Gmail for domains in beta

Found on Ars Technica on Friday, 10 February 2006
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Google last night revealed their plans to offer Gmail service for third party mail servers. Currently in beta, the service will allow mail server operators to essentially hand the reigns over to Google's Gmail cluster.

This is probably about as close to an ideal turn-key solution for e-mail as you can get. Colleges, small-to-medium sized businesses, non-profits, and others should see this as a stellar opportunity to essentially "outsource" their e-mail-and all that comes with it (downtime, spam management, etc.)-to Google. How many organizations can offer 2GB of e-mail space and a user interface as refined as Gmail? Not many. How many can do it for free? Practically none.

As with other recent Google ventures—such as adding remote logging service to Google Talk and adding Search Across Computers to Google Desktop Search—this announcement also suffers from a bit of the bad timing blues. This now makes the third new development to come out of Google in the wake of their battle with the US government over the infamous search data subpoena.

Google seems to try to get into every section of the online world. But as it was mentioned in the article: with all those recent negative news (like support of censorship and remote document storage), I won't trust Google. Especially not when it's about moving the email of a whole company over to them.