I'm really annoyed by all the people who continues spreading these claims, without stopping to think a bit before doing it.
What do you guys think, that yahoo and hotmail does not scan our incoming mail? They do! Every free mail service provider with a spam filter does it. And usually, either the spam gets unnoticed or legitimal messages get black-hole-deleted when mistaken by spam.
Microsoft is an evil company, that does not care for their users, and that is trying to destroy Linux and Open Source by menas funding absurd companies like SCO (
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/18/1358206&mode=thread&tid=133&tid=186&tid=187&tid=88) or the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/17/112218&mode=thread&tid=109&tid=126&tid=163&tid=187).
On the other Google always have *tried* to do the right think, their webpages are user friendly and free of invasive ads. And I trust they will continue with this trend. I am not an economy expert, but their IPO was a kind of one in which Google owners' shares are 10 times more valuable than public shares, so nobody can control the company by buying 51% of shares.
Just visit
www.hotmail.com and
www.gmail.com, at first sight, I can see who is the trusty company. 'Get bikini perfect in just 6 days' ads? I don't need to see further.
Everybody non-tech savvy I know that has e-mail, has a Hotmail account, that is the wrong thing. I would rather send 1 Gigabyte of my correspondence to Google than 2 Megabytes to Microsoft.
The only real problem that I see with Gmail, it's when everybody starts migrating from Hotmail to Gmail, and given that they don't delete emails, Google has such a large information that is a good target for subpoenas or evil legislation. Solutions to this would be encriptions so Google can't access this information, and just the owner of the account can. And I'm sure Google is concerned about user privacy and will try to protect it. (For an elaborated essay on this and other real Gmail concerns, check here:
http://www.templetons.com/brad/gmail.html)
Really, Gmail does just the same of other free email providers, but just better.
And no, my problem almost surely isn't from Gmail's mesage scanning.