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

[Shekhar Krishnan]

Dear All:

I think my message, being a bit of a rant, was misleading. I am not 
objecting to the many virtues of webmail vs POP3 for different people 
who are mobile, checking from cafes, and so on. What annoys the hell 
out of me is commercialised, free mail services like GMail, Yahoo, 
Hotmail, and Rediffmail, and the way in which many otherwise 
straight-talking people suddenly have become brand ambassadors for 
these companies, or normally sane colleagues have begun arguing with me 
about how mailboxes on their own institutional domains are somehow less 
secure than mailboxes hosted from Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Use 
webmail, POP3, IMAP, that's your freedom of choice -- the relative 
convenience and security of any of these depends on your computing 
environment. Nor am I objecting to the open or closed, free or 
proprietary nature of the browser or mail client anyone uses to check 
mail. Both the browser and client I use, as well as the operating 
system I prefer, are semi-free, mostly proprietary products, and it 
will be years before I fully switch to a FLOSS desktop and application 
suite, if ever. I suspect that this is the same for many of us who keep 
company with the movement, and make money from providing free and open 
source solutions. I don't like being ideological about FLOSS. My point 
was a rather narrow one about commercial webmail being turned into a 
lifestyle emblem, though my point about free beer replacing free speech 
points to a broader set of issues. What is at stake in the GMail 
Ideology is the way in which we put trust in distant corporations 
rather than local service providers, in free beer rather than free 
speech. Is it because we often have to pay money and give time to 
support the latter?

But like I said in my initial message, perhaps this is all a bit OT...

Best


S.K.
_____

Shekhar Krishnan
Srishti School of Art Design & Technology
Dodballapur Road
Yelahanka, Bangalore 560064
India

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