012 8:51 pm wrote:

So then anyone can use it for free

Anyone already can use Gmail for free... at gmail.com. What you might have meant though is "anyone can use it to offer their own commercial services... at no expense" (such as other email service providers). Which seems like a dubious proposition.

I think that gmail doesn't charge enough. Google is giving away a lot of services -- you should ask how those services are financed. After all, Google has been on a spree of shutting down services/features that don't foot their own bill. In just over a year, Google has shut down about 60 services/features http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/more-spring-cleaning.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/winter-cleaning.html

[mirhagk]

Google is this amazing company that somehow doesn't charge it's users anything, yet makes money. I fully support them in everything they do, because they go off the simple concept that advertisers are willing to pay for targeted ads. Google ads are damn near amazing, which is why they can offer so much for free.

It does suck when they invent awesome services/features and noone uses them so they need to be shut down, but I can't expect them to stay open, and I'm glad for everything they do offer.

I think the concept of selling services to businesses while giving it free to consumers is a great plan, something that both microsoft and google do to some extent (google definetly does it much more, microsoft just does it for a few things), and it seems to work out decently.

So in sum, no, Google should not offer their server code to others so others can charge, it's awesome that they offer the service to consumers for free (as gmail already does), but in order to do so they need to make money.

[BigBear]

Tony @ Wed Dec 19, 2012 12:37 am wrote:

BigBear @ Tue Dec 18, 2012 8:51 pm wrote:

So then anyone can use it for free

Anyone already can use Gmail for free... at gmail.com. What you might have meant though is "anyone can use it to offer their own commercial services... at no expense" (such as other email service providers). Which seems like a dubious proposition.

I think that gmail doesn't charge enough. Google is giving away a lot of services -- you should ask how those services are financed. After all, Google has been on a spree of shutting down services/features that don't foot their own bill. In just over a year, Google has shut down about 60 services/features http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/more-spring-cleaning.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/winter-cleaning.html

Google makes their money mostly from advertising and even the mobile revenue alone is going to be significant soon.

With another free Gmail for non @gmail.com domain email they get another place to display their ads.

Most of the spring cleaning is removing this that don't make sense anymore or merging things together.

Google still needs to update a lot of its services.

[Tony]

BigBear @ Wed Dec 19, 2012 6:19 pm wrote:

With another free Gmail for non @gmail.com domain email they get another place to display their ads.

If the project was open sourced, don't you think that those ads will very quickly be replaced by ads from... whoever the new host will be?

[Dan]

BigBear @ 19th December 2012, 6:19 pm wrote:

With another free Gmail for non @gmail.com domain email they get another place to display their ads.

This is how the free Google Apps worked (which included e-mail that was basically the same as gmail for your domain). I guess it was not making enough or it was being abused.

It's a shame that there are not cheaper options for individuals that just need one or two accounts. I would consider paying $10/year for Google apps but $50/year seems a bit much when I am the only person using it on my domain. I would however pay much more for the same service if I had some kind of insurance that my e-mail was private, they kept minimal logs and notified me when there was a request for my information by some third party.

[Tony]

though since Google Apps comes in only two flavours ? for business and for education, the pricing scheme seems much more reasonable.