After all that talk about gmail

In a recent NYT article (You've Got Mail ... and --- Court Says Others Can Read It, July 6, 2004) Saul Hansell wrote: "Because most major Internet providers have explicit policies against reading their customers' e-mail messages, the ruling would seem to have little effect on most people."

However, it appears that the other internet e-mail service providers may be potentially more invasive than gmail, according to these posts I spotted on politech:

Google's Gmail policy at gmail.com, which says "no human will read the content of your email in order to target such advertisements or other information without your consent... Google employees do not access the content of any mailboxes unless you specifically request them to do so (for example, if you are having technical difficulties accessing your account) or if required by law, to maintain our system, or to protect Google or the public."

and gigalaw:

Under these policies, customers of the big three ISPs [MSN, AOL, earthlink] should not have any confidence that their e-mail accounts are entirely private. These policies certainly don't forbid the ISPs from monitoring e-mail; indeed, the policies seem to do just the opposite: They expressly permit the ISPs to do.

The discussions arose out of the recent Councilman case in the 1st Cir where it was held that a company, who provided email services to its customers, did not violate the Wiretap Act (18 U.S.C. section 2510-2522) when reviewing their emails because there was no "intercept" of a communication within the meaning of the Act.