We've always been able to give our email as @gmail.com (I have), but any email we send comes from @googlemail.com, which is obviously always a headache for support tickets and such.
I'm glad they've finally got this dispute sorted out.
"Since "gmail" is 50% fewer characters than "googlemail," we estimate this name change will save approximately 60 million keystrokes a day. At about 217 microjoules per keystroke, that's about the energy of 20 bonbons saved every day!"
But seriously, glad this trademark dispute finally got sorted out.
- All gmail.com and googlemail.com addresses are (and have always been) interchange-able (go on, try it out)
- The only noticeable impacts this will have is what gets displayed in the Gmail logo on the top of the window, and what gets displayed as the email address in your Gtalk profile popup
- I've noticed that regardless of where (geographically) I log in from, if the system locale is set to en_GB, it redirects to a Google Mail page.
Germany isn't a part of the UK, so things will work exactly as before. There's an existing mail service in Germany called G-mail, and the agreement (after a court case in 2007) is that the owner of that trademark can use it in Germany, Monaco, Norway and Switzerland, but nowhere else.
The English trademark was owned by someone else, and wasn't in active use, afaict.
Update: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/03/gmail-uk/ says Google reached a settlement after "engaging in legal proceedings at the trademark office" (read: pointing out that it wasn't in use, in order to get it revoked).
Yes, if you signed up from the UK, GMail used to display name@googlemail.com instead of name@gmail.com. Both versions worked though, so if someone sent you an email to yourname@gmail.com you still received it, it was just an UI thing really.
I'm not sure how whether they used IP geolocation or the country you specified when you signed up to decide if you're in the UK or not.
What happens when someone has a name on a googlemail account, and that name was already taken in the gmail beta on the original gmail rollout in the US?
I'd be really interested if someone from Google could address this.
At the risk of losing even more karma, I took a look at the google help, and someone in the UK has been occasionally using my email (his full name - same as mine) instead of his proper email address (shortened version of name).
Google actually are addressing this by annotating emails to you with (yes, this is you), when a non-primary email address for your account is used.
Posterous, for example, doesn't have an account verification email process. Outgoing gmail is sent from @googlemail.com so that's the email address you have to sign in with to the posterous site, and not '@gmail.com' which confused the hell out of me for a little while.
> Has always worked for inbound mail, not outgoing.
Unless you signed up for the Gmail beta before the trademark arose, in which case @gmail.com works in both directions. (Though your IMAP folders are still under [Google Mail] not [Gmail], just to confuse the issue further - I wonder if that will switch too?).
I'm glad they've finally got this dispute sorted out.