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Information Technology

Gmail forced to change name

By Derek Sooman, TechSpot.com
Published: October 19, 2005, 5:04 PM EST
New UK users of Gmail will notice something interesting - a name change for the service. Following a trademark dispute, Google's mail service will be called... Google Mail.

London-based Independent International Investment Research says it started using the Gmail name for a web-mail application two years before Google.
Current UK users of Google's service will be unaffected, but a separate trademark dispute forced Google to drop the Gmail name in Germany in May.

There have been talks between the two companies to try and come up with some kind of a settlement; however these talks fell apart after they failed to agree a financial settlement.

From Wednesday morning, new users in the UK signing up with the Google service will be given an e-mail address that ends with "@googlemail.com".

German users with this address report that e-mail sent to their username but ending with "@gmail.com" instead of "@googlemail.com" will still arrive at its destination.

User Comments (3)

Post a comment
nimo333
on October 20, 2005
10:15 AM
Come on, it's just a name, why people make such a fuss out of things. If your name is the same as mine and you were born after me, then you should change your name? That's absolutely doesn't make sense. However, due to an easy situation like this, I don't think it's hard for google to change its name to google mail or gmail 2.0 or ...

Phantasm66
on October 20, 2005
3:56 PM
as shakespear said - "what's in a name?"

tinku
on October 24, 2005
12:37 PM
Originally posted by nimo333:
Come on, it's just a name, why people make such a fuss out of things. If your name is the same as mine and you were born after me, then you should change your name? That's absolutely doesn't make sense. However, due to an easy situation like this, I don't think it's hard for google to change its name to google mail or gmail 2.0 or ...
for a corporation, the name is everything. if i started a company called IBM and made off of that name and you were in charge of sales at IBM - how'd you feel?

still, i know what you mean though...corporate behavior is getting out of line these days.
my $0.02.

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