Does your friend still use a Hotmail account, or worse, an AOL account? Google might be able to help you stage an "email intervention."
"On the Gmail team, we affectionately refer to them as 'email interventions,'" writes Peter Harbison, product marketing manager at the Official Gmail Blog. "We hear about them all the time: the cousin who finally switched from an embarrassing address like hottie6elliot1977 to a more professional elliot.d.smith@gmail.com, a co-worker who helped his dentist switch after he heard her grumble about having to pay for IMAP access, etc."
The web-based email client, Gmail, promises those who land on its site, EmailIntervention.com, less spam, more storage space, faster search and a complete transfer of messages and contacts from an old account.
While some have been calling Google's latest strategy aggressive and "not funny," it's a necessity if Google expects to grow. While grabbing those new to email helps, there are likely millions of people who started email accounts in junior high and never bothered to switch. Funny or not, hitting user targets is a worthwhile goal -- and then those converts can be leveraged into Google+.
