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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail#Germany
On July 4, 2005, Google announced that Gmail Deutschland would be rebranded to Google Mail. From that point forward, visitors originating from an IP address determined to be in Germany would be forwarded to googlemail.com where they could obtain an email address containing the new domain. Any German user who wants a gmail.com address must sign up for an account through a proxy. German users who were already registered were allowed to keep their old addresses.
The German naming issue is due to a trademark dispute between Google and Daniel Giersch. Daniel Giersch owns a company called "G-mail" which provides the service of printing out emails from senders and sending the print-out via postal mail to the intended recipients. On 30 January 2007, Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market ruled in favor of Giersch.[76] It seems Google isn't without a sense of humor as this is the same service Google "offered" in the Gmail Paper April Fool's Day joke in 2007.
Since June 19, 2008, the domain gmail.com no longer redirects to the Google Mail service when being accessed from a German IP address. Instead, a short text message is shown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gmail-from-Germany.png
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