Google to provide Virgin email services

[nj2006]

Google will provide email services to Virgin Media's broadband internet customers, it was announced today.
In what will be one of the largest-ever deployments of Google Partner Edition Apps, 10 virginmedia.com email addresses with 7GB of storage will be available for each Virgin Media broadband-equipped household.
The service will be piloted by the first 20,000 new customers who sign up for Virgin's broadband service from today, with a full launch to all new customers to follow "shortly after".
Existing customers will eventually be migrated to the new Google system and will be able to keep their existing Blueyonder, ntlworld or virgin.net email addresses, or select new virginmedia.com ones.
"As the UK’s largest home broadband provider, we’re committed to providing the very best online experience to our customers," said Alex Green, executive director of online at Virgin Media. "With email so important in everyday life, we’re delighted to be working with Google and launching a brand new, feature-rich and easy to use email service. We look forward to exploring future services with Google and continuing to deliver market-leading communications and entertainment to our customers."
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[PaphosAL]

Originally Posted by nj2006

...The service will be piloted by the first 20,000 new customers who sign up for Virgin's broadband service from today, with a full launch to all new customers to follow "shortly after".

So this should impact us in around two or three year's time, then?

[finefettler]

Might take an age to arrive, but at least Googlemail works!

Had no end of trouble with Virgin/NTLworld account...their idea of support is to recreate your address with different number on it each time!

[lincsat]

I was on the official trial for this some time ago (2-3 Years). It took them some time to implement it - still got no end of spam though.

[mike557]

Wow - Virgin is doing something sensible !!!

Been using googlemail for quite a while in particular using imap instead of pop3.

Imap means that all of my computers 'see' the same message folders. Sending from one computer means that the email appears in the sent folder on all the other computers.

The emails are all stored by google, so again accessing via web still shows all messages.

Reliability has been excellent.

As for spam, the bigger the user base becomes (on google), the greater the power to detect spam so I think this is a very sensible move.

Google also allow you to map your domain names to their email service.

Lets hope Google do not decide to charge for this service in the future......