On the Soapbox

Back in November 2005, Microsoft announced a cool new service called Windows Live Custom Domains. With this service, if you owned the domain name example.com, you could now create Hotmail (a.k.a. Windows Live Mail) accounts of the form user@example.com. You provide the domain name, and Microsoft provides the server and infrastructure necessary for an e-mail service at that domain name. It's useful for small companies who can't afford to run their own mail server but who want to give their employees professional-looking e-mail addresses at the company domain. It's also useful for owners of personal domains who want e-mails at their own domain name. While this sort is service is hardly new, there was one important difference: this is free. Microsoft had become the first of the major e-mail providers to offer a free domain e-mail service.

A few months later, in February, Google launched Gmail for Your Domain (which was expanded on and renamed to Google Apps for Your Domain last month). Google's service is similar to Microsoft's. If you own example.com, you could now have a Gmail account at user@example.com and you could sign into Google Talk using user@example.com. The differences between the two are the same as the differences between Gmail and Hotmail: there's more space (Google offers 2 GB vs. Microsoft's 250 MB), a better webmail interface (though that's subjective), and most importantly, secure SMTP/POP3 access, which allows Gmail--and thus Google Apps for Your Domain--to be used with proper e-mail software (e.g., Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Eudora, Apple Mail, etc.).

Recently AOL has joined the fray as well with the My eAddress service. Now this is where things start to get interesting. While Microsoft and Google are BYOD (Bring Your Own Domain) services where you provide a domain name that you own, AOL will register a domain of your choice for you. Apparently, for free. Which means that you won't have to pay for a domain registration, which will save you about $9 per year. Like Google, AOL is offering 2 GB of space. And like Google, AOL's e-mail service can be used with proper e-mail software like Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc. However, while Google offers support for e-mail software through the POP3 protocol, AOL is offering it through the arguably better and more fully-featured IMAP4 protocol. And if AOL is offering all this for free, it begs the question, why the heck are they doing this?

In the case of Microsoft, it is a rich company trying to become the gatekeeper of the Internet by pouring money and resources into establishing their new Windows Live brand and strategy. Furthermore, without POP3 or IMAP support and with a much smaller storage limit, Microsoft isn't offering very much to begin with. In the case of Google, they are hoping to offer the Google Apps for Your Domain service as a premium service--a "business solution" for small companies and organizations. Google is currently in a beta stage, so the service is free for now, and they have promised to keep the accounts created during this beta period free. But what about AOL? Their offering is the grandest: free domain name and IMAP support, but do they have a strategy that merits this extravagance? They could offer the service for free now and then make it a premium pay service later on. And since AOL is doing the domain registration for you, they will technically own the domain, which will give them a sort of blackmailing power over you if they decide to make it a pay service (pay up, or forever lose these e-mail addresses), whereas if this was a BYOD service and you owned your own domain, you could easily jump ship and set your domain's MX records to point to any other service offering e-mails for domains or even to your own servers and thus preserve all those e-mail addresses. However, AOL has stated that they are working on allowing people to use their own domains and that BYOD is not allowed at the moment only because the service is so new that they haven't gotten around to supporting that yet. So if AOL follows through and offers BYOD support, then, if you opt to use your own domain, there will be nothing to prevent you from switching service providers the second they decide to do something unpleasant with their service (granted, the typical AOL user would not be tech-savvy enough to know how to do this). Additionally, unlike Google, AOL has not stated intentions to make it a pay service, so a course reversal there would bring bad PR for them at a time when they're spending so much time and money trying to heal the AOL brand image. So I think that AOL is caught up in a me-too fever and is outdoing everyone else simply for the sake of outdoing everyone else and not for any rational business purposes, which certainly won't be a first for AOL. ;)

Finally, where is the last the Big Four? Yahoo! has been offering services like this for many years now, but it has always been a premium service. According to their website, they will charge you either $35/yr for a single address at your domain, or $120/yr for up to 10 addresses at your domain (in contrast, Microsoft's free service offers 40 addresses per domain, AOL offers 100, and Google offers anywhere from a minimum of 25 to the thousands, depending on how many you request at signup). The prices are less if you provide your own domain. So it would appear that this crazy domain services fever hasn't reached Sunnyvale yet.