Free Google Email with 1 Gig of storage

[Alluvian]

How is Google's position fundamentally any different?

Because it is an inanimate object.  Fuck, you really don't get the difference?

My bathroom mirror sees me naked all the time too, I am not calling it a voyeur.  Sure it is a bad analogy, but you are acting like you don't know the fundamental differences between a computer and a human.  I think you should stop watching scifi.

At worst they are getting demographics.

[malloc]

Secondly, there isn't a filter in existence that I'm aware of that scans anything more than an email's subject line.

Then it is quite clear you know nothing of value about the subject you are writing on.

[HeartBurn]

Secondly, there isn't a filter in existence that I'm aware of that scans anything more than an email's subject line.

Then it is quite clear you know nothing of value about the subject you are writing on.

LOL My yahoo account gets messages with HI as the subject from spammers and from people I know. the ones from people I know come through. The ones from spammers don't. Imagine that.

[HeartBurn]

The problem that I have with the Google thing is that to me, it comes dangerously close to spying on people and the fact that it's being done by a computer program is the only reason they can get away with it.

Fucking don't use it then. Drop your yahoo hotmail and your own isp email too because they fucking read it too when they scan it. Messages with the subject HI come through to me when they are from people I know but not when it's from a spammer. Tell me how the fuck that happens if they don't read my e-mail.

[Soukyan]

Conspiracy theories and paranoia aside, does anyone know roughly when Google may start offering this service?

[Odysseus]

Fucking don't use it then.

I'm not donning the tinfoil hat for GMail, but your solution isn't helpful. If GMail is wildly popular then you will have to amend it to say, "Fucking don't send email to people at GMail." Which could include most of your non-techie family members and friends.

This essay explores the privacy issues with GMail very well. Chiastic's reaction may be 99% irrational. Even so, there are some issues to think about here and "fucking don't use it then" is just willful ignorance.

[Alluvian]

Which could include most of your non-paranoid family members and friends.

Fixed it for you.

To some degree or another, everyone here is what I would consider at least partially techie and still the anti-google paranoids are the minority.

To call this a techie/non-techie issue is... how would you say it?  Willfully ignorant?   Yeah, that's it.

[Odysseus]

Which could include most of your non-paranoid family members and friends.

Fixed it for you.

To some degree or another, everyone here is what I would consider at least partially techie and still the anti-google paranoids are the minority.

To call this a techie/non-techie issue is... how would you say it?  Willfully ignorant?   Yeah, that's it.

Way to blow it out of proportion and context. Have a cookie. My point is that centralized, long-term storage of email (GMail, everybody else who will mimic GMail) is not something that people can ignore if they choose.[*] Simply refusing to use GMail won't let you off the hook if everybody else you know is using it. Since, you know, email involves more than one person talking. Hmm, maybe you don't know.


[*] Edit for the pedants: You can't ignore it in the sense that the privacy issues won't disappear when you're not looking. Contrary to popular geek wisdom, emails have been protected by law since 1986 under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. By storing emails indefinitely, GMail voids those protections and makes it much easier to seize your emails (i.e., with a subpoena rather than a warrant).

[Chiastic]

The short-bus crowd is out in force today.

Fucking don't use it then. Drop your yahoo hotmail and your own isp email too because they fucking read it too when they scan it. Messages with the subject HI come through to me when they are from people I know but not when it's from a spammer. Tell me how the fuck that happens if they don't read my e-mail.

Your address book overrides your filters, dumbass.  If it's someone that you know, chances are you've emailed them back before, and just about every client in existence will dutifully record that fact and green-light mail from that addy.

Then it is quite clear you know nothing of value about the subject you are writing on.

Alright Sparky, name an institution that provides a scoring content-based filter of any kind on anything other than a purely opt-in basis with total end-user control and we'll talk.  If you can't, then hush.  Nobody cares what kind of filtering individuals choose to employ of their own accord.

Because it is an inanimate object. Fuck, you really don't get the difference?

My bathroom mirror sees me naked all the time too, I am not calling it a voyeur. Sure it is a bad analogy, but you are acting like you don't know the fundamental differences between a computer and a human. I think you should stop watching scifi.

At worst they are getting demographics.

