CRM Daily: NewsFactor Network - Marketing Automation - Gmail Free, But for a Price Someone needs to start a new list of clueless people and organizations that are buying this concept of a privacy issue with Google's new Gmail. Let's get this straight: Unless you encrypt your e-mail it's not private, or secure. How many times have you heard that FTP is not secure? If you work with computer networks AT ALL, the answer is: A LOT. Thats because FTP sends your password from the client to the server in un-encrypted form. New version of FTP correct this by encrypting the password. Similarly, secure web transaction involved the entire page, and everything you type into a form on that page being encrypted. As everyone SHOULD know by now, things zipping to and fro on the internet are subject to snooping. The bits and bytes pass thought a lot of equipment owned by many different people and theoretically, any one of them could be siphoning off traffic for good or evil purposes. That means, TA DA: nobodies e-mail is secure or private. Unless, that is, you take measures to make it so, namely encrypting it. How many people encrypt their email? I don't. I don't even digitally sign mine (although I have in the past just to play with the concept). But at least one air-headed state congressperson from California (of all places) wants to pass a law against Gmail. Duh. And it seems several technical publication (who should know better) seem to not have all their fact straight either. Oddly enough the publication mentioned here is in California too. Coincidence? I think not. Ban California!