Gmail/Googlemail

[setspeed]

Ive had a couple of Gmail accounts for a while and my friend has just asked me for an invitation which i gave her.
She has signed up but its given her [email]herusername@googlemail.com[/url] address and she actually wanted [email]herusername@gmail.com[/url]

I now realise from reading about a bit that Google is only issuing @googlemail.com now in the UK.
The thing is, if i email [email]herusername@gmail.com[/url] then it gets delivered to her anyway. Any emails she sends out say from [email]herusername@googlemail.com[/url]

My questions are:
Is she safe to give her address out as [email]herusername@gmail.com[/url] - is it likely to get changed in the future so that [email]herusername@gmail.com[/url] and @googlemail.com become separated?

Thanks for any help its appreciated.

[mondine]

If she expects this account to be used for a while, and receive mail from a variety of locations, it would probably be better to just get used to "Googlemail".
Particularly if her correspondence is international. There is no way to predict if mail will be handled the same way in, say, the UK, and Germany.

One thing that you could do, as several people have reported success with, is to send your friend another gmail invitation, and have her use a US proxy to sign up. That would give her an actual "Gmail" address (although, of course, she'd need to alter the user name, as her current one is 'taken', as far as Google is concerned).

[xamtoh]

I don't think they would change gmail to googlemail definitely, it would be too annoying for the actual gmail.com users, wouldn't it ?

But you can do as mondine says, using the US proxy to create a proper gmail address, I would add that you can delete the actual account in the Google Account Settings (Settings -> Accounts -> Google Account Settings -> Delete Gmail Service) so that your friend would be able to create a new mail with the same username (even though I don't know if the username is directly reusable or if you need to wait some time before google really delete your mail account).

I don't really understand this policy to do accounts with googlemail, and others with gmail ... Gmail is far more convenient as it is shorter !

[mondine]

Unfortunately, it's not up to Google, as the matter of the ownership of the "Gmail" name is now before the courts, with multiple claims.
This has been reported extensively in some older threads, so I'll not bother repeating the details.