Gmail

Post by **Jonathan** » Thu Jul 01, 2004 1:07 am

Dear numbnuts who think Gmail is a privacy concern:

All bloody unencrypted email is a privacy concern! So, yeah, I'm afraid privacy concerns over email are Constitutional and legislative issues "best addressed to Congress and law enforcement agencies."

Sincerely,
Jonathan

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Thu Jul 01, 2004 1:25 am

Geez, if you're sending any sensitive information over unencrypted email, you're just asking for someone to read it. duh. I do not trust congress or law enforcement or anyone else to protect our privacy rights. It's still better than broadcasting your life in a LJ though.

Post by **Jonathan** » Thu Jul 01, 2004 2:42 am

My experience is all plaintext on the net is public. You can count on everything being monitored or read by someone other than the intended audience, including forums, IRC, IM, BT downloads, and pretty much everything else.

The real question is, what to do about it? If you read the court case, this guy who sold rare books and offered email forwarding addresses was monitoring his users' email for incoming Amazon.com messages to monitor what they were buying. Now, I can keep passwords, my checking account, and embarrassing information about me off the net. I can encrypt personal emails or IMs to friends (at least, those who aren't losers and have actually adopted encryption). I can only download media using WASTE, FreeNet, or that anonymous BT client I posted. But, short of no longer shopping on the web, I can't stop Amazon.com (or whoever) from sending me email confirming my order.

I guess if encryption were ubiquitous, I could tell Amazon.com my public key and they could encrypt email they send to me. However, I haven't heard of any online retailers lining up to send encrypted confirmation emails. In the near term, I believe the only relief will be legislative, unless you have a better suggestion.

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Thu Jul 01, 2004 3:33 am

I wonder if anyone has actually asked amazon and other places to send signed and/or encrypted emails.

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Tue Jul 06, 2004 7:08 pm

http://cio-today.newsfactor.com/story.x ... =ecommerce

Selling a gmail account is now against the TOS. Trading and bartering is still ok.

Post by **Jonathan** » Wed Jul 21, 2004 7:36 pm

Alright, I finally have a decent solution set up here. My email address (jonathan@pearce.name) forwards to my ISP mailbox, which has spam filtering enabled (though it's not yet doing any good). My ISP forwards my email to Gmail and keeps a local copy on their server. My Hiptop retrieves messages from my ISP mailbox and BCCs sent messages to Gmail. The extra step of indirection through my ISP wouldn't be necessary, except Gmail has not yet provided POP3 or pure HTML access, so I can't access my Gmail from my Hiptop. This solution ought to work, even if Gmail decides to charge for POP3 access.

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Wed Jul 21, 2004 7:43 pm

Heh, yeah, gmail is a bit limited with their interface not being pure html. It's pretty damn annoying when I go places that have macs or just old browsers.

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 2:25 am

In case you've just not been paying attention, there's been free POP3 access and mail forwarding for a while now.