On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 10:50:38AM -0400, Josh Luthman wrote: > If you're worried about that, then you wouldn't be using Gmail. Would you > use your ISP's email and expect confidentiality? For free?
If you are worried about confidentiality, you use PGP, SMIME, or similar technologies. Anything less which is transported via SMTP is smoke and mirrors. I do expect an ISP to not care enough about what is in my e-mail to worry about them sniffing around. After you've gone through a few mailboxes troubleshooting problems for customers, you realize that you do not want to go browsing through them; ick; zzz. There may be admins sick enough to want to read that drek, but I suspect they are in a significantly small minority. They probably exist, so protect yourself and use encryption or keep it out of the computer in the first place. Google is an ad agency. I expect that their privacy policy says they don't share specific information about you with their clients. I suspect it also says that the privacy policy can change at any time without notice. I do not trust google to *not* have a tendency for ads to lean toward "get a new pickup" type messages while reading an e-mail from a friend about his new pickup. TANSTAFL. Disk and the power to spin them are not free. Targeted ads sell for a higher price. I have *no* knowledge of any sort of targeted ads being "more likely" to be related to the content of an e-mail message on any free e-mail hosting services. I simply don't trust human nature that far and assume privacy will be traded for more profit in the future if that trade has not already been made. I run my own personal mail server. I also run the mail servers at the ISP at $DAYJOB. I've been doing this stuff for 13 years. We didn't have much choice back then. I've looked at outsourcing. I've done away with outsourcing for the various ISPs we have absorbed. Everyone.net was advertising to our customers. The tech support calls about everyone.net's advertised upgrades were not good. We are happier with e-mail in-house. Newcomers may decide they need to focus their learning curve time on other technologies and not want to learn how to properly handle mail servers. I encourage them to outsource. The last thing the Internet needs is more poorly run mail servers. I currently like Cyrus-IMAPd and Postfix. Dovecot looks good too. I'm just not terribly motivated to try it out. We do have a Barracuda SVF 600. I do not have time to keep up with the spammers. I played that game for several years. I am not in love with the Barracuda but we are getting what we're paying for. It does the job. I don't trust Barracuda Networks either. I just don't see a gain for them in data mining my user's e-mail for anything more than making better filtering rules, so far. -- Scott Lambert KC5MLE Unix SysAdmin lamb...@lambertfam.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