The fundamental difference between a human and a computer is that a computer is a tool that requires human supervision and oversight to properly function.  It's nothing more than a demonstration of your ignorance to believe that because Gmail will use automated software as its front-line data-mining application somehow means that human beings won't be involved in pruning that data after the fact or that human beings won't be the ones to ultimately decide how that data is collected and used.  This fully autonomous system you think you're getting is a figment of your imagination.  You're the one living in sci-fi land, not me.

And you think all they're going to get is demographics?  Have you ever even heard of metadata processing?

I'm not worried about John Ashcroft reading my email or any of that other paranoid bullshit.  If he wants to read it, let him, it really isn't all that interesting.  The only real concern that I have (aside from general data security issues) is that gloves-off ultra-targeted advertising offends my sense of what is and isn't in good taste.  I'd rather Google not spam me with funeral home ads when my parents email me my grandfather's funeral arrangements after he dies.  Or ads for goddamned nursing homes when I get old.

So what I'm worried about is this:  With Gmail as proof-of-concept that such things can be done (and from a purely technical standpoint, it's my opinion that they almost certainly can be done right now to some extent), an entire industry will be born around the idea overnight and we'll all be stuck with it.

Which, frankly, is not cool.

[Alluvian]

Way to blow it out of proportion and context. Have a cookie.

Wow.  Now I have a cookie AND I am not being chased by secret government workers!  My life is so much better than yours!

I just can't fathom why anyone would give a SHIT about a computer reading email.  I don't get what anyone would be so afraid of.  Email has NEVER been secure. Or do you encrypt all your email as well so the government does not find out about when you are visiting your sister?

[Odysseus]

Way to blow it out of proportion and context. Have a cookie.

Or do you encrypt all your email as well so the government does not find out about when you are visiting your sister?

Awesome. Now you have it in your head that I'm paranoid.

Here's a hint: I don't care about computers reading my email. You have my points mixed up with Chiastic's. I'm trying to point out that there are actual, interesting privacies issues to think about with GMail. I even provided a nice and reasonable link from one of the EFF Chairmen, but maybe you were too busy building a strawman.

[Soukyan]

I think it can all come down to the old, where are you storing it deal. Mind you, this is my take on it and it may be completely out of line with current law and legislatures relating to the subject at hand. But here's my somewhat non-utopian vision.

If I am storing something on your server, like say a character in an online game or email, then that data is your property. I pay you perhaps or maybe just signup for your service and agree to your terms.

If I am using hotmail or yahoo or gmail or whatever and the mail is being stored on their servers, then that data is technically their property. The content of that is probably none of their business, BUT as the data is their property, they could technically have access to the content. If I want to protect that content, I should download those emails to my computer as quickly as possible and remove it from their servers.

But it is on their servers at some point and they could mine it for data. I suppose I could fire up my Linux server and start the mail server up on it and just handle all of my email myself. Of course, an analogy is that the post office does not read my mail when they are delivering it. But then again, they also won't store my mail for me for a long period of time.

So is the issue with mail or with storage? I don't know. What I do know is that the internet is a public place. Like any other public place, there is very little in the way of privacy. I don't think that privacy on the internet is an easy venture, just as security on the internet is not easy. Is it a noble cause and a goal to strive for? Perhaps.

I use encryption on my email. This is about the only method I have of ensuring some small semblance of security and privacy. I also don't use free web-based email providers as channels for important or secure data. I use my ISP and I secure it where possible. Does my ISP store copies of that data and read it? I don't know. From what I can tell on my end, I have to assume that they are merely a transfer agent and the data is only stored for as long as it takes me to retrieve it. But that's probably not the case, and I may never know one way or the other.

Privacy is a big issue and always will be. I think people are more frightened of each other than they are of Big Brother. But I also think a lot of people think they have more privacy than they really do. Examine your workplaces policy on privacy. You will probably find that the only thing that belongs to you at work are items that are kept in a locked drawer. Your employer can confiscate anything at anytime. And if you bring a plant in and put it on your desk, guess who is now the owner of that property? Hint: Not you. But that's getting into a major digression.

The fact remains that in regards to spam, we will eventually need a Do Not Email List, just as we needed a Do Not Call List, to effectively prevent spam and give a more solid base for prosecution of violations to the law. Of course, even that system is not perfect.

