[sarnowski]

Just because you are paying for the service does not mean that they respect your privacy. You can also pay for Google Apps, but what you get is not worth the money. Depends more on the company than on the pricing model.

(This is just a general hint - not against Microsoft. I don't know how they do their job.)

[Maro]

Microsoft advertises Office 365 / Outlook by saying that unlike Gmail, they don't "peek" at your email for ads.

The "Gmail man" ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXqrTfOWx60

[ortatherox]

That was an internal video to try raise morale in Microsoft and get some people switch, it's pretty safe to assume gmail reads your emails as much as their spam filters does. But as well as doing the spam filtering on the results it does ads.

[Estragon]

Yeah, just looking at mail to model spam is one thing. Looking at it to model the user's life and interests is quite another.

[jonknee]

Ads can be disabled for Google Apps accounts, but as should be obvious any provider that provides spam filtering will already be "peeking" at your email. Perhaps in part to their ad relevancy system, Google's spam detection is best of breed.

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6...