Okay, so you’ve heard of gMail. You want it. You haven’t been able to get it. Go to this site. Offer to trade something for an account (I promised enlightenment). If someone likes your offer and takes you up on the trade they’ll send you an invite to gMail. I got 2 invites in as many minutes. gMail is awesome so far. Fast, well designed, 1000 megs of space (yeah, yeah, I know… it reads your e-mails. Get real, all free e-mail services do..). If you want it go to this site:
I’m waiting until there is better understanding of how much of our privacy they want us to sign away. Google so far has been a good company, but who knows. I’m ok with Yahoo for now.
As far as I can tell Gmail doesn’t support any e-mail protocols. It’s straight and simple webmail. In that respect it doesn’t come anywhere close to my favorite e-mail service, http://www.fastmail.fm . I am certainly not going to switch away from fastmail, but it’s nice to have a huge, free webmail account that I can use to receive and store big attachments and that I can also use as my SPAM account. For years I’ve been using my crummy hotmail account for SPAM - that is, whenever I have to provide my e-mail address for anything on-line or otherwise (except for with friends, family, business, etc) I provide my hotmail account because I know it’s going to be spammed. Gmail is better because it’s essentially graphics free, has a nice clean log-in page and user interface without all the ads that hotmail has, and it will let me store 100 times more SPAM than hotmail will.
I think it’s well worth checking out.
For those concerned about privacy, here’s what gmail has to say:
Is Google reading my email?
Google is NOT reading your mail. Privacy is an issue we take very seriously. Gmail is a technology-based program. Advertising and related information are shown using a completely automated process. Ads are selected for relevance and served by Google computers using the same contextual advertising technology that powers our AdSense program. This technology enables Google to effectively target dynamically changing content, such as email, or news stories.
Because the ads and Related Pages are matched to information that is of interest to you, we hope you’ll find them relevant and useful.
How does Google handle my personal data?
We only use personal data to enhance Gmail by providing you with highly relevant, unobtrusive ads. Your personal information will not be sold or given to any third party, including advertisers and/or business partners. Ever.
In my opinion that’s a lot more than hotmail, AOL, Yahoo or any other webmail service promises.
I suppose that depends on the definition of ‘Google’. True, there probably isn’t somebody in Google head office reading through your emails. But Google as an algorithm/engine has to “read” i.e. scan through the words in the email you are looking at, to determine which adwords adverts to display in your browser. As far as I understand, they will be using the same adwords technology that knows what you just typed into the search engine and displays relevent adwords adverts down the right-hand side.
And I know that adwords advertisers can see what words/phrases people typed in order to get their ads to display.
You’re mostly correct. Yes, gmail’s server does electronically read your e-mail to find keywords which can be used for the targeted advertising which manifests itself as a few text based ads on the right hand side of the screen. However, no person, neither the google folks nor the advertisers can see what you, personally, are reading or writing. It’s all electronic and impersonal. Unless google changes its policy (which it might, but not without great uproar), those advertisers will never know that I, Chris Laughlin, was writing letters to Colin Goldie about Overton whistles. Instead the gmail engine will see “whistles” in my e-mail and put a few adds on the right of the screen selling stuff that matches “whistles” - train whistles, penny whistles, dog whistles, who knows what.
Another thing to consider is that if you use a credit card then advertisers already know almost everything about your buying habits. They know how much you spend, what you buy, what stores you buy at, where the stores are located, how well you pay off your bills, what magazines you are subscribed to, etc. I believe very, very strongly in privacy, but I think that people are misunderstanding and over-reacting to gmail, largely because they don’t understand how much their privacy is routinely being violated already. As I see it, what gmail does is almost non-existant compared to the snooping that already goes on. At least gmail is upfront about it. That said, there’s nothing in it for me whether anyone uses gmail or not. The thing is I think most people will be using it as their free e-mail in a year or so, by which time the log-in name you want will be gone. That’s why I registered yesterday.
No matter what webmail service, so long as your files are stored on their servers, can, conceivably, be read by Homeland Security, or ever who it is that thinks it their right to spy on you, like Soviets. It appears to me that the new Yahoo version includes the same search feature.
