On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 8:05 AM, John Newman <[1]jnn@synfin.org> wrote:
   > Do any gmail users (which I've noticed there a lot of on the list,
   > as well as in real life, heh) feel at all threatened by what Google
   > is doing with access to your entire mail stream? They've publicly
   > stated users have no "reasonable expectation of privacy".
   I assumed from the beginning that they'd examine everything that passed
   through their servers. "If you're not paying for it, you're not the
   customer, you're the product" has been Cypherpunks wisdom since
   forever.
   Gmail has my main mail accounts, for various work, personal, and list
   stuff. I'm not too worried about privacy for this, as I don't put
   anything sensitive where outsiders can see it. (Though sometimes other
   people send sensitive info to my gmail accounts, which pisses me off.)
   I have a couple non-gmail accounts for various purposes, but these are
   also free accounts and I assume no privacy there.
   Formerly I ran email servers of my own. Let those slide mainly because
   keeping up with the patches and the spam was too time-consuming.
   For anything I want to keep secure, I use encryption. I had been
   relying on encrypted email -- GPG on my end, usually a PGP mail client
   plugin on the other end. I'm getting away from that because certain
   email correspondents who are not me seem to have trouble with even the
   relatively-easy-to-use plugins. eg, one normally technically savvy guy
   kept sending me signed rather than encrypted messages containing very
   sensitive material, and another guy could not manage to send me an
   encrypted message that I could decrypt.
   Lately I've been using non-email communications if I want to keep it
   private. A variant of a "send a message to this website's
   administrator" page, transmitted over SSL, is good enough for my
   purposes. It's not encrypted on my server and the response page is not
   encrypted on the recipient's computer, but at least it is (or should
   be) safe from casual snooping along the way.
   None of the above is meant to be the definitive answer to private
   communications or to worries about snooping. So far as I know it works
   well enough for my expected threats. Suggestions for improvement are
   welcome.

References

   1. mailto:jnn@synfin.org