Personal Development for Smart People Forums - View Single Post

shnu · 12-16-2007, 02:25 PM

I think GMail is the best engineered free mail offering out there, but there are a couple of issues with it:

You don't own the data, and you have no legal recourse if they mess up or lose your data;
You are giving Google an awful lot of your personal data to analyse how they please, and they know more about data mining than anyone else.

Basically, I think you have to trust Google a fair bit to use GMail. That said, they are less likely to lose your data than most people will be with a self-administered machine.

web.de offer a free email service with both POP and IMAP, which I have used without problems for years (as well as a GMail account, and an email server i run myself).

12-16-2007, 02:25 PM	#23 (permalink)
shnu Member Join Date: May 2007 Posts: 68	Trust and ownership I think GMail is the best engineered free mail offering out there, but there are a couple of issues with it: You don't own the data, and you have no legal recourse if they mess up or lose your data; You are giving Google an awful lot of your personal data to analyse how they please, and they know more about data mining than anyone else. Basically, I think you have to trust Google a fair bit to use GMail. That said, they are less likely to lose your data than most people will be with a self-administered machine. web.de offer a free email service with both POP and IMAP, which I have used without problems for years (as well as a GMail account, and an email server i run myself).