Posted on 10/01/2011 7:05:08 AM PDT by mreerm
yesterday, a friend who works in an IT department described an interesting action by gmail. i had another friend test and confirm the action.
those of you who are on gmail, check this out.
create a new mail. in subject, put 'here it is'. in body of message, put 'see attachment'. don't attach anything. hit send.
instead of sending the message, gmail will pop up a window saying: 'Do you mean to attach files? You wrote "see attachment" in your message, but there are no files attached. Send anyway?'
“Didn’t you mean to write: ‘Great Job, Obama!’? Because that isn’t what you wrote.”
Lots of email programs do this.
You do know that gmail scans every word you type, enters it into a database and then sells advertising space to companies that target you specifically, don’t you?
If you send an email to a friend consoling them on a medical issue you will probably start to see Dr. adverts on the right side of your browser when in google for instance.
That’s why I always get ads at the top of gmail for spam and various ways to cook it to make it palatable.
I would be interested to find out if the same result happened on an encrypted email.
It's not particularly evil. It's even possible to handle that in Javascript and put that message up before any data is sent to Gmail/Google. If the popup comes up without any significant delay with "contacting gmail.com" in your status bar, then it's your computer that is scanning the content and putting up the dialog.
Let's face it, once you send an email, privacy is not an expected consideration with today's technologies and the increased storage capacity. If I'm worried about what I'm sending being seen by others, I tend to not send it.
Thunderbird has done this for quite a while.
That is strange. When I try to send an email without an attachment after I've signified that I want to send an attachment, the pop up message to me reads: "Chuck Norris will come to your house and kick your ass for wasting our time"
Haha! I thought I was the only one receiving their tasty recipes!
Just for whoever cares, Microsoft Outlook didn’t do it. Sent the email as i wrote it with no “see attached” attachment.
Thunderbird gives a reminder.
If you are not using encryption your email is the equivalent of a post card; anybody on any machine it travels through can read your missive. That your mail client reads your mail is hardly surprising.
Yes, I love Big Brother!
I have never seen a single one of those ads thanks to Adblock, Flashblock and Noscript, though my gmail correspondence no doubt does have plenty of opportunity for ad harvesting.
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