Comments on: Gmail offers IMAP

By: Jon Stahl

Jon Stahl — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 20:18:44 +0000

Mike@2: I agree wholeheartedly. It would be nice to see better PKI support baked into the servers, because it is a bit too hard to get it going on the client-end for nontechnical users.

By: Jon Stahl

Jon Stahl — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 20:17:40 +0000

Dave@3:
We’re certainly going to think more seriously about it. We’ve recommended them (among other options, including EE) in the past, and this certainly removes the one major technical sticking point.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 20:11:54 +0000

Hi Jon,

So does this mean that you're going to start recommending this to ONE/NW small clients? We use Electric Embers and really like them, BTW.

By: MikeC01824

MikeC01824 — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:05:38 +0000

With public key encryption, you don't have to choose between doing it yourself and trusting someone. Just as Plone can encrypt passwords so that even the webmaster can't get at them, email can be encrypted so the mail host can access it.

I don't understand why more hosts don't offer public key encryption. Hushmail is one of the few I know of, and the cost is $2-$3 per user per month, which can be prohibitive. But mostly, email is usually bundled with web hosting, and I don't know of any web hosts that provide encrypted email.

At a time when we know telcos are snooping email without a warrant, and members of peace groups (code Pink) get stopped at the border, secure email should be a no-brainer.

By: Duncan Booth

Duncan Booth — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:51:11 +0000

It only seems to be available on some Gmail accounts: I still get the old ‘Forwarding and POP’ configuration screen, no mention of IMAP yet.

Not that it surprises me, a lot of Google’s ‘new features’ seem to dribble out slowly: tabbed homepages was on google.com for ages before it appeared on google.co.uk and even then it appeared and disappeared several times before it became permanent. Also the ‘embed slideshow’ option in Picasa is still only available if your language setting is ‘English (US)’, not ‘English (UK)’.