As to GMail, I'm surprised at the concern over it, considering how easy it is to intercept cell phone conversations these days and the huge reliance on the damn things. The only way to be truly private is to lock yourself inside and cut off all communication to the outside world. As soon as you send a letter to, call, or email a friend, your world is no longer private. Not because some company is snooping on you, but because you have just shared information with another person who could divulge that information to others regardless of promises to the contrary.

I've rambled long enough. Just some thoughts.

[Alluvian]

No, I just don't follow links.  Thanks for providing it though.  It looks pretty.

Maybe if I read the link this would all make sense.

[edit]

Fucking hell.  No, that didn't help.  The link was just more of the same irrational BS.  Except now I lost a few more minutes of my already too short life.

My aversion to following links has just raised 10 fold.  Is there an actual valid concern anywhere in that link?  If so I must have missed it.  I just saw concerns about paranoid 'perceptions' and 'irrational fears'.

I will admit I skimmed the last half because of utter boredom with the first half.  Maybe there was something tangible I missed there.

[Odysseus]

Is there an actual valid concern anywhere in that link?  If so I must have missed it.  I just saw concerns about paranoid 'perceptions' and 'irrational fears'.

You mean the text between the first and last sections where Templeton discusses the ECPA? Emails are protected by law, see, unless they are centrally stored in a place like GMail for over 180 days.

There's also the bit where he offers the simple solution of Google encrypting archived emails. The idea is that old emails would be encrypted with the user's passkey, so even if the government comes along with a subpoena to search Google's archives they won't get anything without getting a warrant to wrestle the passkey away from the user.

Subpoenas = easy to get. Warrants = hard to get. ECPA and/or encryption = get a warrant. That's the bulk of his essay. Not a word about black helicopters or Tom Ridge.

[Alluvian]

Hardly any of his concerns were google specific.   They have all been there since the early days of hotmail.  The problems with adding in your searches have been there since yahoo at the very latest.

I don't see what any of this has to do with a computer adding ads to the browser border when you launch them.  It does not look like they even STORE this data, just bring it up when you launch particular emails.

The only concern I see is a fuzzy one about whether you give away rights you may not even have when you sign an okay that googlecomputer can read your emails.  But those rights have been in flux since hotmail.  The thought that data being stored on a third parter server for FREE is even a little bit secure is frankly stupid in my eyes.

Your expectations of privacy may be different, but then shouldn't you be paying for that security?  Use your ISP for anything you are concerned about.  I find the whole google thing completely uninteresting because it is pointless.

Behind all of this are my personal thoughts that peoples expectations of privacy have been out of line with reality for a long time.  I personally would not care if a person at the FBI personally read each one of my emails.  There is nothing in there that I am afraid of.  I don't understand what others fears are.  Maybe they are secret agents or something, but I don't get it.  The guy in the article talks about using his search engine to look up things like how his family is doing, or the medications he is taking.  And then says 'very personal things'.  ???

I take aleve for my arthritis pain, I am taking a somewhat experimental drug that I frankly can't even remember the name of to maybe solve my problems with ankylosing spondylitis.  It would be awesome if it worked.  We will see, it is still early.  My wife is taking asthma medicine because she has athsma (I can't spell that).  She is taking clariton for allergies as needed.  She recently went to the doctor for some temporary hemmeroid problems, but they are already going away on their own.  Poor thing.  They suck, but most of us have been bothered with them occasionally.  We recently bought some heartworm medication.  It was for cats, but we are using it on our ferrets.  This is not really private shit in my opinion.  Private in that others don't know unless we tell them, but not private in that it is dangerous in the hands of others.  I am not giving out my damn credit card info over email or my bank account numbers.  But day to day shit like this... what's the big fuss?  Who would bore themselves with reading it?  If police thought we might be doing something illegal, reading my email would do nothing except make them think they had the wrong guy.  Go ahead and read it police.  Corporations reading it?  Sure.  Maybe they will sell me coupons for video games instead of viagra.  That would be nice.

It's not like I have a body buried in my backyard.  And if my neighbor does I would applaud and not jeer if someone used his email to catch him.

[Odysseus]

Hardly any of his concerns were google specific.   They have all been there since the early days of hotmail.  

You're mistaken. Hotmail basically forces users to delete emails on a regular basis. When the users deletes the email, it's really gone from Hotmail's servers.

