| I read all the suggestions by in this thread including those of SMS
| and Mayayana in particular. While most are good ideas they all involve
| huge amounts of effort which gets added to the maintenance one has to
| do on a regular basis.

I think there's a limit to what one can do without
some work. It's a complex system. There's a joke
in the programming world that the ideal design for
business software is "one button, no directions".
The problem is that a program with one button can
only do one thing. Computers are very complex and
capable machines. We can't have it both ways. That
desire is part of the reason that tablets are successful,
but tablets also reduce functionality, software options
and control.

I don't think it's so different from anything else.
If you want to control it you have to make an effort.
If you want to eat healthy food you need to study
not only nutrition but also the food business. You
can't just trust that Dunkin Donuts or Panera Bread
is offering something edible. They're corporations
in the business of making money. The same goes
for most farmers and grocery stores.

Home repair could also be used as an analogy. If
you want a good house you need to learn about
upkeep. Or you need to find someone you trust and
pay them to do it.

You can save a lot of work by using tools, like
NoScript for Firefox. But even getting that far is
a level of tech expertise that only a tiny fraction
of people will ever master.

I provide an information webpage for people interested
in privacy. At the beginning I explain that there could be
3 categories of people delineated: People who don't care
about online spying, people who care but don't want to
make an effort, and people who care and do want to make
an effort. Most people are in the 2nd category. Ostrich
mentality. They think that caring will somehow be helpful.
The only people who can be helped are the ones in the
3rd category.

| And, slightly off topic: Those who suggest using the ISP as an email
| provider ignore the fact that one would like to change ISP's
| occasionally without killing all the contacts one has established over
| the years. Further one of my email accounts is with Verizon, my ISP.
| They have no anti-spam functionality and they keep wanting me to
| change the port. I just ignore them and so far all (except for the
| spam) is still well.
|
| Nor is it practical to use a free email account. Last time I checked
| they all seem to be in Bangladesh or other third-world countries and
| are likely of short longevity. Nope, we're stuck with gmail or
| similar.
|

This is a great example of the problem. You want
honest, non-spyware email, but you don't want to
make any effort. (Verizon has switched the port
once, maybe twice over the years. The latest change
is to make it more secure. It requires two minutes
of paying attention on your part to make that change.)

Google says, "Hey, go with us. It's effortless." So
you do. OK, but don't then complain about sleaziness.
I have ISP email. If I changed ISPs then so what? I'd
have to let people know. Most of my email I do through
my own domain. I pay yearly to keep ownership and
pay $9/month for hosting. Again, you can get cheaper
or even free web hosting, but if you want real service
without sleaze it costs a bit. It also requires learning
a bit about how to have a domain hosted. You can also
get real email for a couple of dollars a month from an
independent company. My techy niece is using something
called hushmail lately. I haven't looked into it, but it
looks like it might be a good choice.

Telling everyone that we're stuck with GMail is just
fooling yourself. I'm not stuck with gmail. I've never
used free webmail and never will. On some of
my email accounts I auto-delete incoming webmail. If
people want to reach me they need to use real email
to do it.
I don't agree that the sleazy webmail companies
(Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, especially) have a right to
essentially rifle through my desk and copy my papers
at will. You going along with that sleaze is *exactly*
what makes it possible for them to do it.