Fwd: philosophical question about gmail

[Dan Jenkins]

> 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.

GMail does NOT append ads to outgoing email. Nor does it add ads to
incoming email. It does display ads adjacent to email in a separate
column. Just like Google. Ads are segregated from the search results (or,
in GMail's case the email). Ads are based on keywords found in the email
itself. Just like Google search results in which ads are based on the
terms in the search.

Some folk are concerned about the keywords in the email being associated
with the user. Google has addressed those concerns, though not to
everyone's satisfaction. (It ANYTHING ever to everyone's satisfaction.)

Personally, I have no problem with GMail. I also have no interest in
GMail. I run my own domain and my own email servers (and my own webmail
servers). So any discussion of GMail is purely academic for me.
--
Dan Jenkins (dan at rastech.com)
Rastech Inc.