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

[Menso Heus]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 11:39:00AM +0530, Shekhar Krishnan wrote:

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> 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.

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Shekhar, 

Security and privacy wise there's little difference between using POP3 or
webmail. In both cases it is stored on a server at which point it is 
vunerable to attacks. Most webmail solutions offer secure connections over
SSL, something only very little POP3 providers support. This means that 
in case of POP3, your username and password travel cleartext across the 
internet and in case of Webmail, they're encrypted.

Secondly, webmail is a lot more practical for the mobile user who cannot
afford a laptop to carry his mail around on. I use the webmail interface
my provider (XS4ALL, Netherlands) provides me with to access my mailbox a
lot when on holiday or not behind my own computer. My provider also gives
me (secure) POP3 access, which I never use. I don't want to have my mail in
1 place and need to go to that 1 place to do something with it. I want my
mail online, so I can access it from anywhere, anytime. 

This is one of the reasons why webmail is so popular. That, and the fact
that it is free, 'anonymous' and easy to use. I see little harm in it, as
long as people are aware of the privacy statements of the companies they 
have their webmail with.

regards,

Menso

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