Thursday, June 12, 2008

Gmail.com Domain Made Disfunctional In Germany

Surprise... I usually enter “gmail.com” to jump to my email inbox, but today I’m greeted with the following message after doing so (the message sits at mail.google.com/gmail/):

We can’t provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we’re called Google Mail here instead.

If you’re traveling in Germany, you can access your mail at http://mail.google.com.

Oh, and we’d like to link the URL above, but we’re not allowed to do that either. Bummer.

For general information about Google, please visit www.google.com or www.google.de.

Why does this happen? The reason is likely Google’s lost trademark battle with German Daniel Giersch, who owns “G-mail”. Already since some time, German Gmail users will not see a Gmail logo on top – rather, the logo says “Google Mail” – and upon registering, they receive john.doe@googlemail.com instead of @gmail.com. (However, my old email address, @gmail.com, still receives messages alright.)

So for German users, the only change as far as I can tell is they now have to enter mail.google.com instead of gmail.com to get to their inbox. As you can see in Google’s message above, Google isn’t even allowed to link to mail.google.com when you enter the gmail.com domain...

Update: Odd, now it works as usual again from Germany... loading up Gmail instead of bringing up a “sorry” message as above. [Thanks Knospe and Michael!]

Gmail.com Domain Made Dis ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (32)

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