Gmail -- Google's new email

[kaitykaity]

If anybody here wants to try Google's Gmail, send me
a PM with your email address and I'll send you an invite.

Another DUer invited me, and I guess I've been using it
long enough that now I get to do the same thing for six
other people.

kk

[welshTerrier2]

1. pros and cons ??

are there features in Google's Gmail that you either like or dislike ??

is it different than other mail programs you've used ??

[kaitykaity]

3. I like the way it threads your messages.

It doesn't separate a conversation into separate
messages.

[welshTerrier2]

5. thanks for the invite, kaitykaity ...

i've setup a new gmail account ...

[kaitykaity]

9. No problem.

I hope you like it as much as I do.

:hi:

[Osamasux]

2. Sorry, as soon as Google considered reading users' email

and scanning it for certain keywords to show them ads based on their own private email they lost me. I don't care if they follow through on that plan or not. That they even considered such a breach of privacy is inexcusable.

[idiosyncratic]

4. I agree. I learned about that months ago and said "No Thanks."

Also, I don't believe it works with my chosen browser, Opera.

At least that was the early word. I don't want to be forced to use a different browser, especially M$ IE. I love :loveya: Opera.

[lazarus]

7. They do it now

And it's no different from EVERY OTHER webmail service that scans your email for certain keywords to find spam and virii.

Anything you do on the internet that's not fully encrypted isn't private.

[Osamasux]

10. No way. This was very, very different

Google was data mining to sell information on your personal email to their advertisers. That's not even on the same planet as scanning for spam or threats. This was a really sleazy move. I'll dig up some of the old articles. There were plenty. Google only dropped it in part because that was around the time they were preparing to go public and the publicity was hurting the IPO.

Here is an April 14, 2004 article discussing legislation California State Senator Liz Figueroa was drafting to get them to drop the plans, as well as actions being taken by privacy groups, Great Britain and the European Union.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=450

>The complaints against Google’s GMail and its use of AdWords Contextual
>Advertising to show text ads targeted to actual email content may
>have driven Google to reconsider the advertising format used to fund
>the 1 GB of storage space used in the new Google free email service."
SNIP

>In addition to potential Californian legislation there have been some
>other news making protests of Google’s plans for GMail advertising.
>On April 6, the World Privacy Forum and 27 other privacy and civil
>liberties organizations composed an open letter calling upon Google
>to suspend its Gmail service until the privacy issues are adequately
>addressed. Also last week, Privacy International urged Britain’s
>information commissioner to take action against the service,
>heating up privacy advocates in the EU.
SNIP


On April 30, 2004 Google filed the IPO
http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/29/technology/google/

The timing fits to a tee.

[Osamasux]

11. Here's a Washington Post story 5 days before the IPO

was announced.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38662-2004Apr24.html

[lazarus]

12. a response

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4707

There has been a rash of recent editorials about privacy concerns with Google's gmail service. A number of organizations have asked Google to voluntarily suspend the service. One California legislator has gone so far as to say she plans to introduce a bill to ban it. This is nuts! A number of things to consider:

There are already hundreds of millions of users of hosted mail services at AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo! These services routinely scan all mail for viruses and spam. Despite the claims of critics, I don't see that the kind of automated text scanning that Google would need to do to insert context-sensitive ads is all that different from the kind of automated text scanning that is used to detect spam. (And in fact, those oppressed by spam should look forward to having Google's brilliant search experts tackle spam detection as part of their problem set!) Google doesn't have humans reading this mail; it has programs reading them. Yes, Google could instruct a program to mine the stored email for confidential information. But so could Yahoo! or AOL or MSN today. (Perhaps people feel Google is to be feared because they seem to so good at what they do. But that seems rather an odd point of view.)

For that matter, the very act of sending an email message consists of having a number of programs on different machines read and store your mail. Every time you send an email message, it is typically routed through a number of computers to get to its destination. Run the traceroute command at a command prompt on any Linux or UNIX system (including Mac OS X) or tracert on a Windows system to see the hops that your internet packets go through from your machine to any destination site. Anyone equipped with a packet sniffer at any of those sites can snoop any mail that they want. In fact, the NSA recently proved the effectiveness of this approach by tracking down terrorists by way of their mail traffic.

Much more at the link.

[welshTerrier2]

6. gmail question ...

i just setup a new gmail account and sent a couple of test messages ... the "sent folder" is showing that the time sent is exactly one hour earlier than my local time ... the gmail server's probably on central time and i'm on the east coast ...

it's probably caused by the time on the server that's storing my email ... the gmail server's probably on central time and i'm on the east coast ...

any idea if there's a way to fix this ??? i couldn't find a setting anywhere in the gmail settings menu ...

[kaitykaity]

8. No clue.

Sorry. :shrug:

[kaitykaity]

13. Two left, folks.

Hate to see them go to waste.