Tyler Durden writes:

"Ironically, some of the features of Gmail bear resemblance to BlackNet. In particular, its claimed policy of retaining email indefinitely, even after the recipient has stopped using the account, is reminiscent of BlackNet's function as a data haven, as well as other Cypherpunk projects like the Eternity Network. This retention is objectionable to conventional privacy groups, but Cypherpunks will recognize it as being deeply in accord with their values."

Poo poo. The difference between a potential blacknet and Gmail is that there's little doubt that google will cough up the true names of objectionable posters, if and when anyone looking even remotely authoritative/governmental comes pounding on their doors. In a worst-case Blacknet, my True Name will only be gettable by agents of the state via the expenditure of very large amounts of resources, if at all.

You have missed the point of the analogy entirely. BlackNet makes information available even when the subjects of the information (or any other parties) want it suppressed. It is a censorship-proof store of data. If information about you is stored in BlackNet, anyone can get access to it (for a price, perhaps), and you can't do anything about it. To make Gmail more like BlackNet, you should first do as others have suggested and access it via cryptographic anonymity techniques (see the recent announcements for the onion routing network now being developed, http://www.freehaven.net/tor. Now you can use it as a store of data for your pseudonym without linking to your true identity. A second step is to then PGP-encrypt all email going to your Gmail address. This could be done easily by someone writing a mail forwarder which accepted email for any username, looked up a PGP key for that name and encrypted the email, then forwarded it along to the corresponding username at Gmail. This would be less than one page of Perl. You would give out the name of a system running such a script as your email address, but your encrypted mail would then be stored and accessed at Gmail. You'd gain the advantage of their multi gigabyte storage facility while protecting the privacy of your own email. And I'd like to see their adwords facility struggling to come up with something appropriate when the only legible text is "BEGIN PGP ENCRYPTED MESSAGE". A third step is to get a browser plugin which would transparently decrypt PGP encrypted email stored at web mail services like Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc. At one time this would have been an overwhelmingly difficult task due to the multiplicity of browsers; at a later time, it would have been impractical due to the dominance of IE; but today, with Mozilla becoming a widely used, standardized, open source alternative to IE, it is finally possible for such browser customizations to become generally available and useful. So there you have it, a simple three step program to turn your Gmail account into a privacy-protected, virtually unlimited-size data store.