GMail, until just the other day, didn't offer a way to delete emails. They would remain archived in Google's cluster until, I presume, the Sun goes red giant and engulfs the Earth. In response to the criticisms about keeping mail alive--and thus voiding the ECPA time limit--they've added a "really, really delete it" option.

That's why people get vocal about these things, you know? To get things changed.

As for the rest of your post re: "what's all the hubbub about privacy?", may your apathy extend to all areas where we disagree. >;)

[HeartBurn]

The short-bus crowd is out in force today.

Fucking don't use it then. Drop your yahoo hotmail and your own isp email too because they fucking read it too when they scan it. Messages with the subject HI come through to me when they are from people I know but not when it's from a spammer. Tell me how the fuck that happens if they don't read my e-mail.

Your address book overrides your filters, dumbass.  If it's someone that you know, chances are you've emailed them back before, and just about every client in existence will dutifully record that fact and green-light mail from that addy.

Sorry you are the dumbass. I don't have an address book. And I'm talking about Yahoo here. No fucking client you idiot.

[Alluvian]

GMail, until just the other day, didn't offer a way to delete emails. They would remain archived in Google's cluster until, I presume, the Sun goes red giant and engulfs the Earth. In response to the criticisms about keeping mail alive--and thus voiding the ECPA time limit--they've added a "really, really delete it" option.

See, that's a valid complaint.  I don't recall it being listed in this thread or that link you provided.  I could have missed it though.

Hotmail and such have limits on size, but not date. So they don't make you delete things after a certain time, only after a certain amount of storage.  I have kept emails in a hotmail account for years until I let it lapse from inactivity eventually.  Having a larger storage space will mean the emails tend to be stored longer than normal.  And again I didn't know about not being able to delete things.

I still don't really consider email being stored on a third party system for free to be your personal property though.  No more than my MMOG characters are my possession.

I never had any illusions about privacy of the third party email systems so my apathy is mainly in the "well, duh" category more than anything.

[cevik]

The short-bus crowd is out in force today.

Fucking don't use it then. Drop your yahoo hotmail and your own isp email too because they fucking read it too when they scan it. Messages with the subject HI come through to me when they are from people I know but not when it's from a spammer. Tell me how the fuck that happens if they don't read my e-mail.

Your address book overrides your filters, dumbass.  If it's someone that you know, chances are you've emailed them back before, and just about every client in existence will dutifully record that fact and green-light mail from that addy.

I hate disagreeing with Chiastic because he's rarely wrong, but I'm going to have to do it in this case.

I use Outlook Express as a front end to hotmail.  I have one friend in particular who I email 10-20 times a day usually, I've known him for years, he works down the street and we are good friends in real life.  He uses yahoo for his mail because he doesn't want his work to read it (we cuss a lot and his boss is a freak).  His name and email are in my address book, both in Outlook Express and on my hotmail.com account.

When I get to work in the morning I'll email him (or he'll email me) a message that's usually something like:

Subject: scuba

Okay man, we're diving in a week and a half.. you still going to make it?

(that's the email I sent today that started the conversation)

So when that first email gets sent, from that point on the person just hits reply and we converse back on forth.  After the first email the message line is always "re:  scuba" or something like that (maybe "re: 'sup" or "re:  werd up?" or "re:  tonight" or.. you get the idea)..

Once, sometimes twice, a week we'll suddenly start tripping Hotmail's spam filter.  This guy has been in my address book for years.  The subject line doesn't change, but like the emails will be going into my inbox at noon, and like at 1 they'll suddenly start going into my "Junk Mail" folder instead.  I have no clue what makes it happen, but I don't think it can be the address book or the subject line.

[Odysseus]

Fair enough, Alluvian, but the law does consider your email to be your private property, since 1986. It's a tenuous right (tenuous enough that a benign company like Google managed to bring up some issues with it), but it's no illusion. Whether or not you personally need that protection is beside the point, IMO. We have it, and I'd rather err on the side of keeping my rights when I don't see a good reason to give them up.

