gmail is one of the best (barnone),

re: privacy

its just as true that any ISP can snoop your email as google, you are no more safer with an ISP then you are with google so arguing that gmail is unsafe well its just not true,

i think its funny these people believe they are safer on an ISP ha ha, these same people probablly think their cellphone text messages and conversations are more secure with one company vs another
geez people wake up,

I find the praise for GMail’s UI a little mystifying. It has an intriguing concept, but its execution is flawed in so many ways.

Gmail is the mainstream prototype for “folderless” mail management, a cool concept unfortunately crippled by limited tag support and other UI weaknesses (some mentioned in comments here).

I’d like to see explicit examples of people efficiently using it to manage high volumes of mail with a broad content diversity over long periods of time. It certainly doesn’t fit that role based on my own experience.

Also, I recently filled up my Gmail account, and it is SERIOUSLY difficult to clear out email to make space. With (I presume) many Gmail accounts now reaching “maturity”, Google urgently needs to provide an option to drop old email off the back of the database to make room for new stuff. Or provide much more robust searching and mass deletion options.

The privacy issue bothers me more & more, seeing the direction Google is heading, their sheer scale, and the possibility of getting caught by mistake in a US gov electronic dragnet. No chance I’ll be using gdrive, and I’ll abandon gmail when I get a long-term institutional address. In 2020 Google will be trying to insert text messages into my dreams.

One can argue that google isn’t doing anything “bad” with your email, and that the advertising is an acceptable cost to most for a pretty good service.

But being wary of a corporation who’s bottom line is their bottom line and the wallets of their investors, is not paranoia, it is merely awareness.

We all have the right to make these decisions (to use or not); but we also have the responsibility to be informed and vigilant.

cost + risk + value. weigh them for your own particular situation and need.

If privacy is a genuine concern for a person, as opposed to a knee-jerk stance against a single company, the only solution is to operate your own email server. Even then, we’ve seen that three quarters of Internet backbone providers in the US are willing to allow traffic monitoring by government officials without a court order, so encryption is worth considering for truly sensitive information.

[OT] The crux of my argument will always boil down to cost. Only Google has the infrastructure to harness your data as a result you don’t know what they are doing with it. Everyone else has no real monetary gain to retain or even try to sift through your information.

I didn’t say Mail.app’s threading was better than Gmail’s threading. Gmail’s threading is pretty darn good, but like spam filtering it doesn’t work all the time. Unlike spam fiitering, I cannot fix the mistake. This inability to correct mistakes thwarts Gmail’s superior threading, and that is intolerable.

I can certainly understand (but not agree with) your UI complaints. To each his own - for instance, I think Gmail handles threading way better than Mail does. This thread started because someone likes Gmail more than Mail, and based on just the UI, that is certainly a debatable point.

But I still don’t understand the “privacy concerns”. I’m not sure why you don’t think other ISPs do not retain your ‘emai information’ - how does Charter Communications allow me to access my email on the web without retaining anything? Don’t they do backups? Don’t they scan every incoming email for their spam filters?

Problems with gmail:
1- They want my contacts. This is not a privacy concern, those bozos want me to spend my time uploading them. Forget it. Gmail does not sync with my phone.

2- I need an internet connection. Slow internet connections are wose than not having an internet connection with things like gmail.

3- Logging into Gmail logs me into everything else that google uses. For example, I don’t want customized news just because I logged into gmail.

4- 100 threads per page. Sorry, I need more.

5- Cannot upload old emails. I have email dating back to 1996. Local mail clients are capable of importing those emails that I want. I used to keep them in folders separated by month. Then I collapsed them into years. Then I collapsed them into two archives of sent and recieved.

6- Bad threading. Just because I hijacked a thread to pull off some emails from the message does not mean that it is part of that email thread. A previous poster covered this better. No threading is better than bad threading.

Gmail is not the cat’s meow. Add privacy concerns to the mix and its the worst. Other ISPs do not retain your email information. Up till now it wasn’t worth it. With the FCC saying that they have to in case of litigation you know that free email is on its last legs.

Excuse my speeling, I am using windows which has no support for spell checking in FireFox (don’t tell me about any plugins please, I like saying this).