Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler OT Gmail

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hey if anyone wants to invite me i'd be happy my email is LouisLo16@hotmail.com

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Sure, I've got more invites than I know what to do with. Anyone else? First come, first serve.

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I haven't been paying attention... the main benifit is jsut that gig of space, right?...

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That's just part of it. The main benefit is the storage combined with the ability to do a google search on your stored messages.

After Google announced gmail, everyone was going crazy about the gigabyte of storage. So a bunch of other e-mail services upped their storage to compete. But it's not really very enticing competition without the addition of the google search feature, because the whole point of having a gig of storage and not ever having to delete a message is so you can just search through all of your old messages when you're looking for something someone sent you. It's really amazingly convenient.

Oh, and the web interface is far an away the best webmail interface I've ever encountered.

I agree. It's amazingly quick. I click and bang!! there is everything I want and it is very clean. I think they hired some very smart or well experienced (probably both) to come up with the layout and interface.

jr

That sounds like the arguement...wireless is insecure, so why use WEP at all. I'm still going to do what I can to make it easier for people to read my email, break into my computer, etc.

As far as only the computer program looking at your mail, I think that is just the first step down a road to less email privacy that I don't want to take. Maybe someday, but not now.

I'm a geek too BTW, and I dig Google over other search engines, I just hadn't investigated gmail myself other than headlines I see on /. etc

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.

hey josh thanks for the invite, i'm finally part of the club

At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, it's pretty much a known fact that the U.S. Government scans all Internet traffic for keywords related to drugs, terrorism, and George Bush being out of control, among other things.

Basically, there is no such thing as e-mail privacy without encryption. So, gmail shouldn't scare you.

That's pretty much the way I see it Josh. If I want security I'll walk it to a friend or use PGP.
Of course I have nothing other than personal info (financial stuff and social) that I would fear being leaked out. Maybe some bad poetry from my angst ridden teen years?

jr

Maybe you're all right about this, but every time something like this comes up it just seems like we keep inching another step closer towards not having privacy.

Is it really ok that all that other email is scanned for things already? No, but we accept it, and therefore accept the next step of the computer scanning it and targeting ads, which will likely eventually lead to the next step of people being able to read it being written into the privacy terms. By then everyone will just say, well...the computer can already scan it, and people out on the Internet can grab it and read it, so what's the difference. It just seems like another small step down a road we have already gone too far down. I don't really like the targeted ad part either....I already get enough junk. I guess the logic for the step down the path of that road is, well, I already get junk mail, it might as well be targeted so it might actually be of interest.

I guess the difference to me is that stuff out there now can be read by those with the time and know how, but that doesn't mean I think it is ok...with Gmail, you are giving your approval by signing up that this is ok. (albeit only by a computer)

It's starting to look like I'm alone on this one though, so either I'm too worried about this stuff, it's not really a big deal, or everyone else has just given up already.