[mike-cardwell]

"would you willingly grant access to your e-mail to a profitable company"

That's not a yes/no question. I would grant some companies some level of access to some of my email some of the time.

One example: I might grant a spam filtering company read access to the contents of my "Junk E-Mail" folder in exchange for being able to use their black list. Subject to privacy policy contents as always.