I think everybody knows that email is wide open for the world to hack, read, abuse, whatever. Email is inherently insecure without crypto, and we've all learned to accept that. But the one thing people can't do with my email is use it in court, unless they can prove they have a good reason. That is the sort of privacy I'm interested in, just as surely as I'm interested in having the right to an attorney or pleading the 5th. Hopefully I'll never need those rights, but there they are.

[Chiastic]

Sorry you are the dumbass. I don't have an address book. And I'm talking about Yahoo here. No fucking client you idiot.

Hahahahahahahahahaha. (that's a link, damn this board to hell)

And you don't think you have a client?  What the hell do you think Yahoo! Mail is then, chopped liver?

Oh, and before you start screaming "not the same thing:"

Is my Yahoo! Address Book the same thing as my Yahoo! Mail address book?

Yahoo! Address Book and the address book found in Yahoo! Mail use the same underlying contact information. Therefore, you can access all of your contact information through your Yahoo! Mail account or directly through your Yahoo! Address Book.

And cevik, that's weird as hell.  It isn't supposed to do that.  Anyone on your contacts list (address book) is supposed to be green-lighted, period.

Messages from addresses (or domains) on your Safe List are never filtered to Junk E-Mail. (Note: messages from a contact or group member are already considered safe.)

Where is he physically when it starts dumping the replies into Junk Mail (home, work, etc.)?  The only thing that I can figure is that the Hotmail system is flagging one of the domains he's connecting through as a spam factory on the front end and filtering the messages before they ever hit your account (would explain the sporadic nature of your problem, anyway, assuming he uses his email account from multiple domains).  

Which still doesn't make any sense because in that case I'd imagine that SoP is just to block it completely.  Unless of course you're both using Hotmail accounts and the "flagged domain (blocked) + Hotmail-to-Hotmail transfer (probably defaulted as OK)" bit is prompting the system to take contradictory actions and it opts for some kind of goofy middle ground instead.

You might wanna yell at them about that and see if they know what's going on.

EDIT:

Ok, so he uses Yahoo and I can't read.  I've got no clue then.  I have a hard time buying that the messages are tripping the filter (this guy's messages aren't even supposed to be subjected to the filter).  You make it sound as if the problem is essentially happening at random and doesn't seem to be easily reproducible.  Such a lack of consistency is very unfilter-like, especially since from a computer's point of view, all of his emails are essentially identical.  That a filter could even distinguish one of his messages from another over the course of a specific conversation is highly unlikely, no matter what kind you're using.

Do you have any custom message sorting rulesets in place that could somehow route emails from him after a certain point to Junk?  It sorta seems to me that the issue is somehow related to the number of messages you get from him in a given time period.

I could speculate all night, but unless I'm sitting in front of your box seeing it happen for myself (and tinkering with everything), I kinda doubt I'm going to be much help here.

[HeartBurn]

Sorry you are the dumbass. I don't have an address book. And I'm talking about Yahoo here. No fucking client you idiot.

Hahahahahahahahahaha. (that's a link, damn this board to hell)

And you don't think you have a client?  What the hell do you think Yahoo! Mail is then, chopped liver?

Neither I nor you have any fucking idea what you are talking about.
I said I have mail subjects of 'HI'; if it's from someone I know I get it in my inbox. If it's spam, it goes to my spam. That's because YAHOO FUCKING READS MY EMAIL TO SCAN IT. Someone said that Yahoo does not read my email that they only do filtering based on the subject. That's bullshit. They read my email that;s the only way they know which one is spam and which one isn't.
Sure I HAVE a fucking address book, but I don't have any goddamn addresses in it so what the fuck??? I have no addresses fucking in it, that's what I meant and it's fucking stupid to point to a link like that. You weren't even paying attention to the fucking discussion apparently.Yahoo reads my email and that's how they tell spam from not.

[Chiastic]

Neither I nor you have any fucking idea what you are talking about. I said I have mail subjects of 'HI'; if it's from someone I know I get it in my inbox. If it's spam, it goes to my spam. That's because YAHOO FUCKING READS MY EMAIL TO SCAN IT. Someone said that Yahoo does not read my email that they only do filtering based on the subject. That's bullshit. They read my email that;s the only way they know which one is spam and which one isn't. Sure I HAVE a fucking address book, but I don't have any goddamn addresses in it so what the fuck??? I have no addresses fucking in it, that's what I meant and it's fucking stupid to point to a link like that. You weren't even paying attention to the fucking discussion apparently.Yahoo reads my email and that's how they tell spam from not.

