I agree. The privacy implications are *really* scary. (And they're
sufficiently worse for non-subscribers that I've contemplated blocking
gmail-bound messages from my (personal) systems.)
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb
And here I thought I was the only one to seriously consider blocking gmail (to and from) because of the security implications.
As for the invites, I find it interesting just how many folks have been taken in by their very clever marketing scheme that's gotten lots of smart people to spamvertise gmail (and orkut for that matter). I agree with Paul Vixie in not seeing the attraction at all.
Hope you are blocking every non-personal mail server on the planet.
I'm with Paul on the "makes sense" to run your own personal mail server - for me, and others who _can_ run their own mail server. For those who can't, public mail servers are all "scary". Gmail is no more scary than hotmail, yahoo, msn, verizon, earthlink, or any of a billion other mail systems on the 'Net.
Put another way, how many of you have mailboxes on your personal server for friends and family without the clue / time / motivation to run their own mail server? Should we all block you because you can read / store / sort / examine / virus check their mail?
People like it when someone else takes care of the back-end details. And if someone else is doing that, then someone else can read their personal stuff. Period, end of discussion.
Deal with it. Or cut yourself off from e-mail. Your e-mail, your decision.
Just please stop complaining to the rest of us how scared you are that some mail admin on the other end of a port 25 connection might read something you sent to one of their users. It's so... 1970s.
I'm with Paul on the "makes sense" to run your own personal mail server
- for me, and others who _can_ run their own mail server. For those
who can't, public mail servers are all "scary". Gmail is no more scary
than hotmail, yahoo, msn, verizon, earthlink, or any of a billion other
mail systems on the 'Net.
I don't think most people think it's scary at all. Most people don't
really care what might happen to their email before they get it, just as
long as they get it. It's another variation on "So what if someone hacks
my computer, there's nothing important on it."
And here I thought I was the only one to seriously consider blocking
gmail
(to and from) because of the security implications.
I find it interesting how many people are concerned with
sending email to gmail users yet are quite willing to send
email to public mailing lists that are archived and
indexed by Google.
Does anyone really believe that people will use
gmail as their one and only email account? Perhaps they
are really using it for trading DIVX encoded movies.
After all, the cost of sending a DIVX encoded movie from
one gmail.com mailbox to another gmail.com mailbox is
relatively low. What happens to your network when
this happens and instead of receiving a stream of HTML
search pages from Google, you now start receiving
huge DIVX film downloads, all from a single site!
Assuming that they aren't Akamized...
--Michael Dillon
I thought there was a message size limit which is far below the mailbox size limit? Haven't tried if they are able to piece up large messages from MIME headers or such.
Pete
Hell, I couldn't even log into it. The system was "Temporarily unavailable" when I tried.
Curtis
Petri Helenius wrote:
There is in most cases a significantly lower expectation of privacy when
sending to any public mailing list (regardless of who indexes it) than
when sending to a single individual.
The difference you cite is, therefore, somewhat understandable.
Even more so if people set up forwards from their existing email
addresses into GMail accounts, when the senders do not know that
the mail they send will be read on Gmail.