Review of GMail for Your Domain 192
DevanJedi writes "Google recently started offering GMail hosted email service, with 25 free 2 GB email accounts, for universities and beta-testing private domains. Science Addiction has a review of the GMail for Your Domain service and its features including screenshots and speculation on future Google free and paid hosting efforts."
Amusing when I think of the tin foil hat crowd. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, now they might be sending mail directly to Google's servers without even knowing it! I find it highly amusing that these privacy advocates assume there's any privacy at all regarding the plaintext email they might send.
(I also find it amusing that among their privacy concerns, they also complain that gmail doesn't include the originating IP in the email headers. I guess consistency doesn't matter as long as they're railing against the great beast Google.)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Just another dingus in the line of GoogleDingus®.
Re:Amusing when I think of the tin foil hat crowd. (Score:2, Insightful)
Many people forward emails to their gmail account so this was the case even before this new service was offered
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I gave it a try (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, nothing is more professional than handing over your business email to google with their unlimited data retention policy. All my 'business' email with your organization will end up on googles server forever to be part of my demographic profile and who knows what else is done with it. All this and I didn't even sign up for gmail.
Next thing you know this will be solution for those FBI agents without fbi.gov addresses.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I gave it a try (Score:3, Insightful)
Google at least has a track record of fighting the government when it feels they have no business to ask for the information. Most of the telcos simply rolled over when the government started tapping phone calls without warrants.
I'm sure Google wasn't the only search provider approached by the government to provide search data. Why didn't we hear about the others? Maybe they just forked over the information.
Again, my knowledge of the subject is imperfect, but it doesn't seem to me that Google is any worse of a choice than others.
Re:I gave it a try (Score:5, Insightful)
I think people are confusing the issues here. If I send an email to a company online, I expect that company to protect my email according to their privacy policy. By 'contracting out' your email hosting to a third-party, in this case google, any privacy policy you adopt with me is meaningless.
This isn't about the government reading my mail with a subpeona. This is about my communications being disclosed to a third party whose sole business model is extracting the maximum advertising dollar out of that information without my permission.
As far as Sarbanes-Oxley, that law only applies to public companies registered with the SEC in the US. And even then since you have absolutely no control over what google does with the data, how could you have any assurances about data detention?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No catch-all accounts (Score:2, Insightful)
1) most address validators don't recognize this as a valid address
2) spammers can extract your real address after you've blocked the catchall alias you provided them.