Speaking of Google mail, we find this curious, paranoid treatise on its innate weirdness:
Google’s relationships with government officials in all of the dozens of countries where they operate are a mystery, because Google never makes any statements about this. But here’s a clue: Google uses the term “governmental request” three times on their terms-of-use page and once on their privacy page. Google’s language means that all Gmail account holders have consented to allow Google to show any and all email in their Gmail accounts to any official from any government whatsoever, even when the request is informal or extralegal, at Google’s sole discretion. Why should we send email to Gmail accounts under such draconian conditions?
While I’m down with legitimate privacy concerns, I think it might be time for the author to don one of these.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Yeah, I saw that site a few months ago when I got my gmail account. Just seems like paranoid drivel to me – anyone with a webmail account from any provider (hotmail, yahoo, whatever) has exactly the same thing to “worry” about.
In discussions of gmail, a lot of people mention 1984, which kind of annoys me. “Big Brother” was not a company, it was the government. Since gmail is completely optional and not necessary at all, any comparisons with 1984 are pretty off-base.
Also, any claims of “but they’re reading my email!!!11!” are pretty far-fetched. Any email stored on an external server (ISP, webmail, whatever) could be read by someone, and even if you store it on your home machine, SMTP is inherently insecure. Additionally, with freely available software such as GPG, anyone can encrypt their email and send it (through gmail or any other means), leaving it completely unreadable to any interceptors (until the development of quantum computing, that is).
Here’s an idea! If particular mail needs to be private one could always hand write it and send it through the post office. Or perhaps carrier pigeon, might work better, unless the government begins using spy hawks. That could be bad.
http://epic.org/privacy/gmail/faq.html
Gmail currently does not promise to ever delete a message even if you select Delete Forever on something you’ve trashed. When asked by a privacy organization, they never would clearly state they would permanently delete anything. I can’t live with that so I got rid of my gmail. Perhaps some day Gmail will change that and I’ll be interested again. I am able to do much better with other services that do remove email permanently.