Google Mail now Gmail in the UK

Google announced on Monday via its official Gmail Blog that UK users will no longer have googlemail.com as the domain for their email address, but instead, it will employ its normal gmail.com ending.

A trademark issue had caused a hold-up for the search engine giant since 2005. Current users with the soon-to-be-defunct googlemail.com domain have the option of switching to gmail.com or staying with their current address. The transition will begin taking place over the next week.

According to Greg Bullock, a software engineer at Google and the author of the blog announcement, "we estimate this name change will save approximately 60 million keystrokes a day".

While the breakthrough comes as positive news for those in the UK, Google still has trademark issues in other global areas, such as Germany, WebWorkerDaily.com reports. Affected users had been able to work around the technicalities in the past, such as by having friends in unaffected areas sign up for them, or using a proxy server to make Google's service believe they were located elsewhere.

Numberof.net reported in March that about 170 million Gmail users exist worldwide.