Text 46892, 69 rader
Skriven 2008-06-25 01:19:32 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 46885 av August Abolins (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: pros & cons of webmail vs pop
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August Abolins -> Alan Zisman wrote:
 AA> Alan Zisman -> SHAWN HIGHFIELD wrote:
 AZ>> For me, the key issue is keeping everything in sync across multiple
 AZ>> computers/OS's... Some might suspect I have an email addiction
 AA> problem,
 AZ>> but with a computer handy at home and at work, I always keep an email
 AZ>> window open; webmail lets me always see the same thing. (While I use
 AZ>> alan (at) zisman (dot) ca as my 'address of record', that is set to
 AZ>> auto-forward to a gmail account).


 AA> Why not use a thumb-drive and one of the portable versions of an email
 AA> client?

 AZ>> While gmail has ads, as with ads in Google search results pages
 AA> they are
 AZ>> very discrete-- I rarely notice them. And it has far better spam
 AZ>> filtering than any individual user-based software that I've seen. (It
 AZ>> does have a non-folder-based interface that is different from most
 AA> mail
 AZ>> client software- or from most webmail programs- and may not be to
 AZ>> everyone's tastes).

 AA> Regarding Gmail, no matter how "discreet" you call their ads, the system
 AA> is anything but discreet.  Gmail reads our mail to target the ads based
 AA> on our messages!  How private is that?  Would you allow you phone
 AA> company to eaves-drop on your conversations so that they can formulate
 AA> other products and services you might be interested in? Would you not
 AA> mind if the post office opened your mail to so that they can tailor
 AA> junkmail ads for you?



 AZ>> But the ability to access the same mail and contact list wherever I
 AA> go--
 AZ>> with lots of storage, good spam filtering, and minimal ads, at
 AA> home, at
 AZ>> work, on desktop, on notebook, in Windows/Mac/Linux/handheld/etc makes
 AZ>> webmail invaluable to me... if I only used a single computer-- and
 AA> never
 AZ>> upgraded it to a new system, it might be different.

 AA> With webmail we're allowing privacy to become obsolete.

A portable app is a good solution if you're limited to a single computing
platform. Since I move between Windows, Mac, and Linux, that's less of an
option-- while Thunderbird (for example) is available for all 3 platforms, I
don't know of an easy way to get the 3 versions to access the same data.

Having a computerized Google algorithm look for keywords in mail messages in
order to target ads seems very different to me from having employees of the
post office or phone company reading my mail or listening in to my phone
calls... but I appreciate that others may have different opinions on this.

I suspect there was a 'golden age of privacy' and we may be coming out of it--
but it was much briefer than we might think. My family had a party line when I
was a child-- others could (and did) listen into our phone conversations. And
anyone living either in an apartment building or in a small town knows that
their privacy is limited at the best of times! And even for the rich, living a
hundred years ago with bunches of servants was not particularly conducive to
privacy, I suspect.
-- 
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- email: alan (at) zisman (dot) ca
- website: http://www.zisman.ca
(running on Mac OS X)

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