Gmail, changing subjects, your job

[apprentice]

I've noticed that some of you are using Gmail, what is your opinion of all the articles that have been published concerning the ability to search Google for the contents of your email? I know that Google can already be used to find quite abit of info. on people or things anyway so are all the articles I've been reading just more FUD?

The other question I have is that of how you view your job? Where I work the IT staff is way too small, spread too thin, and overloaded with work. Is it the same where you guys work?

When I see how much work they have I'm really happy to be mearly a hobbiest instead of working to the point of exhaustion at all hours of the day or night.

[Voltage Spike]

My Opinion

I've noticed that some of you are using Gmail, what is your opinion of all the articles that have been published concerning the ability to search Google for the contents of your email? I know that Google can already be used to find quite abit of info. on people or things anyway so are all the articles I've been reading just more FUD?

I believe the situation is as follows:

Google allows you to search your mail, but it does not allow you to search other people's mail.

Google has stated that they will scan the content of your mail to provide advertising targetted specifically towards you. From what I gather, most free email services operate in a similar manner; Google is just up-front about it.

GMail probably uses the same or a similar distributed file system to their normal search engine. As a result, when you delete an email, copies of that mail may still exist for some time. GMail's user agreement mentions that mail is not immediately cleared upon deletion and it has the European Union and California upset.

To me, it appears that a lot of the flack GMail is catching is a result of their honesty. I have trusted Google and I will continue to trust Google, but I will not be switching to a GMail account because I love my current provider.

[pc-0x90]

I've been using gmail as an archive for the large multitude of security mailing lists I was on. I've found it works pretty well for that. (A small number of false spam positives occasionally, but nothing I can't fix once a week)

The conversation groupings and searching for keywords work pretty well, I'm sure it could be done with site specific searches on archives, but this also allows me to remove all of the petty bickering posts that litter FD just as easily to improve searching.

For something like this, privacy concerns aren't really all that relevant, because the info is publicly available elsewhere anyways.

[converge]

For something like this, privacy concerns aren't really all that relevant, because the info is publicly available elsewhere anyways.

I don't see what the big issue has been. If you use a free web mail client ANYWHERE, a 3rd party pop3 account, <insert here>, you have already given up your ability to maintain some illusion of privacy. Your mail resides on a server that is not controlled by you. The only client that supports encryption (that I'm aware of) is hushmail; your private key is still on their server protected only by a passphrase.

So they scan for keywords to target ads at you... this is a new concept? What about spam filters? What about amazon.com?

What I have wondered and not yet sought the answer for... what happens once I reach the 1GB limit? Am I suddenly able to delete messages? Is my quota increased? Do I stop getting mail?

[TheCotMan]

I've noticed that some of you are using Gmail, what is your opinion of all the articles that have been published concerning the ability to search Google for the contents of your email? I know that Google can already be used to find quite a bit of info. on people or things anyway so are all the articles I've been reading just more FUD?

The other question I have is that of how you view your job? Where I work the IT staff is way too small, spread too thin, and overloaded with work. Is it the same where you guys work?

When I see how much work they have I'm really happy to be merely a hobbiest instead of working to the point of exhaustion at all hours of the day or night.

Q and an A about gmail I posted here as part of this thread.

View of job:
In IT, your job is one of service, and as basic economics dictates, wants are infinite while resources are finite.

We resolve this by placing prices on services and use an in-house charge-back system for departments so they can prioritize what they want. Costs for all services are built-into a matrix to show refresh costs and total cost of ownership with payments made periodically.

We emphasize that there is no "one time cost" for tech, but instead "an ongoing cost" for tech.

This works well, and the artificial market prevents us from getting overworked and allows us to not be the ones who say "no." They have money? we're their whores. If we do not want to do something, the cost is just set so high that they won't be able to afford it, or our department will be able to hire people to do the task that we do not want to do.

