Google to use UK googlemail users to gmail following agreement with IIIR

Google, yesterday said that it has reached an agreement with Independent International Investment Research (IIIR 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 for a gmail account starting later in the week.

"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." 

Since October 2005, people signing up for an email address with Google have been given a googlemail address rather than the gmail address provided elsewhere in the world. The company stopped using the gmail suffix as a result of its dispute with IIR, which applied for the gmail trademark in 2002, two years before Google launched the beta version of its email service. The research firm uses the term G-mail for its financial analytics software.

In 2005, Google said IIR had asked a sum of $50 million for the use of the G-mail trademark but had later scaled it down to between £25 million and £34 million indicated by an independent valuation of the brand's worth. However it said it would seek the full amount if legal proceedings continued.

The discussions remained deadlocked and Google ceded the trademark to IIR introducing the @googlemail for new email users. At the time it said the impasse would take years to resolve. At that time Google said trying to work things out had become distracting and annoying and it felt like it was being taken advantage of.

Though the matter had been settled two years back, according to Google the engineering work had taken much of the time required to put the infrastructure in place.

Google email users across the rest of the world have been allowed to take gmail addresses following the introduction of the service with the exception is Germany, where users have to use googlemail.com accounts because the gmail name has already been registered by a venture capitalist there.
UK users switching to gmail addresses will also be able to receive messages at the googlemail equivalent.

Though Google does not give figures for Gmail users, while launching Buzz in February this year, it indicated around 170 million people across the world use Gmail.