Do you wonder why they keep locking your accounts and holding your money? You rolled over and took it the FIRST time and have done so since. You should've sued them the first time it happened.

Imbecile. Outside of the USA, the majority of email addresses end in a country-specific suffix.

1. It is clearly different from running your own email server. But it is also differrent from any email provider from which you POP your email and then store it locally. 2. No; but I am saying that if you use a premium account then you add to all those private data also now a provable address and other information. That's also true for any book that you buy at Amazon, but you typically do not leave 10 GB private data with Amazon. 3. If your first address was aj1990@xyz.edu and then 3 years later aj93@myhome.com and then changed again a couple of years, it might be fun working with those emails over the Gmail or any IMAP interface. Think also about your "sent" folder, not only other folders.

Maybe he's a sleeze. Maybe even criminally so. You have no evidence of this, however. And fortunately, I live in a society where you are presumed innocent.

It has been mentioned that he has been dragging wikileaks into this personal situation, for example using the wikileaks twitter feed to promote the idea that he is innocent and the US is running a smear campaign. I do not think he would be asked to step down, especially so publicly, if he had kept his personal life and wikileaks separate.

1) I use the common "business identifier@vanitydomain.com" trick to help identify who is selling my e-mail address. Gmail has plus-addressing, which works reasonably well, however it is imperfect. Some spammers know about plus-addressing, and strip the plus. Google Apps for Domains would work, except that you're pretty limited in the number of addresses you can use without paying exorbitant (for these purposes) fees.

2) Forwarding mail to Google destroys valuable header information. Redirecting mail can cause it to get blocked by the spam filter (sometimes so badly that it doesn't even make it into your spam folder.) So even keeping your own mail server and just bouncing everything up there isn't a viable solution.

3) Having Google pop mail from your server is probably the most workable technical solution, but then Google has your password. Also, there are size limitations, in case you happen to have large attachments that you need to preserve.

1) Privacy and possibility of identity theft. 2) 7.5 gigs is nothing for 20 years of email - unless you do not use attachments. If you upgrade, you also share your real name and credit card etc. with Google. 3) Your email address probably changed multiple times over those 20 years - do you want to change all emails in the sense that the email address needs to be changed?

WHY oh why on earth would you pay someone to do something that you can do for yourself for free?

A liberal estimate of my lifetime of e-mail is a little over half a gigabyte.

It's the modern equivalent of saving all your personal letters and other correspondence. What the heck is abnormal about that? In the old days you'd have a bundle of letters stored in the attic somewhere. But this doesn't result in heaps of paper or file cabinets full of it that get in your way, as it does for people with a genuine mental problem [wikipedia.org]

I dislike GMail for my professional correspondence for a number of reasons: (1) it does not allow me to readily use my university affiliation address (and since that's a top university, that makes a difference whether people like it or not), (2) I do not have ownership of my email, (3) the lack of a good filing / archiving interface makes it hard to associate different threads together, or to limit searches (I intensely dislike the tagging feature), (4) GMail has an only rudimentary ability to edit text since it's browser-based.

So on the one hand, you think my saving email for later access and analysis is not useful, but then, you want to know why it is useful?

When I run events, I need to be able to post-hoc review all of the correspondence for demographic analysis, often done two years after the event when the final reports are being written. Saying that this sort of behavior is odd, or not normal is either being a troll, or not understanding how the world works when you're not just a drone.

IMO, this is one of the best Slashdot questions ever, and I am greatly anticipating hearing some good answers, especially if they don't include suggesting GMail as a panacea,

YOU say that that is what this is about, but many Net Neutrality Proponents say otherwise, that AT&T shouldnt be allowed to throttle Torrents/etc.