I don't think I'm saying anything like "wireless is insecure so why use WEP." You certainly shouldn't *rely* on WEP if you need truly secure wireless, but it's not going to do any harm to use it. We're not talking about encryption here, if you want secure communications use RSA and get yourself a 500 decimal digit private key. Then nobody will read your email. We're talking about the equivalent of sending a package through the USPS vs. Fed Ex.
What I'm saying is, the loss of privacy between gmail and yahoo mail is imaginary. It was drummed up by competitive companies so that people would be scared and not move to gmail. There are not people reading my email. There is a computer program that scans it for key content, and then uses that content to load advertisements. Google can't afford to hire people to sift through 1 gig of email per user, that's a hell of a lot of text. Now if down the road they decide to hire an army to scan emails by human, then I will stop using them.
I'm not saying you should use gmail. (Although it does have a much slicker interface than any web based email I've ever used.) I'm saying your security concern reasons for distrusting it are not valid. If you read the policies, there is really no difference at all except that a machine scans your email and provides targetted ads. Machines scan your email *all the time* with every spam-filter providing web service.
This is GMail's
privacy page
I would suggest reading the paragraph titled "Email content and usage" under "What types of personal information to we collect and how do we use it?"
This is essentially the same privacy policy that companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon have.
