I have 3 gmail invites, in case anyone’s interested (pm me).
I don’t have any gmail invites, in case anyone’s interested (pm me for all I care 
).
Wowza! I had not heard of G-mail! Not that I ever thought nobody else was doing it . . .
Truth be told, nothing you do electronically is private. It’s possible to steam open the envelope any time your email passes through a server, and you should not be thinking that nobody does this, because they do and it’s not a secret that they do it.
If it were not for legal protections, anybody could and would be doing it.
My organization has two completely separate email systems. One is entirely inside the organization and secure. The other uses regular internet routes and by definition it is not secure. It just isn’t. If you’re going to send anything containing identifiable patient information, it has to be encoded. What’s identifiable patient information? Not just name and address, but all sorts of little things that can be data-mined and accumulated to identify someone.
It makes you think twice about what goes in your email. And in anything else you do on the net.
My posts here are only superficially anonymous. It’s a simple matter to pick out bits from here and link them up with bits from elsewhere to figure out who I am and what I’m up to. Google inventories enough stuff to make it a very simple chore, indeed.
I am a little concerned, though, that Google intends to inventory the information in emails that a G-mail account holder receives. Not that I think Yahoo, etc., don’t already do that, but still . . . I’ll have to ponder that a while.
If you’re concerned about the privacy of your email, you should be encrypting it (with GPG or PGP). Your organization is doing the right thing. There is no legal protection for your email. Just assume it’s being “steamed open” (heck, you don’t need to open anything, there is no envelope).
yeah…I’ve got some G-Mail accounts to give away, too. PM me if you wanna…