The Security Mentor

I'm a beta tester and I'm slackjawed at the amount of nonsense out there. There's a real set of issues but sheesh, it's not the ones people are talking about.

The most common objection is that Google will show ads based on the content of the email you're reading. The ads are exactly like the ones you see when you're searching the web with the Google search engine. If you send email at all you're used to the idea that a computer can see your email. If you use a spam filter or virus filter you're already letting a computer read the content of your email.

There's a complete review with screenshots at ExtremeTech. Journalist Jim Lynch adds commentary in his blog.

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Want to know what the real problem is? GMail is too powerful and convenient. With 1000 megabytes of storage and Google searching to organize it, people are going to store everything in their GMail accounts. After a few years your GMail storage will be a tempting target for scammers, snoops and divorce attorneys. Current law makes it easy for the government to look at it. Anyone who tricks you out of your GMail password can have a wonderful day romping through your data looking for words like "credit card", "prescription", or "confidential". They could do that to your Hotmail account, but Hotmail doesn't let you have enough storage to keep your whole life there. They could do it with email stored on your local machine, but that might require getting into your house first.