I own a domain name and have been in the process of migrating from my GMail account to my domain e-mail account. It's tough though. The majority of my non-work e-mails these days are updates from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or some other kind of account I have. Other times it's invoices for online services that I use.

Very rarely do I get a "personal" e-mail any more, since my generation uses all different types of services for personal communication.



Theoretically they can track any data that comes through their system. If you do not have an account registered they can track your IP address/hostname and whatever you search. If you are logged in to your Google account they can additionally link that search to your account. Bing.com, Yahoo.com... they can all do the same. Of course they have a tremendous volume of information so it's difficult to know whether or not they do (I assume they do given their resources and infrastructure). What they do with this data is up to them, but is usually clearly stated in their privacy policy.

Their privacy policy highlights what they can and can't use your data to do. With targets ads for example, authorized third parties don't have direct access to your data but can still use your data to target advertisements to you. They go through what's called an Application Interface that allows Google to redirect content (IE advertisements on your Google Search or above your Gmail inbox) without allowing them to ever view or store your data.

They *can* track your data if they want to, but they state in their privacy policy that they do not. It's a good solution if you're paranoid about Google, but you shouldn't be unless you have extremely sensitive information going through their systems.


This is somewhat of a misconception. Remember that any e-mail going through the e-mail server can be unpacked and read. As for your sent e-mails... a local copy *is* stored on your computer, but you should check with your service provider to see if they aren't also caching stored e-mails on the server. If you can sync your e-mail to multiple applications (IE run it through Outlook *and* Thunderbird, or access it on multiple computers) and still see all of your sent e-mails then yes, your e-mails are also stored on the e-mail server.


It is pretty dangerous when a personality like Glenn Beck hops on the radio and spews misinformation or paints an incomplete picture to send people into mass hysteria.