Another Reason Why Gmail Rules
According to an article posted on TechCrunch, Gmail is now able to receive email from ANY email account into the Gmail system. Imagine your subscribers are getting email at Yahoo, MSN, iWon, or their work or ISP email account. Now with Google upping the ante, they can consolidate mail from all of those accounts into one place: The Gmail Inbox.
It remains to be seen how this will affect deliverability and open rates. It certainly does have its upsides and downsides. It can lower open and click-through rates since their inbox will have a lot more messages coming from various avenues. On the other hand it can lighten the load on email marketers. It will make it simpler to send html emails to the correct ISPs. And it will certainly be a lot easier to manage one ISP rather than hundreds.
But Gmail is still relatively new to the email game. It has yet to gain the resounding popularity that MSN, AOL or Yahoo has. And one question remains to be seen: will the business user or your mom switch over to using it? (Please note: My mom has had the same AOL email address since ’97. She’s never going to change it, no matter how much spam she gets. Maybe that’s why I’m so stubborn. Anyways…)
Now this may not have a significant impact on longterm users such as my mom, but newbies including students and early techies may be more willing to adopt the new feature Gmail is offering.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the name of this exciting little facet: “Mail Fetcher”. It allows users to access non-Gmail email accounts from within the Gmail GUI. All you have to do is calibrate your POP settings, and presto!
Posted by MindComet on Dec. 13, 2006