[Reader-list] Re: how to get pop3 access from gmail

[Isaac D W Souweine]

With regards to Vivek's suggestion about circumventing major capitalist 
email enterprises through the use of small-scale cooperatives:

About two years ago, I tried to ditch the major email providers, with 
their spam and their restrictions and all the other shadiness, for an 
account with riseup.net, which as far as I can tell is a small email 
cooperative run by anarchist-leaning activists (not an effort to make 
any specific characterization of this group, about which I now very 
little, that was just my sense). On the plus side, the decision felt 
extremely good (read: righteous). On the minus side, though riseup 
seems to have a good philosophy (generally speaking) and is definitely 
making an effort to provide top quality service, I found that the load 
times were extremely slow and the occasional outages and other problems 
that arose from the fact that the people who run the service are 
obviously not doing it as a full time job, made use of riseup more 
inconvenient than was worth it. 

Thankfully, I now have access to excellent webmail from the University 
of Hawaii, which at least is spam and ad free. But my riseup experience 
did not exactly get me, a simple little end user, amped about bucking 
the system. Email at this point is a mission critical application. It 
needs to be fast and versatile and constantly updated viz. feature 
sets. I am not an expert on privacy issues and so I can't contribute to 
that side of the discussion, but I'm wondering whether the privacy 
issues really justify trying to keep pace with corporate interests who 
are happy to pour money and expertise into providing us this service.

That said, I would love to hear from privacy wonks or open sourcers who 
would be interested in telling me how/why:

1. Im putting my personal information in extreme jeopardy
2. It wouldn't actually be so much work to create cooperatives that 
evaded the current dominant providers.  

Yours,
Isaac