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Originally Posted by Brutha  Backup your data, pop3 gives you the option to do that easily with gmail. You can also autoforward every message to an yahoo account to backup your data there. |
Of course, if you are after high-reliability, there is no recourse if GMail fails to forward your data.
The issue is not just speculative. A poster pointed out the tools that exist to use GMail as an offline backup medium. Doing this puts you out of your Terms of Service, and accounts have been yanked for doing just this.
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Originally Posted by Brutha Google got a lot of bad press for being transparent about what they do with your gmail data at a time where the other mail providers did the same thing but weren't as transparent. |
Google have been about the most ethical player in the unethical world of data-mining, but they are in a far better position (knowledge, resources) than others to misuse what they have, and they have got things wrong before.
My point is not to say not to use the service (I use it), but that I think it is important for people to be aware that this is not like getting an email account with AOL in some important respects: if AOL yanks your account for violating the TOS, you are in a much better position to complain about it.