Forum Moderators: open
-----------
Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately, due to potential privacy and confidentiallity considerations, we are not accepting inbound email from Google's Gmail service. In order for us to respond to your email, you will need to resend it from a different email account.
-----------
I am aware of the current privacy backlash (silly in my opinion), but in my opinion, regardless of the email providers Terms and Conditions, the biggest threat to the privacy of the person's reply is the person they send it to - not the provider.
Someone so paranoid about privacy should really require recipients of their emails to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
As to the gmail debate, this whole discussion is pure speculation and conspiracy theories. I haven't read through any other gmail threads so I could be wrong here but has anyone testing the system actually reported on how the ad serving works?
I'm in Gmail. I can tell you how the ads appear, but I don't know what bearing that has on conspiracy theories.
* AdWords ads are displayed to the right of the e-mail's body. Not inside the body. I have not received an e-mail that does NOT trigger an ad unit with at least two ads. Relevancy is decent, though most of my received mail is from an industry mailing list that I shunted into Gmail to build up volume quickly. Time will tell how the relevancy holds up across personal mail.
Interestingly, Gmail also displays "Related Pages" links and site descriptions, below the ads on the right side.
Lost in the discussions of privacy and conspiracy are Gmail's fairly innovative display, sorting, and searching features. I need another week to decide whether these features add up to a better or worse experience than Outlook. Gmail blows away Yahoo and Hotmail in speed and searching, that's for certain, and those are the main factors encouraging me to compare Gmail with desktop e-mail (Outlook) rather than with competing Web mail systems.
(silly in my opinion)
Hardly silly. The privacy concerns are massive. Gmail may be keeping email messages going back years, and eventually decades, and all of that can be retrieved by governement agencies and others.
Most free email systems do NOT archive email messages for long. Gmail is different in that gigabytes will be available online for long periods of time.
The possibilities of abuse are vastly increased.
Richard
Most free email systems do NOT archive email messages for long. Gmail is different in that gigabytes will be available online for long periods of time.
If Mr. Ashcroft suspects that one of us has Bad Stuff(tm), all he has to do is confiscate our computers, 'wiretap' our incoming or outgoing traffic, subpoena mail records from our ISPs, etc. Gmail MAY make things easier for the government, but the door's pretty much already unlocked.
Someone pointed out earlier that they are beginning to become nervous about on-line email (not a direct quote).
Personally, I am concerned about privacy, regardless of the clients used, web-based or not! We all know how things end up on the web, where the sender/reader NEVER thought it would.
This would pretty much enable any ISP email account to be retrieved and viewed form the gmail interface (then ads).
What is the benefit then to block gmail users? If a user likes the interface, it will likely use it to get his pop3 emails.
The real problem is displaying contextual ads in email. I looked at Yahoo and Hotmail, they show very non specific ads (therefore are probably making a very little money out of this).
In the other hand, using Google ads on a website will likely make your competitor's ads to show up there, and we can see that people are using it a lot! I agree that there's a big difference in the where they decide to make money this way.
By sending an email, we won't make money from it even if a targetted ad is displayed, so there is the real problem: displaying ads in context of an email because email is a priviledged way to contact your clients and customers and when you smend some time to send them offers and information, you don't want your competitor to show there. YOU have done the hard work to get this user to subscribe to your mailinglist and not the others, so they don't have the right to contact them.
What's next then... will we have to pay to have our emails read through the gmail interface ad free?
Blocking email from GMAIL is quite stupid. If you were worried about gmail you would block email to gmail not from.
I assumed it was an act of protest. Protestation doesn't always serve any purpose other than bringing attention to the issue. If enough administrators did that, it could become a problem though.
-----------
Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately, due to potential privacy and confidentiallity considerations, we are not accepting inbound email from Google's Gmail service. In order for us to respond to your email, you will need to resend it from a different email account.
-----------
It did mention that they would not respond, in the case that it wasn't an act of protest.
Oh, and you'll have to avoid sending all e-mail to Google.com addresses. And stanford.edu addresses (at least two of my Stanford friends are forwarding mail to their Gmail account).
Seriously .. I can recall signing up to a number of similar services for similar sorts of reasons in the past .. quite a number in fact.
In the end all of them seemed a little less in my interests than I had thought they would be when I started with them.
Well now I can even go out into the world without a mobile phone always on in my pocket and I dont have trouble meeting people arranged to meet without it to guide my last 2 miles to their location .. or without 24/7 email access anywhere I am ... sometimes face to face with other humans does mean leave the tech toys in the office :-)
I will have no problem banning Gmail users from corresponding with me whether business or personal. I certainly wouldn't want to send "aunt Martha" birthday wishes just to have it plastered with advertisements? I won't go as far as to liken this to having your local post office open the birthday card or letter you mailed and stuff the envelope with advertisements based upon the correspondence inside, but it as least as bad as allowing them to plaster the envelope with advertisements so you can save the cost of a stamp. Who would allow/want this? Then why would you allow Google to deface your correspondence?
If a client is too cheap to get/use their ISP email address if they do not have a website – sorry, I don't want their business as it tells me a lot about them. I certainly wouldn't type a personal message to my wife at work for instance and have it filled with "dating" or other types of advertisements.
