Google Disabling Exchange Sync for Free Accounts
support.google.com
support.google.com
I should have noted that they hadn't been on the internet in the 90's when Microsoft did the same with Hotmail, and others.
Ultimately, nothing is free.
Still,I can't help but wonder if ads in emails didn't generate enough cash so now it's tiem to charge.
Companies, on the other hand, typically exist to make money. This is nothing new... However, unlike traditional companies, Google is more sensitive to its users needs. After all: "Let the consumers decide whether we are going in the right direction" Unfortunately, the majority of consumers are lazy; not caring and simply consuming. A company needs only to change a service ever so slightly in order to not affect a large majority. Small change - After change - After change until a company has fully 'maxed' the potential profit.
If you didn't login every 90 days your free account would disappear. This was after Hotmail itself was built up to hundreds of millions of users with only free users.
At this time they were the main web email provider as well as Yahoo.
Guess Google has hit saturation point and are now trying to leveridge some services as a package instead of just gaining income from ad's.
Still at least getting some notice, albiet timed rather interestingly right before the holiday season and also after the canges to there app accounts.
So in effect this realy will only effect the less-techy minded people out there with non android phones.
Sounds like that's what's happening here too.
Introducing new services that are not available to the free-riders seems to me to be a much more friendly thing to do than to take away features that were previously on offer. The latter strategy will make people wary.
My guess would be somewhere in the vicinity of $5-$10/month.. for all ads on all web pages you look at everywhere.
Though I could be off by an order of magnitude, for some people.
Charging much more would mean targeting a completely different market segment with a fraction of the size of Google's current search and email users.
It's a strategy to consider, given the "desirability" of GMail users vs Yahoo users[1], but behavior of most people is highly likely to change when going from free to not free.
1. http://blog.opower.com/2012/06/the-triumph-of-gmail-how-yaho...
Only if you use the GMail web UI or official Google clients that can show you ads. Once they get people off native clients and onto either Android or at least official clients on other platforms they can start ramping up their mobile advertising to make-up for the loss of web advertising. They've been sly about it so far but they have to pull the trigger eventually. Like you said nothing is free. They may have waited a bit too long to pull the trigger. Now a lot of Google service users are under the false impression they can get a free ride. They may have started using Google services exactly because they looked like a no-trade off free ride. Those days are coming to an end now. It's going to be a very interesting transitional period over the next 12-18 months.
I've been using Exchange exclusively instead of IMAP for Calendar and Mail "Push" since I switched to iPhone....
This is absolutely outrageous.
The badge on the app reflects the unread count of every account that is active in the app, but even when you open it, there's utterly no indication of which inbox has unread email. I've just three accounts added to their app, and its already a hunting game finding where that mysterious (1) is coming.
Most of the interface feels weird too. You can't slide to archive an email in the new version, as it opens the siding panel. The behaviour is still hidden away though, tap and hold and slide tricks the old gesture into working again. Ticking and tapping for every interaction feels clunky.
It's not a replacement for proper psush email in Apple's Mail.app. I'd host my own push email, but I've struggled finding anything that is lightweight and supports IMAPs IDLE command (allowing for push email).
I could get over the interface oddities as that's mostly a matter of aesthetics, but it's nowhere near as fast as Mail.app to actually open your new email, and that's the killer for me.
The load time led me to delete the app. But I can't get mad about the loss of push to mail.app. TANSTAAFL.
That would totally suck! If it's locked down by account, I guess that's OK since existing accounts would be grandfathered.
So Google can surely change their EAS implementation to not register new clients.
I can't pretend to know anything about IMAP or Exchange, but one would assume that push uses less than polling the email server every 5-15 minutes.
I use an Android phone and I get an email notification via text messages.
Works well in India, not so much in USA (due to the 140 char limit in Twilio, message concatenation is not allowed)
Just to put this out there, K-9 is the fork of the andriod mail client you really want to be using, it does IDLE.
Personally, I'm a bit of a hypocrite, because I use my gmail as my main account, despite being far more comfortable with a service I can pay for (in the past, that was MobileMe) and know I can get customer service on the phone. Honestly, once Apple can show they've got their act together for more than a few years I'll probably switch...
I do.
>They've already changed people's email addresses as least twice, which is beyond uncool (mac.com -> me.com -> icloud.com)
And they all still work.
