Google has announced that its Gmail service is going to start offering POP access to users’ e-mail accounts, meaning that rather than having to log in through Gmail’s Web interface, users will be able to download their Gmail to their own computer using Outlook, Eudora, or whatever other e-mail client is their favourite.

According to a story in USA Today, Google expects the POP service to be available to all Gmail users within the next couple of weeks.

There are several interesting aspects to this. By making this move, on the one hand, Gmail becomes more flexible and accessible for potentially millions of users. On the other hand, it serves to dilute Gmail’s cachet: its signature 1gig of storage, and whizbang searching of your e-mail archive. Once you start POPing your e-mail to your own computer, you don’t have either that search access or, presumably, that 1gig of storage (otherwise why did you sign up for Gmail in the first place? It wasn’t just to be cool, was it?)

Of course, you could always download your e-mail to your own computer, and then use the archive on the Gmail servers as your offsite searchable e-mail archive, but… [Continued]