Any email sent unencrypted is the equivalent of a postcard sent without an envelope. It’s best to just assume it will be read. Ashcroft is probably reading this forum too, especially the “Political” thread.
Google at least has always been an ethical company (their motto: “don’t be evil”).
But i have a system that works, right now, and i don’t feel pressured to move. I’ll wait and see how this develops. If you have the time or are looking for a new system, by all means, feel free to try gMail. Women will throw themselves at your feet (or guys, in case you’re female) when they see h0w k00l U R!
Hear hear! - The media are really to blame for starting this whole ‘Google are reading your email!’ thing - As soon as Google announced Gmail, the first reports from various IT journalists were focussing on the privacy issues, and the whole thing was taken out of context.
‘Privacy’ and ‘Internet’ don’t belong in the same sentence! People don’t seem that worried that their email is being held on a server at their ISP until they download it, having been ‘read’ by various anti-spam and anti-virus filters - Why not start an ‘AOL is reading your email!’ rumour?
Do people trust their ISP that much? - Or is it the case they don’t fully understand the mechanisms behind email servers (perhaps thinking their email is safely floating somewhere around the internet until they login and retrieve it?)
That's not just true of web mail, it's true of all e-mail. I don't mind homeland security, "the soviets," or Mother Goose reading my e-mail - only a danged fool sends anything sensitive in the clear or using common encryption by e-mail and I ain't a danged fool. (Plus, of course, I don't have anything worthwhile to transmit :slight_smile: )
I do mind the guv’mint spending billions of tax dollars to scan e-mail when anybody with a half a brain knows better than to send sensitive information that way. If you really want to send sensitive information to a “partner in crime” there are ways to do so, even via e-mail, that don’t raise any red flags at all. (Using PGP encryption and such raises red flags and that encryption can be broken by the guv’mint without any trouble at all.)
If I wanted to communicate secretly with someone using e-mail I could easily do so - done properly the mere presence of hidden data can’t even be detected, let alone the content. I’ve seen steg software written by normal high school students that has withstood a pretty vigorous detection challenge. I wrote a steg program myself in an afternoon, just for the heck of it.
If I’ve thought of this it’s pretty obvious that the bad guys, with far greater resources, have too. Ergo scanning e-mail is a non-productive waste of tax dollars. In fact, it’s probably worse than non-productive. Remember all those “non specific warnings” the guv’mints been issuing for the last 2-1/2 years? Notice that all of them have been triggered by “a marked increase in chatter” and none of them have amounted to a hill of beans? Well, that’s what happens when you rely on things like scanning e-mail as an intelligence gathering tool.
Here’s a post from slashdot.com http://slashdot.org/articles/04/06/21/1150236.shtml?tid=126&tid=217&tid=95
from the intereting-tests dept.
bonhomme_de_neige writes “Emails and invitations sent to Hotmail from Gmail accounts do not bounce, but nor do they arrive in the recipient’s Inbox - they vanish mysteriously into the aether. Joel Johnson writes in his Gizmodo weblog that invitations he sent to a Hotmail address bounced (this even received coverage from ZDNet). Search Engine Roundtable writes that several ISPs are blocking Gmail. It’s already well-documented that Yahoo moves Gmail invites into the Bulk Mail folder. I’ve personally confirmed the Hotmail and Yahoo blocking.” Please note: I’ve not been able to verify this one way or another.
(There are hyperlinks in the note)
Tony
I have a good friend who works at Google and set me up with my gmail account, and though he’s fairly tight-lipped about the controversies around their email service, my impression is that Google’s system for scanning email and their privacy policy is consistent with other email providers; the difference is that Google doesn’t conceal their policies, as other companies apparently do. As for Hotmail and other email providers blocking or routing gmail into bulk folders, well, that’s indicative of their envy of Google’s success and popularity. Oh, yeah, if it’s not obvious, I like Google–a lot–and though I also use a Yahoo email address, in my book, Google definitely has a different business ethic than most companies in the industry.
The swap site is not resolving right now (at least from here).