Wednesday, December 01, 2004

GMail via POP3

In a move which almost totally defeats the purpose of GMail, you can now access your GMail account via encrypted POP3. Surely the purpose of GMail wasn't the 1Gb of mailbox space, it was the interesting and novel interface for reading your mail? Doesn't offering POP3 access, which means you don't have to use the novel interface, sort of dilute the point of the service? Presumably enough geeks have been banging on the table asking for direct access that they've finally just given in...

Interestingly, they're also offering authenticated SMTP as well. However, I haven't tested it yet to see whether it rewrites the headers to make it appear that the email was sent from GMail itself. If it does, that's going to make it a lot less useful than it initally appears, although somewhat less prone to misuse.

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