[dingaling]

> Nobody's forcing anybody to use Gmail, after all.

I think there are a couple of audiences who are; ( 1 ) employees of companies ( or students of institutions ) that have migrated to Gmail / GApps and ( 2 ) senders of e-mails who are unaware that one or more recipients are Gmail users.

For protecting the latter group, it is possible to configure most MTAs to hold or decline delivering to Gmail or any other arbitrary domain. For example, postfix has the 'smtpd_recipient_restrictions' directive.

[joedevon]

What about Google Apps, which host domains that the user doesn't know belongs to google? Google can basically spy on anybody. Sort all emails to and from any email address and probably get a ton of stuff.

Then again, I suppose theoretically that's true of any large email provider. It just seems more egregious from Google since they are reading 3rd party emails to deliver ads...