Gmail is a big step towards big brother. Many people argue that Yahoo, Hotmail, etc could read your email before, so what’s the big deal? The difference is that Google will be able to google everyone’s email and they plan on permanently storing your email, so you won’t be able to delete it from their servers. Plus Google is a company known for being very tight lipped on everything they do and provide. Plus there is no outside verification, and they provide basically no information to back up their stance about how they are using the email indexes. How many big corporations do you trust implicitly? Google is well on its well to becoming a big corporation.

You can read more about the issues here:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001375.php

What we should be doing is using our skills and pooling our resources to set up our own servers. My eds.org email account is such a server, it hosts many websites (bittorrent is hosted there for example) and email mailboxes for about 50 people. Its a PC only slightly better than what you can find on the street these days. The bill for the internet colocation facility is about $80/mo, or about $1.60 per user per month. And I’ve known the guy with the root password personally for 15 years. I trust him implicitly.