JohnH wrote:
Went to get some info on Gmail and came across the following thread in the
Gmail discussion group at Yahoo:

http://tinyurl.com/hofoe

Definitely gives me second thoughts about subscribing. I think I'll just
stick with Cox and Yahoo.

I also came across this line in the info section on Gmail:

"There are no pop-ups or untargeted banner ads in Gmail, only small text
ads. Ads and related information are relevant to your messages, so instead
of being obtrusive, they may even be useful for once."

In order to target the 'ads and related information' it would seem as
though something is paying more attention to messages than I would desire.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about.html

Any thoughts?


You should not treat any unencrypted email you send or receive as if it
was any more private than a postcard. Whatever provider you use. It's
not that my tinfoil hat is too tight today, I administer email here at
work - believe my t-shirt that says "I read your email"

As for google, some of the text ads are absolutely hilarious. My friend
and I were discussing a possible new Nasa mission to Earth's sister
planet when the ad offered me "Best Prices on Hotels in Venus".

As for spoofed spams, I get about 1000 bounces a day of spams spoofed
from the business domain. Every domain owner in the world does (if you
don't have a collect-all postmaster type account they just turn to
digital dust). That doesn't send up alarm bells either.