>Unlike your username to their services, your email address is tied into all sorts of other third-party services (not to mention address books) and is incredibly painful to update.
Since the aliases still work, as mentioned above, this is not an issue at all. Personally I prefer to use the me.com domain as it's short. It still works and the services that I use with me still work, I continue to get email from them. The same is true with .mac addresses.
This is making my move to Android more and more inevitable, actually. However, for a horrendous reason.
Seems to me that this is _exactly_ the reason google is doing this - to push you over to Android.
You're not paying for gmail/apps, so you're the product, and the product is now being ported to Android. It's really that simple.
It's annoying, but calling it "outrageous" is just silly. How much do you pay them and what did they promise you for your money?
I have got used to this great free stuff too, but I don't believe I deserve unlimited free stuff, and I won't get all huffy when they take it away.
And they don't exactly refrain from mining my personal data once I pay for their service with cash. So, it is little short of outrageous.
Anyway, my major concern is that somehow my data stored with 'enterprise-grade' paid service still gets mined and resold to 3rd-parties. I'm being forced to pay while still it's me that's being the product. Privacy is a hefty enough price to pay for a personal email.
FYI that's not how google makes money.
iPhone says I have to sync using the X Y or Z protocol. android can connect to Exchange and also lets me write a custom sync app. I can download an app that hooks whatever-the-hell directly into my contact list (or other android system bits). As long as a little bit of java is written for it, any and every API can be turned into a 1st class citizen.
Its the same for sharing. I click the share button on android and I get a list of all the applications that can take my android.content.Intent.ACTION_SEND intent. On iPhone, I can pick any service I want as long as it's twitter.
What I'm taking issue with is the underlying inertia that causes it to be in a self-reinforcing loop as most widely supported protocol for mobile. When I got my iPhone I had to pick between a handful of sync protocols, EAS being one of them. My Android devices let me download apps that add new sync providers.
I don't so much as care about the day to day machination of google and microsoft as the ability for our tech to cope with whatever they want to throw at us. In this case google happens to be behind both gmail and android, but my point still stands that the android platform is a better suited to dealing with generic external changes w/r/t features that need to hook into the built in functionality of the device. I'm not saying I think it is better overall (I do have an iPhone), I just think this is one place where the architecture of that system is strong and wish that other mobiles took a similar foward-thinking design. If they did, it might not matter at all that google dropped X for Y, just a slight inconvenience while you install the requisite adapter to maintain the same level of integration.
Also, I'm doubtful that this affects the majority of users: on both major mobile platforms (Android and iOS), Google has a push solution with nearly identical functionality to Exchange.
2. Iterate on user feedback, often for years
3. Get tonnes of folks hooked
4. Begin charging
Google are doing this to stop third parties from offering Gmail integration without paying some kind of Google Tax (e.g. other platforms, apps, web-sites, etc).
IMAP + IDLE, CalDAV, CardDAV?
Whether they are a 1:1 feature replacement is another thing, but they are options.
This entire area has been so controlled by Exchange Server for so long that there really aren't many true alternatives. The WebDAV based ones are messy at best.
When will people learn...
All I can see are Zimbra, some other half-finished Exchange replacements or PHP monstrosities, or an unmaintained mod_caldav for Apache.
All I want is another piece of the Courier suite that integrates with my existing infrastructure, and uses the same modular authentication, TLS certificates etc.
I don't want to maintain lots of different stacks in lots of different languages each with their own peculiar auth schemes.
Perhaps I should just move the whole damn setup to Zimbra, but at that point it might as well just be Exchange.
Edit: Everyones favorite company even has some calendar server that runs on linux, i am told: https://trac.calendarserver.org/ Did you try that?
I don't think they made a conscious decision to suck in a specific way to push their own product.
But iCloud is simply the third incarnation of a line of online services. Of course it's better than before, because they've had a lot of time to improve it.
>I don't think they made a conscious decision to suck in a specific way to push their own product.
I suppose so.
This kindof stings.
And except for Google Drive, most of the stuff they're now charging for is clearly aimed at large businesses, with little consideration for smaller organizations or individuals.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-20/google-profit-tops-...
Notably they stopped projects that had limited adoption.
Incidentally this was also when 20% time fell through and Google Plus really started to be pushed as the centre-piece connecting all other projects.
