Free Schnail Mail for life

Why would that pattern disappear? It makes money... What I would like to disappear is naivety of people. They should understands what they actually are doing. They don't need to understands the technology, just that free doesn't exist. Personally I don't care, it's a small price to pay to get a good spam protection, a good security and a good interface accessible everywhere.

The analogy is a bit leaky IMHO. Gmail doesn't add advertisements to the mails you are sending out. They only add ads to the messages you received and are looking at in your browser. If you don't want to see any ads, just use an IMAP client and you'll get the original message.

In-fact, not altering the mails their users are sending was one of the unique features when gmail launched. AFAIR both Hotmail and Yahoo were altering the messages of their users to include ads.

The part about reading the mail is true though, but on the other hand: Unless you host your own email server, it is absolutely impossible to be sure that nobody is going to read your mail as it is stored on the mailbox server (it also can (and is as we now know) be read in transit most of the time and outside of your control).

As such, I honestly trust Google more than I trust $ISP. Usually $ISP is equal to $CARRIER and those, IMHO, are the personified evil, so I wouldn't trust them at all. But even $ISP != $CARRIER, I still think that the bigger the mail provider company, the safer your messages probably are there (minus government spying, but that works regardless of ISP): Bigger providers are bigger targets and thus have likely invested more in data security and internal procedures to make sure mail isn't being read by humans unless strictly needed.

If you don't want ads in your Google-served email while using the web interface, get a paid Google Apps Account. No ads, very flexible email routing and actual customer support. For $50 per year per user. That doesn't say anything about the data being used for other marketing purposes of course, but, as I said, that problem is the same everywhere unless you self-host (which is reasonably complicated and annoying to do).

TBH when I was running a free email service in the early 2000s I really had to fight the temptation to just run grep over /var/mail and have some fun. I think the smaller the company (it was just me and my colleague back then), the bigger the risk that one unethical person can do serious damage.

> machine "reading" the email to find any excuse to label you a terrorist

Is there any evidence at all that this is happening? So far They don't need to do that, they use corrupt informants (Guantanomo) or stupid videos on YouTube (US teen "rappers").

>Government snooping is a separate issue, but as far as I know there are no major email providers that a non-technical person can use that aren't vulnerable.

Not to mention, uh, snail mail is run on the government rails.

This argument is really vacuous and makes an inappropriate analogy.

First, we need to distinguish between attaching ads to the mail experience versus injecting them into the actual content. In the original post, this service would actually open these letters and insert ads into them. This is not even remotely comparable to what most email providers do. They insert ads around the service, but never actually alter the content of the email. A better analogy would be receiving a discount on branded stamps or allowing advertisements to be displayed on your mailbox.

Second, the use of the term "read" when discussing advertising is asinine, disingenuous and probably detrimental to the conversation (inasmuch as it can provoke unnecessary fear in non-technical users). "Read" implies active evaluation and comprehension, conceivably by a person. The GMail algorithm does not "read" email in the classical sense. It systematically evaluates the content in a way isn't even remotely comparable to "reading." (This doesn't mean that this sort of advertising isn't bad, but portraying it in the way he did is just unnecessary fear mongering.)

Third, the OP seems to decry "keeping a copy" as some sort of violation. GMail is a webmail service. What the fuck are they supposed to do if not store your mail?

Fourth, this service actually seems like a good idea, and is probably something I would use for various types of mail. The price of mail been steadily increasing, and I would be fine with these practices if I knew they were saving me money. I'm willing to tolerate advertising so long as I know that the service is improving my life. Like I do with 95% of the things I use.

In conclusion, this is a very dubious analogy that doesn't really contribute to the pragmatic discussion of cost versus privacy.