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While the privacy issue is a real concern for some people and organizations, where it's a big enough concern to pull the plug on considering GMail logic and reason would tell us it's a big enough concern to pull the plug on any hosted solution. Almost everything in IT has risks and rewards that must be evaluated. For hosted email, the reward is lower maintenance costs and hopefully a more robust system ensuring the integrity of data. The risks that come along with that include reduced privacy, lack of full envirnomental control and a more difficult support structure from an end user perspective. These risks and rewards apply to all hosted email environments, not just GMail. In some areas, hosted email simply is a non-starter. I'm sure nobody would like to see law enforcement at any level using hosted email for doing their jobs no matter who the host is...the privacy concern would trump everything else. The same goes for hospitals as HIPAA privacy concerns would also seem to trump everything else. Non-critical government services, schools and most public-sector companies/individuals have their own concerns that need to be weighed individually. As with most things in life, there is no simple answer as to where hosted email services make sense and where they don't.
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