IT field work is relatively shrinking as a market in comparison to others. Many companies are switching to hire phone support where their employees call phone numbers to get support. By this I mean that the high-paid technical support staff that grew with speeds to match the growth of a business are not being maintained. More are relying upon contract work, and phone support than in-house perm/full time staff. A simple monkey with little experience, but can yet follow directions given to them on the phone are still being hired, but with little in the way of higher level jobs with their company, their prospects for "moving up" are declining over time.

I hope to see a change to this strategy by business as poor planning leads to costs that are far greater than the HR costs of having an in-house support group, but the jury is still out on this one.

[highwizard]

What I have wondered and not yet sought the answer for... what happens once I reach the 1GB limit? Am I suddenly able to delete messages? Is my quota increased? Do I stop getting mail?

It's not that you don't have the ability to delete mail, they just ask you not to.

[dataworm]

I don't see what the big issue has been. If you use a free web mail client ANYWHERE, a 3rd party pop3 account, <insert here>, you have already given up your ability to maintain some illusion of privacy. Your mail resides on a server that is not controlled by you. The only client that supports encryption (that I'm aware of) is hushmail; your private key is still on their server protected only by a passphrase.

So they scan for keywords to target ads at you... this is a new concept? What about spam filters? What about amazon.com?

What I have wondered and not yet sought the answer for... what happens once I reach the 1GB limit? Am I suddenly able to delete messages? Is my quota increased? Do I stop getting mail?

The thing that change is that now they can hook your google.com cookies with your mail account and do compair what you search(google), who you know(invite) , who you talk to(gmail) and what kind of stuff you about talk(gmail)....

If you check carefully... "Google" contain 1 letter of less than "Echelon" coincidence... I don't think so!

[converge]

It's not that you don't have the ability to delete mail, they just ask you not to.

I just noticed the 'delete forever' option for the first time after posting... the world is once again sane because of highwizard.

[skroo]

The thing that change is that now they can hook your google.com cookies with your mail account and do compair what you search(google), who you know(invite) , who you talk to(gmail) and what kind of stuff you about talk(gmail)....

True, but the same could be said of Yahoo, or MSN, or AOL. All of them have the same basic capabilities, so it seems unfair to single out gmail. Besides, even without keyword scanning of your email all search engines target you with advertising based on your search criteria - and correlate that back to geographic databases of IP addresses, etc. IIRC, it was either Amazon or Netscape who were the first to do that in about the mid-1990s, so this is nothing new.

One very good point that someone brought up in the course of this thread was why anyone would expect any degree of security for email stored on a server they don't control. If you're using gmail (or Yahoo, or Hotmail, or any other 'free' email service), you have to expect that someone else is reading your email, even if that someone is a bot looking to sell you stuff based on what's in your mail spool.

And one other thing... People have been pissing and moaning about this since gmail announced their intention to scan email for content; quite frankly, if this policy is a problem, then exercise the ultimate in consumer influence and don't use them. At least they're up front about it and let you know what you're in for. It's not like there aren't other places to get email for free, if that's what you really need.

Hell, I'd be surprised if shell providers don't start doing IMAP-based email for their users that's delivered to a database rather than the traditional spool - this way, you still get your email but with search capability like gmail offers. I'd hate to see the record sizes that would generate, but if Google's figured out how to do it with gmail then I'm sure someone else can find a way too.

Of course, they may be doing it at a filesystem level with metadata, like BeOS did. There's an interesting idea; Google running custom filesystems supporting metadata and searching. Hm. But that's a tangent.

[pc-0x90]

T If you're using gmail (or Yahoo, or Hotmail, or any other 'free' email service), you have to expect that someone else is reading your email, even if that someone is a bot looking to sell you stuff based on what's in your mail spool.

I don't know if you even need to qualify it.. I've found that over the years, to just assume that regardless, someone is reading my email (not saying it's not a two way street either)..

Been there, done that, got the tshirt etc.. ;)

But really, if people are even sligthly concerned.. isn't this what pgp was invented for anyways?