On Sun, 18 May 2008, Tom Diehl wrote:
If you are sending secret or sensitive information via unencrypted email you already have a bigger problem then weather or not google is harvesting info. Email by design is insecure. Why anyone would believe otherwise is unclear to me. If you are encrypting it than I would argue that it does not matter if google tries to harvest information from it.
There's data and then there's metadata. The former, as you note, can be protected via standard encryption techniques. The latter -- e.g., who sent messages to whom and when -- might be just as important, and it's not possible to encrypt.