Um, no.  See, I have this thing called "a degree" and a few other things called "certs" that say I know what I'm talking about.  All that you've got is liberal use of the word "fuck" and an apparent aversion to coherency.  I win by default.

I hate to ask this, but since you seem to believe that it's possible to read email without the use of a client, I'm going to.  Did you actually check to see what is or isn't in your address book before you wrote that?  I'm not sure how Yahoo! does business, but almost all stand-alone clients (Outlook, etc.) and Hotmail at the very least on the web side automatically add replied-to addresses to your book.

A spam filter, whether it scans the body of an email or not, cannot under any circumstances tell the difference between an email from someone that you know and one from someone that you don't unless you explicitly define the addresses of people that you know.  The reason for this is excruciatingly simple:  the filter cannot read your mind.  It does not know that sassybitch@hotmail.com belongs to Randy, your friend, and not Randy, your mortal enemy and spammer.

If your client's filter is, as you claim, letting email from people that you know through because it's from people that you know (and not because the message itself just doesn't seem to be spam regardless of who it's from), then this is happening because you either told it who your friends are or because it's configured to guess that people you reply to are acceptable.

It is not using some automagical message-reading metadata processing algorithm to determine on its own that, yes, Randy is one cool motherfucker and should never be consigned to the spam box, ever.  And frankly, while very expensive and high-maintenance data-mining apps are capable of scanning and processing the text of your emails in a way that could be said to approximate "reading," I'm pretty sure that the filtering that comes with a free Yahoo! Mail account is not such an application.

[HeartBurn]

If your client's filter is, as you claim, letting email from people that you know through because it's from people that you know (and not because the message itself just doesn't seem to be spam regardless of who it's from), then this is happening because you either told it who your friends are or because it's configured to guess that people you reply to are acceptable.

What a moron. It's letting email from people I know because they put actual real content in the email and because the spam has content that the filter knows is spam. They are not in my address book. Yahoo ASKS if you want to add people when you rep[ly and who the fuck said I replied to them? Your degree and certs made you stupid as fuck.

[HaemishM]

With Gmail as proof-of-concept that such things can be done (and from a purely technical standpoint, it's my opinion that they almost certainly can be done right now to some extent), an entire industry will be born around the idea overnight and we'll all be stuck with it.

Which, frankly, is not cool.

Dude, this industry ALREADY EXISTS. It is in operation every day of the week. Who do you think is getting and storing your information when you sign into ANY opt-in email form? If you sign up for something, whether it be a credit card, phone service, etc. SOMEONE has all the information they need to start building a profile on you. The industry was born five years ago or longer. This is merely one more tool used by one more service for the same thing. It's nothing new.

[HeartBurn]

It's nothing new.

You know how all the info they teach in those technical schools to get your certs are years out of date and shit. That must be where hes getting his info.

[Chiastic]

What a moron. It's letting email from people I know because they put actual real content in the email and because the spam has content that the filter knows is spam. They are not in my address book. Yahoo ASKS if you want to add people when you rep[ly and who the fuck said I replied to them? Your degree and certs made you stupid as fuck.

The flow of email to your account is 100% one-way?  Riiight.

You seem to have a problem with writing sentences that say what you want them to say.

In your special universe, this:

I don't have an address book.

somehow actually means:

Sure I HAVE a fucking address book

and this:

Messages with the subject HI come through to me when they are from people I know

somehow actually means this:

It's letting email from people I know because they put actual real content in the email

And just the simple fact that you wrote this:

No fucking client you idiot.

probably means that you're beyond help.  Perhaps, then, your failure to intelligently communicate is the real problem here.  All I can do is work with what I'm given and hope that you manage to graduate from high school one day.

To be serious for a minute, neither one of us have any fucking idea what kind of filters Yahoo! uses other than the fifteen custom keyword filters that the service allows you to define for yourself (I checked) because they aren't saying.

But from the sheer standpoint of realistic speculation and proven concepts, putting multiple users behind a single content-scoring filter is sheer idiocy (people's actions will contradict one-another and fuck it sideways in a couple of days) and the processing/bandwidth pricetag for giving each and every user his own private one would be astronomic.  Just imagine running billions of emails through millions of Bayesian filters all on the same system.  Not.  Practical.  At. All.

