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

[Vivek Narayanan]

Isaac--

(By the way, the initial suggestion was Shekhar Krishnan's.)

I take it as a given that any new initiative, like Linux itself at one 
point, will be ragtag and shambolic, but this does not mean that it 
could flourish at some point in the future, with enough imaginative 
input and problem solving.  So you have a point, and I'm not thinking of 
getting webmail from my nearest anarchist collective any time soon 
(unless you count Sarai itself as a kind of buttoned-up collective) but 
the question is, has one the will to envision it, or do we just cede the 
possibility in the interest of present contigency?  Perhaps it's already 
too late?

Also-- I wonder if there could be other reasons for circumventing 
corporate mail other than privacy, because I'm not so sure that a 
non-corporate collective would allow any more privacy-- probably less, 
if anything-- and could be tapped and knocked by governments just like 
the big boys routinely are.

V.

Isaac D W Souweine wrote:

>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 
>
>
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