People, use some tact – it simply amazes me what people will stoop to in order to save a few cents, and equally what a company will stoop to in order to try to make a buck.
It is a personal decision to use Gmail or not – just don't be surprised when you don't get a reply.
I think it will also cost Google dearly in advertising revenue in the future if they go ahead with this and don't make it a completely separate option for AdWords advertisers.
No, but who in their right mind would want advertisements in their email whether it be personal or business correspondence?
Again, there will be no advertisements in your email. They will appear on the web interface outside the email, on the right, just like AdWords ads show on the SERPs.
As to "who in their right mind...", the idea of offering a free service in exchange for accepting advertisements is a business model that's been in play for a looooong time online now. And the services that use this business model (Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Groups, and countless others) have millions of subscribers. So apparently there are a lot of people who won't mind advertisements near their email.
As for me, if I could choose the types of ads I get, I'd do this in a heartbeat. I want ads from Macintosh stores, music and book stores, etc. That would be great.
As a retailer, I don't want to send a weekly newsletter to a hard retained customer and have an ad from my direct competitor being displayed in the email I hardly got the right to send. And this is my whole concern far beyond having my aunt using this free service to get her greeting cards. She would have choosen to be in this situation.
I can imagine another retailer checking at my prices and buying keywords advertizing the same item I do for a few bucks less even without having to work to get the user to subscribe to his newsletter.
You'd rather lose that audience and potential customers completely, because you annoyed them when refusing to accept their Gmail address?
I think some people are forgetting that the customer is always right.
If you are primarily b2b then I can see the concern with free e-mail accounts.
I have sold widgets to internationally funded governement agencies, where my contacts would exclusively use hotmail addresses. You can't just assume that all your b2b customers will have their own domain name, even if they're as legitimate as they possibly could be.
No, I don't want Google to display ads targeted on the content of MY newsletter.
Writing in forums probably reveals more about people than any mechanism might parse for commerce purposes. I generally laugh at how wrong such efforts to match my needs are are.
But for some reason, the high disdain here gets to me and I kinda wonder where it is coming from. If from a genuine concern for rights, that is one thing. I can be convinced. If not, then not, as the Bard might say.
Cheers, S
Then some harp about Google stooping to new lows just to make a buck but freely talk about sending follow up messages to customers. Is that just correspondance or are you trying to...dare I say it...make a buck?
As someone commented on the b2b remark I made, I agree. It was a very broad genralization and also proves that you could lose out on big business if you ignore all those addresses.
But spyware is spyware. I like the idea of flagging Gmail. Perhaps we will accept the email but auto-respond that the sender should not expect a reply.
How will you handle redirections to gmail and pop3 retrived through gmail environment?
How will you handle redirections to gmail and pop3 retrived through gmail environment?
Hmm.. Haven't given thought to that, as uncommon as that will probably prove to be. I'll pose the question to my buddies more well versed in fighting scumware & spyware like this.
Meanwhile, since our only response will be that gmail users get no reply to their message, I don't care what Google does with it. Perhaps we'll pack the auto-response with information about spyware, privacy, etc. Let Google match that with ads.
Somebody warned me that Yahoo mail is already putting targeted ads in their email interface. I personnaly never saw this, but see what's being reported. Is it contextual to the content or the profile, not sure...
That inconspicuous looking Sponsored Links ad you see, is more sinister than it first appears. When you click on the "What's This" link, you'll see that it is a contextual ad served up by Overture.
I've had my Gmail account for about 36 hours now...hardly a veteran. I went into it prepared to hate it on general principals, but it's hard to hate. It's a very nice interface for those browsers it supports. I've learned that it does most things very well, some important shortcomings, most of which will probably be fixed, and I can't quite believe the privacy outcry. Like we have any privacy now?
In the US they can check on what we're taking out of the library, every purchase we make on a credit card is on record somewhere, our medical and financial records are sent who knows where to who knows who. Technology is great, but not if you're interested in privacy. Once you send an e-mail to anyone, it's out of your hands and you're at the mercy of the recipient and anyone who has access to the recipient's mail client - and that's not taking into consideration any actual hacking that might occur. When someone is terminated from a job it's SOP to shut down his or her computer access while the victim is on the way to meet his fate in the person of the HR termintor. It's up to the company whether they wipe the computer or keep what's on there. Privacy is so 20th century.
While I can understand the feelings of those who are complaining about their marketing e-mails triggering competitor's adds, I'd say wait and see. Gmail is going to be big and it's going to be popular. To the user, there's nothing that feels intrusive, especially compared to the Yahoo interface, for instance. For the user, targeted ad are better than general ads, but I think there's a huge BUT attached to all this. Targeted ads need to be targeted to the viewers interests. This is reflected in some of our e-mail but not all of it by any means. How much depends on the usage of the user. Someone who subscribes to lists and newsletters..sure. Their e-mail is all about what interests them. Someone who corresponds with family and friends...not necessarily.
