gmail??

[emperor_black]

Sounds good. It's just a pain to switch over though, I've got so much that goes to my "old" address that it will take a year to get everything moved over.

On the top right-hand corner, click on setting, then select the "accounts" tab. You will see an option that says "Add another email account". It also says you can have upto 5 email accounts routed to gmail.

The first thing I saw when I signed up for it almost 2 years ago was that its very "light". Its very quick in loading, search is of course excellent. But I dont use it that much. Maybe I should start using it.

[rjohnstone]

I've got nearly 1000 emails in my inbox... no spam either.
I still have TONS of room for more crap.

You are currently using 380 MB (13%) of your 2867 MB

I only have one external email account linked to it, but it's really low volume.

As for the privacy concerns... Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, or the mail service provided by your ISP can all be accessed by the people hosting it.
Legally they cannot without a court order.
Gmail services only do automated (no human involved) keyword scanning of your email to present you with advertisements.
Small price to pay for "free" email.
And I have actually bought a few things from ads that showed up on the side a few times.

[GodOfRhythm]

I like Gmail, it's a great extra account to have and hotmail or yahoo just don't compare IMO.

I've got to agree with rjohnstone. Everyone's got advertisement so I'd rather have the one that actually advertises about stuff I care about...

[Argos]

That's not really the issue. Google keeps enormous amounts of data from their users (potentially every search you've made with Google over the last few years has been logged and is readily available to them). They still currently track everything you do on any of their services with unique IP addresses (although they have announced plans to limit it to a cluster of 256 computers instead of a single one in the future, who knows when that will be implemented). That data is kept for years. As far as I know the government has been unsuccessful in obtaining that data thus far (they have tried several times) but the day may come when all of your records are handed over in bulk.

There's a huge ongoing debate about the necessity and propriety of Google's collection of data about its users, surely you guys must have heard at least something about it. Many security and privacy experts caution against using Google's services for those reasons. Even the EU is currently investigating Google's privacy policies.

I'm not trying to come off as some spooked tin foil capped conspiracy nut, but it's something to be aware of no matter what email/search/whatever service you use.

[rjohnstone]

You need the data for trend analysis. Associating activity based on IP address is useless unless the user has a static IP.
At home, my IP address is dynamic and changes roughly every 14 days from my ISP, so it will be hard to track beyond 14 days worth of traffic.
I access Google mainly from my office. The only thing Google sees is my proxy servers IP. There are 8,000+ users coming out of that proxy IP... see my point.
The data is really hard to associate to any one user.
The tin foil hat wearing people would have everyone believe that they can actually track the information to a user... that is not possible given the sheer volume of data that comes in every day.
They would require more computing capacity aggregating the data than they would performing their original business functions.

[shobet]

You need the data for trend analysis. Associating activity based on IP address is useless unless the user has a static IP.
At home, my IP address is dynamic and changes roughly every 14 days from my ISP, so it will be hard to track beyond 14 days worth of traffic.
I access Google mainly from my office. The only thing Google sees is my proxy servers IP. There are 8,000+ users coming out of that proxy IP... see my point.
The data is really hard to associate to any one user.
The tin foil hat wearing people would have everyone believe that they can actually track the information to a user... that is not possible given the sheer volume of data that comes in every day.
They would require more computing capacity aggregating the data than they would performing their original business functions.

I have an account but I don't use it very much. Being a Mac user I tend to use .Mac for my mail and other things.

You are correct as to it being extremely difficult for them to track individual users, especially if your traffic is being cached/proxied. Obviously all the traffic through the proxy should/could be logged, so that's trackable, but that's your companies data and not Google.

However if you use the personalized iGoogle home page for searching you are either logged in to their service or are using a cookie. I've not read much about the iGoogle service so I can't really comment on it and any data collection that might be done when you use it. Cookies can be used to collect certain data to a limited extent, but nothing I'd be worried about. After all a cookie is just a data file and can't do anything by itself. I seem to remember reading somewhere that google used to have a 30 year life span for their cookies (which seems a tinsy bit excessive to me) but have recently reduced that to two years.

