Security threats Toolkit

Google tests hosted corporate email

Dawn Kawamoto CNET News

Published: 14 Feb 2006 09:45 GMT

Google has launched a beta for hosted email accounts that feature the user's domain instead of gmail.com or googlemail.com.

The beta, which is going head-to-head with a similar beta that Microsoft launched in November, is offering 2GB of storage, email search tools and a control panel to manage user accounts, aliases and mailing lists, as part of its test version.

The beta is open to businesses, organisations and schools, according to a posting on Google's blog. The search giant points to San Jose City College as one school that is testing hosted Google Mail, offering its students email accounts with the domain of jaguars.sjcc.edu.

Google's beta follows on the heels of a similar one Microsoft launched in November, and a service it has been offering to individual users on an account-by-account basis for some time. The Microsoft Windows Live Custom Domains beta features instant messaging too, which Google has just integrated into its mail product in the US.

The Live Custom Domains service, however, was aimed at consumers who wanted up to 20 email accounts, with 250MB per address for an existing domain. Microsoft's hosted beta also included security features such as virus scanning and spam filtering.

The battleground for hosted email accounts appears to be taking shape among the industry titans, but it has yet to be seen whether it will quickly accelerate, as did the offerings for large email storage by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.