London — For the past five years, British e-mail users with Google accounts have been deprived access to @gmail.com email address. But on Tuesday, the search engine company has settled a long-running trademark dispute with a British research firm, and now, finally ditching the two-word moniker are now able to change the end of their addresses from @googlemail.com to @gmail.com.
Google unveiled its free e-mail service in the UK in 2005, and similar to its American genera, the service was launched as Gmail. But due to trademark conflicts, Gmail became Googlemail in the U.K. However, a few lucky users were able to keep their Gmail addresses. Everyone else had to adopt the newer, longer address.
But now that long national nightmare is over. On Tuesday, Google announced that it has reached an agreement with Independent International Investment Research (IIR Group) and will begin offering people with googlemail addresses a gmail address “over the next few months”. New UK users will be able to sign up to a gmail account later this week.
Google software engineer Greg Bullock writes in the company’s blog that the change will be rolling out over the next week. Bullock notes that the change, although seemingly small, has some larger implications:
Since “gmail” is 50% fewer characters than “googlemail,” we estimate this name change will save approximately 60 million keystrokes a day. At about 217 microjoules per keystroke, that is about the energy of 20 bonbons saved every day!
The trademark dispute has been settled for an undisclosed amount.
“After engaging in legal proceedings at the trademark office, we were able to reach a settlement with the party with whom we had the conflict,” Google said in a statement. “We are happy to have resolved this issue, and look forward to offering @gmail.com addresses to users in the UK. We are unable to disclose the settlement agreement details.”
Google has been confronted by similar issues with its “Gmail” name in Germany, Poland, Russia and even the United States, where it finally was granted a trademark in 2007. The trademark dispute in the UK was settled in September of 2009, when Google paid IIR more than £200,000 for the intellectual property rights to Gmail.
According to Google, users will be able to decide whether or not they would like to keep their “googlemail.com” domain or switch over to the shorter “gmail.com” domain.