The strange mix of privacy advocates, anti-globalists and anti-commercial groups that seem to be swarming on Google in hopes of preventing the company from providing its new Gmail service might be surprised to find out that the other free email providers already do exactly what the groups seem to find offensive. Yahoo Mail, for instance, allows for searching emails. Hotmail appears to target ads based on message content. A MarketingVOX investigation revealed that different free email sites include different levels of interaction with message content.

For instance the message "travel air flight fare" sent to a Hotmail account came up with an ad for a travel site United.com. The message "love match date couple relationship" spawned ads for eHarmony.com, a dating service for people looking for serious relationships. Reloading that page brought up ads for LavaLife, One2OneMatch and Date.com, and then a string of non-dating related sites. Since the testing was anecdotal, the email engines may be merely coincidentally providing relevant ads, but tests were run on four categories of message at least seven times each. Yahoo and Email.com appeared to not trigger ads based on message content.

Messages to Microsoft and Email.com over the weekend seeking comment on the practices were not yet returned. A Yahoo representative responded, sending a link to the company's privacy policy (which doesn't mention anything about email content) and declined to answer when the email search function became available. MarketingVOX also approached for comment the head of Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), an organization that has been critical of Gmail's potential for privacy abuse. EPIC filed a Freedom of Information Act request last week for documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). EPIC was fishing for information that might tell it whether or not the FBI contemplated using services like Gmail for law enforcement purposes, something it hasn't legally been able to do by itself.

In further support of our request for expedited processing is that fact that Gmail is capable of performing precisely the functions for law enforcement and intelligence agencies that have been the subject of Congressional action and widespread public debate.