So, the great news over at TechCrunch today was that Google has added a feature called Mail Fetcher to Gmail, which basically allows you to grab email from other services, such as Yahoo.



This sounds great, and it probably is for Gmail users, but it is also great for Google.
Someone with legal wits should point a browser towards GMail’s terms & services, and check whether there are any provisions to exclude or include, explicitly or not, the scanning of all incoming and outgoing email from these other services. Maybe Google will also scan the contents of the additional email services you add to your Gmail account to send you targeted ads. Maybe Google will have even better demographics by tying the IP addresses found in the headers of all the additional emails with their own database of registered users. There is a saying that nobody sells dimes for 9 cents, it’s a rather good saying to move your wallet by.

Any lawyers in the audience?