It wasn't until April 2 that I truly believed that Google's announcement of GMail was not an April Fool's joke. Even after reading what all the online news sites where reporting, I remained skeptical.
Now, it seems that GMail is not a joke.
GMail is good for Google. Is it good for email? I don't see how it can be. It's going in the wrong direction.
Sometimes, we are concerned that others might be able to read our email. Then, we start to talk about S/MIME or OpenPGP, which permit us to encrypt our email messages. Generally, we all agree that encrypted email is a good thing. We also agree that encrypted email has its own issues: complexity, long-term storage, usability, etc.
Now, Google asks us to let it read our email. In other words, Google asks us to take advantage of a feature that specifically excludes encrypted email.
In the final analysis, many users have more than one email account, which they use for different purposes. GMail might be the perfect solution if you want to sign up for mailing lists and read them online. In that case, confidentiality is not necessary at all. For many other purposes, an email solution that offers the prospect of confidentiality at some point in the future is probably a better choice.
Posted by Doug Sauder at April 3, 2004 09:37 AM