The school's email is working better today, but I'm wary. Very wary.
Gmail seems like one possible solution to my email woes. I was sent an offer to join a few weeks ago, but dithered so long over choosing a screen name that the offer lapsed. Now I'm re-motivated, and Constantin Basturea kindly sent me a URL to activate an account. But now there's a new problem: I just read the license terms.
If you read the program policies to which assent is required (along with the privacy policy and terms of use), you find in there a representation that I do not think I can make in good conscience. I'm asked to agree that I will not,
Reformat or frame any portion of the web pages that are part of the Gmail Service
The trouble is, like everyone else I would plan to view my gmail through a browser. Sometimes it's in a small window. Sometimes it shows text only and no graphics, sometimes all sorts of odd things happent to my desktop, some of them even intentional. Sometimes I have small text, sometimes bigger. And let's not even talk about the ad blocker…
If this were a prohibition on publishing Gmail content to others in a transformed form, that might be less of a problem, although you have to wonder what this means if I forward the text of an email—do I have to include the ads? What if I only quote a paragraph in a paper I'm writing? But the text quoted above reads as a limit on how I display it to myself, and one which it may be impossible for me to comply with since all browsers “reformat” web pages according to my and the programmer's instructions.
I would communicate this concern directly to Gmail, indeed in further correspondence no-good-deed-goes-unpunished Constantin Basturea even gave me a URL to use to submit the query…but it requires you have a gmail account to write to them.
