Why ‘Free-mail’ Has a Bad Reputation

Hey everyone, sorry about the little hiatus, I was on vacation (still am) and despite best intentions did not spend any time posting over the last week or so. I suppose that’s a good thing.

I do now want to write about an article on the Washington Post site regarding Web-mail. The gist of the article is that Google is the best of the ‘Free-mail’ options compared to Yahoo and Hotmail. The article ends with three points:

“But what if you plan to employ a Web-mail account as your primary e-mail address? That can be a complicated value judgment. Gmail’s ads are generally in good taste, but do you want every bit of personal correspondence to arrive with its own marketing payload?”

Is Google forgoing potential business customers by continuing to display ads in the email client? Could they possibly be making money with these ads? Until just now, when I went to look specifically, I had never even looked at the ads. I knew they were they but never looked at them and never even considered looking at them. I’m there do get things done, read my mail, respond, are these ads really adding revenue at the expense of users?

“There’s also the nagging issue of Gmail’s developers not considering the service “done” after 33 months of effort — thought it may be comforting to learn that Google employees themselves use Gmail.”

Can we stop exploiting the word ‘Beta’ now? Look 33 months, millions of people use it every day and anyone can get access and use it, it’s not in Beta anymore. Beta use to be cool, now it’s just a gimmick. Google’s not the only one diluting the definition of Beta, of course. Now we are going to have to have different levels of Beta, ‘Limited Beta’ (which means it really is in Beta and not just anyone can use it), ‘Beta’ (the company is trying to be cool), ‘Perpetual Beta’ (the company has no idea how to monetize the product and needs to keep the investors on the line).

And finally, here’s the one I don’t understand: 

“But the real sticking point may be whether you want to trust your most important messages to any free service at all.”

I don’t know what this means. Why wouldn’t I want to trust my messages to a free service? What is the opposite of a ‘free service’ and why should I ‘trust’ them?