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My Email Privacy is Worth more than $36 per year

By gherlein, on February 6th, 2011 - No comments
I’ve been using Google Apps Mail to host my mail for herlein.com for years. In fact, I was a very early adopter. I’d say I was in the beta, but hey, so was everyone! Seriously though, I was pretty early. It seemed like the thing to do. I had been hosting my own mail forever and had a server die (the real death) and was tired of fighting spam. It was a free, seemingly reliable alternative.

Over the last few years I’ve become increasingly frustrated. As a free solution I had no support, so when my wife’s emails were going missing I had no help in chasing it down. I never did solve it. I had mails forwarded to me that were indeed sent, but alas, they never showed in her inbox. That’s probably when I found that there were two inboxes – the real one accessible from POP/IMAP and the web interface. Last year I seriously played with using a local client (on Linux) for at least my mail. It was a baby step to the real leap I wanted to make, which was to get off GMail altogether. But none of the Linux clients were really to my liking; they all had some warts that were just too ugly for me to cutover. This last week my wife started having problems accessing a web site that happens to be hosted on Google sites. It was a really strange permissions problem, apparently because logging on to get herlein.com email set a certain user permission in the new Google App infrastructure. I spent 15 minutes chasing that before realizing that I really want no part of it.

I’ve been able to ignore the privacy implications of using Google for a long time. However, lately I’ve had a growing sense of unease. After all, NOTHING IS FREE. I was getting email services but was paying in units of privacy… and we don’t yet know the conversion rates for that currency! As I scraped through the new Google App infrastructure I realized that Google’s email is really complicated – it’s not just a simple email interface anymore. They are bolting on a ton of things underneath that we don’t know much about. Hell, they may not know much about them either, to be fair. Does the right hand know what the left is doing over there? Even if they do, am I comfortable with that much more of my data and traffic crossing that system?

You see, Google is an advertising company cloaked as a technology company. I work in advertising and I joke that part of my job is trying to make Minority Report style ads really viable. But Google is DOING THAT NOW, just without the silly retina flashes, and not in ways we can even imagine now. Over the last few years they ‘index’ all my email, measure my click throughs, and with the Google Apps infrastructure can see a lot deeper into my traffic and inner workings (assuming I host docs there, etc). To what gain? Ads. Better and more specific relevant targeted ads. Good for them, they are building a business. I won’t address any moral issues around all this. For now, it’s legal, they got there first and so far they are executing on it. Nice. And supposedly they provide an opt out. But their system is so darn complicated under the hood, will it really work?

Except that I don’t have to play. Or at least, I can choose to not accept services in exchange for aspects of my privacy that I cannot measure (yet). I can move my email to another provider, for starts.

So I did. I turned on a Rackspace email account and pointed my MX records there. Unfortunately I didn’t realize that GoDaddy DNS sets the timeouts to 1 week by default for MX records, so I’m keeping Google set at a lower priority and keeping it active for a week, just to be sure I don’t drop an email (as a side note, I’ll be moving my DNS off GoDaddy soon too – I simply hate their GUI). I don’t really care for the RackSpace web interface for mail, but it’s functional. That’s my backup really anyway, since I do most of my mail on my mobile, or from my desktop. And now that I have cut over to all Mac’s at home I just use the Apple Mail program. It has warts too, but it’s functional, and I love how well spotlight finds stuff on my hard drive. I don’t need Google to search mail! Really! That technology is so commonplace now. That value add is commodity! Rackspace has a special deal for SliceHost customers (I host this blog on SliceHost) so my email will cost me $36 per year. I suspect that my privacy is worth a lot more than $36 per year!

My only remaining question is: why didn’t I do this sooner?