Now then, do you really want to know the hundreds of ways that you can sift spam from legit mail on the cheap without ever touching the body OR the subject line?  Or can we finally call it a day?

Haemish,

Oh please.  Spare me your armchair analysis.  You honestly think that what Google is trying to do is "nothing new?"  Then do explain why there's enormous industry interest in this little project because people are dying to see whether or not it can be done.

Nobody has tried anything even remotely like this before.  Effective automated large-scale mining of totally unformatted data is an extremely ambitious project.  Opt-in mailings, credit card purchases, etc. all require people to perform very specific and easily parasable actions in order to generate consumer data (and the amount of metadata that can be extrapolated from that data in real time is less than impressive).

If Google's shit works and all of a sudden something as nebulous as an email paragraph can be processed in a way that consistently produces actionable, cross-referenceable (and the holy grail: instanceable) consumer data, the very nature of advertising could change overnight.

There's "If you ever get heartburn, buy Tums!" and there's "Buy Tums right now, because we know that you, Haemish, have a history of heartburn problems and we also know that you, Haemish, just ate a plate of fajitas at Chili's!"

Some people will have a problem with that kind of thing and some won't.  But "nothing new" it ain't.

[HeartBurn]

...shit that ignores the real issue...

Just trying to make a point to a moron that doesnt understand that your email is getting read stored scanned and archived all over the place and has been for years. Sure this is a little different but the sky isnt going to fall where i am. Just like Yahoos spam filter scans my email, but no one at yahoo is really 'reading' it, gmail will scan my email but no one at gmail will really be reading it. if you are so fucking worried then you better unplug from the internet now because they are coming for you. that is all.

[ClumsyOaf]

Christ people, you have this long discussion on google mail - but you don't bother to use google to find stuff that backs up your claim...

Here, I'll help: SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin(tm) is a mail filter to identify spam.

Using its rule base, it uses a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text to identify "spam", also known as unsolicited commercial email.

I'm not saying Yahoo uses this filter, Hotmail probably doesn't :) But it is a commercially used filter, and there are large ISPs / Mail servers that use it.

As for only filtering for headers and address book: I've had a mail account for about 10 years now, I use it for signing up for all kinds of crap - but it also is my main account. I always, as far as I know, receive mail from the people I want mail from - and on a really bad day I get maybe 5 spam mails. I use pine as my client (meaning manually adding people to the address book - I haven't bothered to add anybody), and I don't run any filters of my own. And yet, somehow, spam is being filtered, while mail with typical spam headers from people I know get through...

And, as a final point, why would spammers have stuff like this:

eager eyebrow actinometer filler curve follow magnolia airframe
melancholy codify bounce landlord oneself intensive wells referendum
cerium philosopher twirl biceps tenth parkway musty coconut hypothesis
there'd wintertime caprice arthritis deflector electrolysis preliminary
cayley motley bridgetown miranda dust confession disk acetylene almond
usual brillouin gradate sinh renault rockaway cluck inscription wrest
elbow deferent character procrustes chou newspapermen bamberger mormon
indira guernsey beef doorkeep anorexia cell assimilate point peptide
noisemake acrobacy bridgeport agnes mottle city abbott barbara simons
astigmat jugging dwight fully cheek breakaway wound coronet kolkhoz tate
bottle reef connally embraceable pyle wit stammer enol sentiment stubby
lord procaine spectroscopic weight forum octant meet erastus gore cutset
taketh babcock bertie cache moen nipple trod dairyman technology haynes
whiteface soar portmanteau allentown blandish liaison alphonse abbey
collet sourdough christendom baptistery gimpy bergson advisable dahlia
anthracite begin comeback hap solvate gotham cheesy compress corrigible
chaste consummate lumbermen military raise corn coronate sagacious whup
mend dill gannet paulo sweat reinhold impracticable result insist
endogamy gaugeable dowitcher blockade accessory obese

as body text, unless they were trying to avoid filters?
Personal "filters" usually trigger on single words, so adding random words would actually increase the chance of getting caught by a filter - right?

Having said that, I don't know a great deal about spam filters - I just wanted to add some, well - spam, to an otherwise meaningless discussion.