All I can say is that google interview process is one hell of a ride, and as for their London HQ, I've never seen so many 30" monitors in my life! I even got interviewed by James Bond, I just wish I'd had a toy white cat in my bag. But that is another story...

[emperor_black]

At home, my IP address is dynamic and changes roughly every 14 days from my ISP, so it will be hard to track beyond 14 days worth of traffic.

what if they are keeping track using MAC address? That will never change unless you change your NIC card or your wirelss pci card. I am not an expert in this field, but when they say "IP" doesn't mean ONLY your IP is recorded. Everything including your subnet and default gateway, etc. is stored. That will very easily give away your identity. or at least it will give them your internet provider's name and he will have to give up your name if there is a court order.

[rjohnstone]

what if they are keeping track using MAC address? That will never change unless you change your NIC card or your wirelss pci card. I am not an expert in this field, but when they say "IP" doesn't mean ONLY your IP is recorded. Everything including your subnet and default gateway, etc. is stored. That will very easily give away your identity. or at least it will give them your internet provider's name and he will have to give up your name if there is a court order.

Your MAC address is only viewable by your ISP.
And no, they cannot get your IP info beyond the address you used to connect to their service. Default gateway and subnet are not broadcast, although they are in the TCP packet for routing purposes.
You only need the IP address to ID the ISP.
Heck, you only need to the first two or three octets for that part.

Again... directly linking all that data to an individual is not possible.
The best you could do is link it to a computer. (legal mumbo jumbo)

If you use a Google account and log in with an ID... that's a different story.

[MichaelLitvak]

i like its nice and simple design
awesome email

[Bert]

Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, take your pick -- they all log all your actions on all of their services. If you think it's just Google doing it, you're quite mistaken. If you are a privacy nut, the service you have to fear the most is the one you use the most. Google just gets singled out because it's the big guy.

Use gmail, it's great.

[Bert]

You need the data for trend analysis. Associating activity based on IP address is useless unless the user has a static IP.
At home, my IP address is dynamic and changes roughly every 14 days from my ISP, so it will be hard to track beyond 14 days worth of traffic.
I access Google mainly from my office. The only thing Google sees is my proxy servers IP. There are 8,000+ users coming out of that proxy IP... see my point.
The data is really hard to associate to any one user.
The tin foil hat wearing people would have everyone believe that they can actually track the information to a user... that is not possible given the sheer volume of data that comes in every day.
They would require more computing capacity aggregating the data than they would performing their original business functions.

Not quite true...Google, Yahoo, and MSN all use persistent cookies and can & do tie multi-session multi-IP sourced data together for various types of analysis, though none for purposes nearly as sinister as the privacy nuts would like you to believe.

Truth is the major search engines have quite good (though I admit not quite spotless) track records in handling private data. You have a lot more to fear from your credit card companies, most of which sell their data to commercial aggregators such as Acxiom who make it conveniently available and accessible to a variety of other organizations.

If you really are paranoid about being tracked, then do the following:

1) configure your browser to delete persistent cookies with each restart (they don't do this by default!)

2) make sure you use a dynamic IP address and that it changes with reasonable frequency (some dynamic IPs are effectively static they change so infrequently)

3) don't sign in to any services with a username/password.

4) request that your credit card company not share your data with third parties. Usually you can mail in a form that is part of the privacy policy they are required to periodically send out.

[Number Of The Priest]

I've got nearly 1000 emails in my inbox... no spam either.
I still have TONS of room for more crap.

You are currently using 380 MB (13%) of your 2867 MB

I don't use Gmail, and I don't use anywhere NEAR one gigabyte or two, but Yahoo Mail recently eliminated their 1GB limit for all accounts. Now I'll NEVER be able to fill it...

[CharvelRocker]

I use gmail and like it. Mainly because I don't like giving out my main email for fear of spam and crap.

[Argos]

They all do it, Google has just become known as the one who gathers the most data (as far as I know).

If you're really paranoid, you use Tor

[Bert]

They all do it, Google has just become known as the one who gathers the most data (as far as I know).

If you're really paranoid, you use Tor

Good point, I stand corrected!