
Stuck On Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Or AOL? Gmail Just Made It Incredibly Easy To Switch - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/13/stuck-on-hotmail-gmail-just-made-it-incredibly-easy-to-switch/
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mediaman
The feature is powered by TrueSwitch, a product that as its name implies makes
it easy to switch from one provider to another.

More abstractly, I think business models which are predicated on reducing
switching costs of customers in a given industry are interesting, because they
lower the pain that another company is trying to maximize, and therefore is
probably valuable to both the end-user and competitors in the industry (either
of which may be willing to pay).

Another example I can think of is CellTrade, where users can get out of their
cell phone contracts by trading them.

Anyone have other examples of this sort of business model?

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JacobAldridge
During the current recession I've heard ads from various Financial Services
firms in my city making it clear that their staff will do all of the paperwork
in switching your super (401k) or other investments to them, at no cost.

Most Health Insurance countries here in Australia offer the same service, and
then meta-provider iSelect also make it simple to compare and recommend where
you switch to.

Regarding business model, it's basically a question of loyalty. If we pay you
or one of our staff to help you switch, we want the pay-off to be revenue from
you for a long period of time. That's fine if combined with decent client
service or a loyalty program, but if you're just as crappy, and your industry
starts making switching easier, it will cost you in the long run. Not the
easiest way to get clients and make money.

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8-bit_Blaster
FYI, this feature is only visible in the "Standard" AJAX version of Gmail...
The HTML version has no option for importing...

It's too bad this feature does not work on importing from one Gmail account to
another Gmail account. A few years ago I [accidently] got onto some e-mail
spammers list and have been getting spam mails ever since!

I'd love to be able to migrate all my old Gmail e-mails to a new account
(including my RSS feeds and stars from Google Reader). Maybe someday?

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petercooper
I've been trying to get my wife to switch from Hotmail to Gmail for years and
I was excited by this development, but.. it doesn't help with the e-mail
forwarding problem, alas :( There are some workarounds but they either involve
money or third parties.

Of course, Microsoft is smart enough to realize that if they made forwarding
available for free, there'd be a major exodus ;-)

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johnnybgoode
Hotmail now has free POP3 so you can let Gmail download new email from your
wife's Hotmail account. Shh, don't tell anyone!

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ZeroGravitas
I've been following this for a while and was under the impression that the
POP3 access was a paid feature. Got a link to the free-ness?

nevermind:

[http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2009/03/13/pop3-technol...](http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2009/03/13/pop3-technology-
has-now-rolled-out-to-hotmail-customers-worldwide.aspx)

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tsally
I'm surprised that the other email providers have allowed the switch to be
technically possible. Oversight by them, or intentional?

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asmosoinio
How could you possibly prevent this? If the user can access the emails at
provider X, so can a webapp that has the username and the password.

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gamache
Preventing it entirely would be difficult, but given a list of IPs belonging
to Google and TrueSwitch, it would not be very hard to put some serious brakes
on the feature. Even reverse DNS could mostly work.

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smokinn
Not necessarily. If they did do something like that it would be a pain to
TrueSwitch but hardly the end of the line. All they'd have to do is embed a
hidden a hidden iframe and parse with javascript. Then the webmail provider
would have to implement iframe busting, then TrueSwitch would switch to an
ajax request that parses the source and it would essentially turn into a
massive arms race that I don't see the webmail provider winning.

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patio11
So _that_ is why Mom switched to Gmail today. Thanks, I had been wondering!

