GMail Turnover Worse Than An Enron CEO

Reading a post from MarketingVox about the high turnover rate of GMail users I felt compelled to give my 2 cents on the situation.

Until Gmail opens up smtp and pop3 access to the accounts so users can add the email to Outlook, there will be turnover. It's comparable to Orkut, Google's foray into the social software arena (written in .Net doh!). Orkut got a lot of press and I joined and got others to join and I even created groups with hundreds of members but in the end it was a waste of my time.

Until Gmail is seemless and integratable into a standard email client, it's going to be rough goings. The only up side is the
gmail notifier
but even that has its drawbacks. I was quick to sing it's praises but now I'm not as fanatical. The notifier usually requires about
8k
and tells me when I have mail, a feature I love. But what blows me away is how my BlogLines notifier only takes 327 k to do a similar task. Sure the Bloglines notifier.exe has less features but who cares. All I really care about is knowing when I have new email. But I still must open a new browser window to get that mail and they never should've had to create a notifier in the first place. How about IM-ing me when I have mail or just letting Outlook tell me?

Even integrating Gmail into the Google desktop wouldn't work. Then I'd have another mail client and I'm just not interested in switching again after having to deal with Bloomba. There's a lot of resistance in switching mail clients and Google should pick up on that. If you can't beat em, join em!