[Reader-list] Re: how to get pop3 access from gmail

[Shekhar Krishnan]

Dear All:

This debate about GMail, and the request for information on POP3 
access, makes me wonder if this is all not a bit OT. But while we're at 
it...

The excitement around GMail baffles me, particularly since any form of 
web mail, no matter how sexy its feature set, cannot compare to a POP3 
mailbox used with your favourite mail client (Eudora, Mozilla, OSX 
Mail, Outlook). The widespread use of webmail is further baffling, when 
maintaining a POP3 mailbox costs less than Rs 200 a year, and doesn't 
tie you to a commercial domain, infringe your privacy by storing your 
mails on someone else's server, bombard you with advertisements, and 
confine you to the limits of your browser. The most baffling thing is 
the tenacity of these commercial webmail services and the fierce 
loyalty of people to yahoo, hotmail, and now gmail. Is this unique to 
India, where there is widespread difficulty in obtaining domain name 
registrations (especially .in domains, because of NCST's kleptocracy), 
and sheer laziness on the part of most institutions and firms (and 
their IT service providers!) in alloting mailboxes to their employees.

I have recently had an incident in a school where I teach and help with 
IT, in which the faculty is insisting on retaining their yahoo and 
hotmail addresses because they are more "secure" than using the 
school's own registered domain, hosted on a dedicated server for which 
the school has paid an annual contract. This faculty argued with me 
that anyone in my IT company, which is contracted to host their web 
site and mail server could see their mails. Why is the same fear and 
anxiety absent with large anonymous corporate entities like Microsoft, 
Yahoo and Google? When I argued with this person that using their own 
domain (whether through POP3 or web access) is much more secure, I was 
given a lecture on the wonderful features of GMail and how I too could 
get invited to join. I wanted to vomit on this person. When did trust 
in distant corporations replace a relationship with your local service 
providers? When did free beer replace free speech? Nearly every list to 
which I am subscribed has seen people hankering after GMail invitations 
(even free software activists), without any serious discussion of this 
phenomenon.

Why can't we start cooperative mailbox movements, or hosting societies, 
which will get unique domains registered for people and give them out 
for free or at a nominal fee, considering the neglible costs of hosting 
mailboxes? Or for a start, why can't most IT service providers give 
people mailboxes when they register domains for them, rather than just 
giving them websites? Anything is better than the gospel of GMail...



S.K.
_____

Shekhar Krishnan
9, Supriya, 2nd Floor
Plot 709, Parsee Colony Road no.4
Dadar, Mumbai 400014
India

http://crit.org.in/members/shekhar