Fwd: philosophical question about gmail

[Michael ODonnell]

>> I'd assume the pool of eyeballs available here
>> on the GNHLUG list to be highly desirable to an
>> advertiser, but Google has provided the GNHLUG
>> with precisely nothing in return for access
>> to those eyeballs.  Of course, the fact that
>> they're all likely to be obscenely rich after
>> the imminent IPO has nothing to do with my total
>> lack of sympathy toward them...  ;->
>
>What if someone subscribes with a Hotmail address? Microsoft owns
>Hotmail, and could potentially scan any mail on their site, and
>Microsoft has provided the GNHLUG with precisely nothing in return
>for access to those eyeballs.


I suspect that at least one of us has missed a point; I was
only worried that if (say) you were a gmail user and the
gmail folks felt free to append an ad to end of all your
outbound emails then anything you posted to the GNHLUG
list would contain an ad, thereby shoving that ad into
all our faces even though the rest of us were NOT gmail
users and had not consented to view those ads.  The gmail
folks would benefit because their ads would be in front
of a whole set of "eyeballs" (I've heard that's how the ad
geeks think of us) without us getting anything in return.

If gmail does NOT append ads to outbound msgs sent by gmail
users (ie.  gmail does NOT inflict its ads on anybody that
a gmail user happens to correspond with) then I (think I)
would have no complaints.  I've pretty much always assumed
that my msgs are subject to random scanning anywhere along
their travels.

BTW, where's the Linux connection in all of this?
maybe this thread oughta be taking place on a different
GNHLUG channel...