Digital Home Thoughts: Gmail Wants You To Defect

"Since launching back in 2004, Gmail has set the gold standard for webmail clients, offering a large amount of storage and a highly usable interface, free of charge. But for many people it has remained out of reach - no matter how appealing Gmail might be, they’ve racked up thousands of messages on other services that they simply can’t give up. Today, that changes. Gmail just released a new feature that allows users to import their Email archives and contacts into their Gmail accounts effortlessly."

You would think with all the press about Twitter, Facebook and other social applications, email should be put out to pasture. It seems as if Google still thinks that email is of enough interest to invest some development dollars and come up with a tool to help you migrate everything from other webmail providers. Sure, if you had some time and knew something about rocket science, you could do this yourself, but Gmail's new import option makes moving email addresses a snap. By lowering the barrier for migrating, Google is definately threatening other webmail providers because while email is not hot anymore, it does contain one very important and valuable thing for Google, personal information. The more Google can host services for you, the greater it knows about your life which to them is gold. I'm not a Gmail user though not for privacy reasons. I'm the kind of guy who likes owning his own data so that should a company decide to flip a switch, I'm not blocked for all my stuff. Regardless of who you use for webmail make sure you always backup your contacts and email regularly. If you've got all your eggs in one basket, like Google, for email, documents, spreadsheets, bookmarks and your first born you might find yourself cut off from your own life one day.