Get Netted :

Users from UK and Germany often want to Sign Up for gmail.com id instead of googlemail.com id. However because of trademark disputes over Gmail name in UK and Germany, Google has rebranded Gmail.com to Googlemail.com in these countries.

So if a new user wants to sign up for gmail.com id from an IP address determined to be in either UK or Germany, he would be automatically forwarded to googlemail.com instead.

The Trademark Dispute

In Germany Google’s problems were that Daniel Giersch, had a pre-existing email service called “G-mail”, and in the UK, London based Independent International Investment Research’s use of Gmail predate Google’s by 2 years. In January 2007 the EU’s trademark body, the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), also turned down Google’s attempt to invalidate Giersch’s claim to the name.

Do you really need to sign up for Gmail.com address?

When you sign up for Googlemail.com or a Gmail.com account, Google actually provides you two email addresses – @googlemail.com and @gmail.com.

That means if your email address in Googlemail is something like david@googlemail.com, all email messages that are sent to david@gmail.com will also be delivered to your own Googlemail account.

How to Sign Up for Gmail.com account instead of Googlemail.com

Google recognizes a user by his IP address. Therefore in order to sign up for Gmail id, we will need to change our IP address. Since proxy websites don’t work with Gmail, we have limited options.

First option is to ask someone living outside UK and Germany to sign up on your behalf. I heard of such a service providing Gmail signup for a dollar sometime back, but I am not sure if it exists now. Other similar option is signing up for Gmail while travelling abroad. You can also ask someone who is travelling to sign up for you.

Second option is to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network). You can choose any VPN service based outside UK and Germany for the purpose. Though most of the VPN services are paid, some of them do offer free trial packages. You can sign up for any of these free trials and get a Gmail account. Among all, US based VPN servers are quite popular and are easily available.

There is no third option but you can try this link and see if works for a Gmail.com sign up