Migration of Email to Google: What's the downside?

[meld51]

OK I've had the hype about this reconfiguration of the VM email service.

So, who can tell me about the downsides?

I'm particularly thinking of Google data mining, security, etc...

[Peter_]

I have no issues and I am a @blueyonder .co.uk account user so have been migrated for months.

The Spam filter is very good and in my account captures just the spam.

We receive no advertising emails via Google.

Each account has over 7000Mb of storage unlike the previous storage of 30Mb.

Off course if you are not happy with this you can always purchase your own domain and have a personal email address or take http://www.gmx.com/ email address, I have one of these as a backup plus 2 standard Googlemail accounts.

[hansi]

I use WLM for my everyday email but use Virgin Webmail when away. How can I stop the thousands of spam messages going into my Virgin email spa folder. I don't get this in WLM as I also use Mailwasher to filter out spam but it is a pain having to log in the Virgin site every so often and deleting the spam

[BenMcr]

If there e-mails in the webmail SPAM folder they are automatically deleted after 30 days.

As you have 7Gb of webmail space they won't stop you receiving e-mail

[KenK]

Originally Posted by meld51

OK I've had the hype about this reconfiguration of the VM email service.

So, who can tell me about the downsides?

I'm particularly thinking of Google data mining, security, etc...

Keep checking on what is going straight to the Spam folder on Webmail - the filters are good but they're not perfect, and some genuine emails can end up in there.

The default is that they'll keep all of your non-spam emails forever, unless you delete them from Webmail - deleting from a POP client doesn't count. There's an option to change that.

Data mining, security, etc. are always concerns, that's why I don't like using Webmail and having all emails and other data stored long-term "somewhere" on the internet. I have no reason to suspect gmail at the moment, but they can always change their own rules without asking - there are plenty of examples, including Google.

[BenMcr]

Originally Posted by KenK

Data mining, security, etc. are always concerns, that's why I don't like using Webmail and having all emails and other data stored long-term "somewhere" on the internet. I have no reason to suspect gmail at the moment, but they can always change their own rules without asking - there are plenty of examples, including Google.

Virgin Media Mail uses Google Apps which although the same technology as Google use for Gmail is not the same thing at all. There is no 'data mining' going on

Your use of the service is covered by the Virgin Media privacy policy which can be found at www.virginmedia.com/legal

[KenK]

Originally Posted by BenMcr

Virgin Media Mail uses Google Apps which although the same technology as Google use for Gmail is not the same thing at all. There is no 'data mining' going on

OK, I'll rephrase it: "I have no reason to suspect Virgin Media Mail at the moment, but they can always change their own rules". Facebook and Google Buzz are just the latest examples of such things happening.

[Peter_]

Originally Posted by KenK

OK, I'll rephrase it: "I have no reason to suspect Virgin Media Mail at the moment, but they can always change their own rules". Facebook and Google Buzz are just the latest examples of such things happening.

See post 2 with my link to Gmx mail I also have an account there and it is free and not tied to your ISP.

[KenK]

Originally Posted by Masque

See post 2 with my link to Gmx mail I also have an account there and it is free and not tied to your ISP.

Yes, I know other email services are available. Since I'm paying for this one as part of my ISP contract, I feel entitled to comment on it; and I would apply my last comment to any provider.

[Peter_]

Originally Posted by KenK

Yes, I know other email services are available. Since I'm paying for this one as part of my ISP contract, I feel entitled to comment on it; and I would apply my last comment to any provider.

It is only classed as a free service addon and if you move providers it does close as it is attached to your account so that is reason enough to have another email address up your sleeve.

[mdwh2]

One problem is that it's not backwards compatible when you're using multiple clients. There's the new "recent" mode, which has it's advantages. But I dislike that GMail (and now VM) don't preserve the correct standard POP behaviour, in that when an email client tells the server to delete an email after downloading, it ignores it, and doesn't delete it!

I know there's the email setting to delete emails after accessing via POP, but that's a server side setting that applies to all clients, so you can no longer set it on a per-machine basis. My old way of working was that I'd download everything and delete from server on my main machine, but I sometimes would check the messages on the server via laptop or phone, which would be instructed to leave emails on the server after downloading. Although in some ways recent mode has advantages, the point is there seems no reason to change the old behaviour, and disobey the client command to delete an email.

A related downside is that some might have privacy concerns about their entire email history being stored on a server. The only way round this is to periodically log in and manually delete yourself.

GMail is generally good, but forcing a non-backwards-compatible change on people with hardly any notice (I didn't know at all until I wondered why my emails weren't downloading correctly - now I've had to spend an evening sorting it out; I might have seen their warning message if it didn't get lost in all the spam they send us...) is not so good. Seems typical of VM - take a good solution, but still arse it up in their own implementation. Plus there's the point that GMail is free for anyone anyway, so they can hardly tout it as an advantage - anyone who preferred GMail already had the choice to use it. So perhaps the flipside to this question is: what's the upside?

[Itshim]

Have to keep repairing forward pop3 to get them to Windows mail