No, they hate people using gmail as a free enterprise-quality backend for some other mail system. The message seems pretty clear to me: if you want to use gmail, use gmail (with an official gmail client and an @gmail address) or pay up. If you want to use some service other than gmail for your email, use their backend too.
You must be joking.
Exchange is pretty horrible to administer.
Google also does email search better than anything on Exchange, and the web ui is better.
yes, Exchange does have a lot more configurability which is needed in large enterprises.
but no, it is not "good" as far as the users were concerned - I had usability complaints very often, of the kind that my gmail users now don't have. Gmail is better now, and perhaps Exchange is too - but I have the impression that the problems people had with it are deeper than a UI revision.
I also don't understand what usability complaints users would have, since for the most part, they access it through a client such as Outlook. Are you talking about the web app? If so, then it's been updated quite a bit since then. There's still a preview site available here http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/try-more-products which has a trial of the hosted version. Is it the connectivity or some feature?
Disappearing & reappearing emails through outlook. (And occasionally disappearing and not reappearing; Had something to do with ActiveSync and outlook open at the same time, but I never quite managed to exactly characterize it). Despite exchange's hyper configurability, those disappearing and mostly reappearing messages did not have anything in their logs different than anything else.
Also, search was abysmal.
Larger mailboxen (3-4 GB at the time) caused huge slowdown, and people were moving stuff to local (though, not backed up!) archives sorted by quarter, so that the recent year or so would perform reasonably.
> But you're comparing a service in 2012 to one in 2006.
I'm comparing Exchange at 2006 (I think it was Exchange 2005? but it might have been Exchange 2003; It was the latest available at the time) to Gmail at the time. Everyone preferred gmail to outlook web access, and most preferred it to Outlook as well (for tags, search and predictable behavior).
I'm sure Exchange has improved since, but so has gmail. What can exchange 2013 (or exchange 2010, which is the recent battle-tested version, unlike 2013) do that that Exchange 2005 couldn't?
Compared to utter shit like Army Knowledge Online, sure, it's great.
google mail for apps has still a long way to go to be real enterprise quality. but then again, it's simplicity to maintain and relatively low cost IS much more attractive than maintaining your own enterprise system.
Gee thanks what I always wanted, my mailbox to take half the day to open
Also I'm pretty damn glad I have an Android phone.
Google does some pretty amazing things but if they keep cutting services with these sorts of announcements we will loose faith.
When my phone finally dies, and I get another one, I won't be able to have the same functionality I had today?
How come the future has so many less features...
This is a joke, right?
Perhaps Amazon can introduce something to fill this gap ?
iOS - CardDav for contacts (2 way sync) - Exchange for email and calendar
Android - default setup, I added my gmail at setup - email, contacts, tasks, calendar... all work out of the box once you have added your gmail account.
Thunderbird (PC) - email, contacts, calendar
(My reading of that is that this effects gmail users as well.)
On the free accounts, I pretty much felt like I was on my own as far as Google is concerned, which I suppose is fair enough.
I'm just wondering if you feel like a paying customer? If not, does the service itself make up for it?
[0] http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4208?viewlocale=en_US
[1] http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=...
Perhaps the board feel that they aren't growing or earning fast enough to keep their shareholders happy. Maybe Google have some fears about the future of online advertising and want to diversify their sources of revenue. It could be that the service's free users are costing too much and are an easy way to save money. Either way, it's very unlikely to be a simple matter of avarice. Companies act greedily, but usually for sound (or at least consistent) reasons.
One possible benefit I haven't seen anyone else mention: they might finally improve their miserable customer support. That's easier to do when the product you're supporting is bringing in money directly.
No, it only affects free accounts, not business accounts.
Am I reading it correctly that only new setups will be disallowed while existing devices will continue to work as-is?
I only see cynicism in the way the companies are working: be friendly and open source until you gain a good market position, then do chess moves.
I also remember paying 0.05 in adwords... and getting new customers.
I was under the impression that GMail uses their own version of IMAP? The built in iOS mail client does not provide push e-mail via IMAP but instead uses P-IMAP for push e-mail via iCloud.
The one that used to go to https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync/thankyou.html .
I would expect this to keep working. According to the original article, this affects mobile devices using the free Google accounts.
Yahoo could actually try to take on Google Apps. The most choice the better.