I've clicked on many Google ads and made purchases from them, but only when using the Opera browser - free version with ads. Got an e-mail provider for an entire small company from a Google ad once. That was because I was proactively looking for things on the web and the Google ads brought excellent targeted results. However, my nephew's description of his new boat or my neice's stories about her baby are not going to generate ads that will cause me to buy anything. I think that how this plays out depends on what type of e-mail is actually read. It might behoove Google to ask people what they're interested in rather than depend on keywords to deliver ads. What works well when the viewer is actively surfing might not be as effective when they're simply receiving what's sent to them.
Privacy is so 20th century.
When a gmail user encounters more than one site that is unwilling to accept their address, they will realize that it is GMAIL that is the problem and not the sites. This happens with AOL customers already ---especially when they learn how AOL has arbitrarily denied them from receiving emails they wanted.
I deal with PR agencies and publicists for national tourist offices who use AOL addresses, and I've got an attorney who uses a Hotmail address. It probably won't be long until I'm getting e-mails from business contacts that use gmail addresses--and I certainly won't be foolish enough to ban such e-mails in the hope my business contacts will see the error of their ways.
As for the privacy fuss, the whole thing has been overblown. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, the "Google will be reading our e-mail crowd" seems to believe that ignorance in the pursuit of paranoia is no vice. :-)
There is a thread which has been moving but is presently here
[webmasterworld.com...]
called
"Someone Is Misinformed About E-Mail Privacy..."
You are quite correct that your and my government scan most recordable communications in the name of national security and they are permitted to do this by legistlation passed into national law in our respective countries.
Further that sysadmins at ISPs and various Employers of companies featuring significant computer use are also technically able to watch and read other peoples non public emails and in fact in the pursuit of their employment some of these are actually required to do this to protect the integrity of the service and or the commercial property of their employer.
Nevertheless there is considerable legislation in Europe and the USA which sets out what is permissable snooping and what is not.
In the UK there are
The Data Protection Act 1998
the Human Rights Act 1998
The Regulation of Investi-gatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000
and in the US about which I admit I am much less familiar there is certainly the
Electronic Communications Privacy Act
Please let me know of any other regulations that may apply in the US to privacy issues?
I am interested in the current climate to know about more of them.
So the fact that various people may be able to look at your email at various places on its travels across telephone networks does not mean they can do it in an unregulated way or that they can legally make this data available to people whose commercial interests are in conflict with yours.
The fact that it is technically possible does not make it legal and in fact in many cases for an individual or organisation to significantly snoop into your communications for their own profit would likely make them liable for criminal prosecution by your state or mine.
A lot of what I was saying about privacy per se was kind of flippant, I realize. What I am is kind of cynical about privacy. I like the idea of privacy as much as the next person. My "real" e-mail account uses SSL, and I never view HTML mail by default, just in case a webbug slips by other protections against insecure images. I have AdAware and Spybot and firewalls and all that. I just believe the following things:
If it can be done, it will be done at least sometimes.
If more than one person has access to information it's no longer confidential.
If information is digitalized and if it's on a machine that's connected to the internet in any way, shape or form, the information is in effect, everywhere. Security measures work decently, or else all would be chaos, but if anyone believes in real, bulletproof security, they're in denial.
So, I kind of accept that privacy is over. There can be legal protections about what can be done with your information, but it's tough to know if they can really be enforced on a global scale and those protections are not really the same as protecting actual privacy.
Those are my feelings on privacy. Not very technical - just based on observations of what is, rather than what should be or what once was.
That said, I just don't think that Google ads are a major threat to privacy compared to other things that are out there and which are much more serious.
The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003
Which, according to www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk came into force in the UK on 11 December 2003 and supercedes the Telecommunications (Data Protection and Privacy) Regulations 1999
I am not yet sure how this applies in this case but expect there are some meanings which will bear relevant as to the intent of European and British regulators as regards the privacy of our communications.
With respect to the US Patriot Act we have similar in the UK in the RIP act (Regulation of Investigatory Powers) and additional emergency actions which can also be taken as needed as far as I am aware.
As I understand it legislation and snooping by our government in the UK and USA and the power to do this was taken and granted pretty much so that "they can keep us safe" which has to be one of the most important responsibilities of a government to the population it serves.
The privacy issue with respect to Google Gmail as it is proposed is not at all the same. To my mind it concerns privacy as regards our personal commercial interests and those of our employers and companies.
Quite simply because it is a proposed commercial service and is proposed to do detailed invasive scanning for the purposes of specifically targetted piggybacked communications.
I am not concerned about their data retention policy or that law enforcement officials could gain access to any of my emails in its system, they can get these anyhow already much more easily in the UK from the copies which they are supposed to be being sent directly by my ISP courtesy of the RIP bill.
In the personal communications area I was recently sent a plain text email by an overseas friend of mine to tell me it has been confirmed he has an inoperable tumour in his lung and was shortly after to start chaemotherapy.
That ISPs would have scanned that message to reduce spam, to check for viruses or that various mail system administrators may have read it as it was progressing through the telephone networks to me or even that Gmail might have been able to get hold of it to scan it and serve adverts in an email client near the mail does not concern me in the slightest.
