Looking to leverage its popularity as a search engine, Google is now entering the email business.

The Pitch: Free "Gmail" email accounts with 1 GB of storage.

The Catch: (Isn't there always a catch?) Google will keep and analyze your email in order to provide context specific advertising placed within your email, and on their site.

So, while the service promotes the service as having built-in Spam filtering, the reality is that Google will actually be inserting their own Spam instead.

This seems to be a growing trend among email providers. They don't want Spam from outside sources reaching their customers, mostly so they can Spam their own members without competition.

Google's approach simply takes this philosophy to the next level, one that really shouldn't be taken.

Not only will Google read email that you send, but also email that you receive. By virtue of using their service, you will be subjecting those that email you to this invasion of privacy, and most likely without their knowledge.

What's worse, Google retains the right to keep your email (both received and sent) after you delete your messages, and even after you cancel your "Gmail" account.

That's right, in exchange for a free email address they not only will insert advertisements into your email, but can keep and analyze all of your private messages, forever.

While assuring privacy today, the potential for future uses and abuses of your private correspondence are practically unlimited. Who can really say what their policies will be in ten years, or even five? And, just what happens if hackers decide to break into Google, just for the fun of it, and what might they do with millions of private messages? While "Gmail" is not quite ready for public release, consider yourself forewarned.

Even if you wisely decide against this bargain with the search-engine Devil, remember that email sent to "Gmail" users is also subject to capture, analysis and storage.

With that in mind, I have already crafted a standard email reply for use in communication with "Gmail" users, and you might want to copy and paste this for future use yourself:

"Thank you very much for writing. Because the terms of your 'Gmail' account allow Google to store and analyze all correspondence between us for their commercial marketing purposes, please provide me with an alternate address to which I may reply and I'll get back to you as soon as possible!"

Published: April 8, 2004

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