Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Review of GMail for Your Domain

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fingers-in-another-pie dept.

DevanJedi writes "Google recently started offering GMail hosted email service, with 25 free 2 GB email accounts, for universities and beta-testing private domains. Science Addiction has a review of the GMail for Your Domain service and its features including screenshots and speculation on future Google free and paid hosting efforts."

3 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Amusing when I think of the tin foil hat crowd. by vslashg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So much for the folks at http://www.google-watch.org/gmail.html. They suggest folks never send mail to gmail.com, and provide boilerplate text to reply with in case someone at gmail.com mails them.

    Well, now they might be sending mail directly to Google's servers without even knowing it! I find it highly amusing that these privacy advocates assume there's any privacy at all regarding the plaintext email they might send.

    (I also find it amusing that among their privacy concerns, they also complain that gmail doesn't include the originating IP in the email headers. I guess consistency doesn't matter as long as they're railing against the great beast Google.)

  2. Re:I gave it a try by big+tex · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, nothing is more professional than handing over your business email to google with their unlimited data retention policy

    Have the Enron trials taught us nothing?
    No corporate email is truly private. (possible exception for encrypted stuff. how many 'regular' businesses do that anyway?) If the government wants to read your mail, they'll subpoena it and get it anyway. If a competitor (I work in construction, a non-IT business) wants to read your mail, well, they're out of luck either way, unless they get a court order - at which point, it doesn't matter whose servers the mail is on.

    Hell, by passing the buck to Google, it might save you some hassle on the Sarbanes-Oxley data retention stuff.

    --
    I think I need a new sig here.
  3. Re:I gave it a try by krbvroc1 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    No corporate email is truly private.

    I think people are confusing the issues here. If I send an email to a company online, I expect that company to protect my email according to their privacy policy. By 'contracting out' your email hosting to a third-party, in this case google, any privacy policy you adopt with me is meaningless.

    This isn't about the government reading my mail with a subpeona. This is about my communications being disclosed to a third party whose sole business model is extracting the maximum advertising dollar out of that information without my permission.

    As far as Sarbanes-Oxley, that law only applies to public companies registered with the SEC in the US. And even then since you have absolutely no control over what google does with the data, how could you have any assurances about data detention?