gmail

Wow, what a flurry of press coverage on Gmail. I wonder how much of it is because the service itself isn't available to the public yet, so reporters are stuck scrutinizing every last word in the privacy policy.

The two biggest complaints seem to be the targeted ads and the deletion policy. My thoughts...

I don't have a problem with a computer scanning my e-mail. Spam filtering and spell checking are both dependent on my e-mail being scanned. The difference is that in Gmail, the result of the scanning is the possibility of targeted ads being displayed in my mail client. I have no problem with this either; the ads are extremely unobtrusive and Gmail is very conservative about displaying ads at all. My only concern is, if I click on an ad, then does the advertiser now know something about the contents of my e-mail? Can the advertiser link my click with any identifying information, such as my IP address? This concern would be allayed by a privacy policy saying advertisers only get aggregate data on how well given keywords are performing.

As far as the deletion policy goes, I don't see how it is anything new. Yahoo! explicitly states: Please note that any information that we have copied may remain in back-up storage for some period of time after your deletion request. This may be the case even though no information about your account remains in our active user databases. I'm sure Hotmail does the same.

I think people are concerned that deleted e-mail is being used to profile users, when really what the policy is trying to say is that it's technologically difficult to support redundancy and instantaneous purging of data. Clarification that this is the case would be great.

I personally have no problem with Gmail deleting just the pointers to my e-mail, over a predefined period of time (30 days?), instead of instantaneously wiping and overwriting my e-mail on all servers and tape backups. Yes, the e-mail might still be able to be retrieved by a data-recovery specialist who has access to the Gmail hardware, but it resides on my local machine (in my browser cache, even when expunged) for an indefinite period, as well.

So yes, I'm comfortable with using Gmail...and it rocks. My favorite Gmail features:

Ultra-super-fast search (with snippets!) of course.

Keyboard shortcuts: My biggest complaint about webmail is how mouse intensive it is compared to Unix mail systems. Now I can navigate through my e-mail with almost no mouse interaction at all. (I've yet to figure out how to send a composed message without using the mouse.)

Threading: Gmail displays a message and all its subsequent replies as a "conversation". I must say, the UI for this is very well done. I hate the Outlook threading UI, and was not optimistic when I heard Gmail would use threading, but it's actually very convenient and intuitive. The logic that collapses quoted text is great. It's also nice that you can always tell if you've replied (and what you've replied) to a given message.

Labels vs Folders/Directories: I love that each message can have multiple labels. I realize that the point of Gmail is that you never have to categorize your e-mail again, but I can't kick the habit yet. Then again, it's only been a week.