Gmail.com Domain no longer works in Germany.

If you happen to be in Germany you can not access your gmail by visiting gmail.com
You'll be greeted with the following message:-
We can’t provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we’re called Google Mail here instead.

If you’re traveling in Germany, you can access your mail at http://mail.google.com.

Oh, and we’d like to link the URL above, but we’re not allowed to do that either. Bummer.

For general information about Google, please visit www.google.com or www.google.de.

This is likely because Google lost trademark battle with German Daniel Giersch, who owns “G-mail”. Already since some time, German Gmail users will not see a Gmail logo on top – rather, the logo says “Google Mail” – and upon registering, they receive abc@googlemail.com instead of @gmail.com.

So for German users, the only change as far as I can tell is they now have to enter mail.google.com instead of gmail.com to get to their inbox. As you can see in Google’s message above, Google isn’t even allowed to link to mail.google.com when you enter the gmail.com domain...

Comments

indeterminacy said…
They've really done it. A few days ago some people could still get gmail.com in germany, but now I think it's completely blocked. What really sucks is the old gmail-notifier has also stopped working in Germany.

But I don't see why this was done all of a sudden. There were no recent new decisions forcing them to take this action, or were there?

Giersch, who owns the German trademark to g-mail has a site gmail.de - by all rights, he must assure that this site is not seen outside of Germany, but that is not the case. Going in over a Swedish ip, I see it is there, and anyone can register, apparently.

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