Honestly: If the Department of Education wants their students to use gmail, they could just tell them to get a free account – what would be the difference?

Instead, Australian money again migrates to a US company for a service that could as well have been delivered by Australian companies.

It seems to me that a decision was made to walk on the safe side: while in the past you could not be fired for deciding for IBM or Microsoft, Google has now joined this set of safe decision. Congratulations, Google.

Your Email is always available for sniffing not matter what Email systems you use, and using an in-house Email server like Exchange or anything else won’t make your privacy or confidential info be protected well, as long as you don’t encrypt the Email.

Have you ever used a protocol analyzer? You could watch all day long and see that Outlook is not sending your subject lines back to Microsoft. I’ve never done that myself, but have you actually gone through every line of source code for Thunderbird? Sure, someone has, but I bet someone has also watched a good deal of (nonexistant) Outlook data packets to Microsoft. I (and Microsoft) know that the uproar over such a thing going on would be widespread, so has a very low odds of happening.

Finally, you KNOW that Google HAS ALL OF YOUR E-MAILS and they ADMIT TO DATAMINING ALL OF THEM. Way to go, genius.

By the way, go to that article and highlight a section of text in preparation to copy it to your clipboard. They have some anti-copy technology in place. Viewing source does not show the text either. Kind of clever. Must be loading text using AJAX or something like that.

Interesting.

For a web-based e-mail, I still prefer the old-school Yahoo. Have yet to switch to their ‘new-improved’ version of mail. I just wish developers would realize we really just want fast and simple access.