response 25 of 38:

Feb 13 00:08 UTC 2006

Regarding #24; You really do know how to misinterpret someone, don't you?
But it's just that sort of ad homimun, ``I don't like you so I don't like
what you have to say'' and ``You're saying something different from what
others say so it must be wrong'' bullshit that I'm talking about.  But hey,
thanks for making my point for me!

Regarding #23; That's actually not true.  You'd cut down on most of the spam,
for one.  If you think there'd be a deluge of new users looking for gmail
access, then at least tell me *why* you think that?  Any statistical data to
back it up?  Do other shell services offer POP access (I don't know, but
think that sdf might)?

response 27 of 38:

Feb 13 08:39 UTC 2006

i'm very mad at all of you.

response 29 of 38:

Feb 16 20:44 UTC 2006

Just encountered this item and looked briefly at the link about it that
Nate provided.  I realize that the details are sketchy at this stage,
but if it's the case that users would still have to log into Grex and
use Grex's local email clients to access mail provided in this way, it
certainly wouldn't violate the philosophy embodied in our FAQ statement
and might save staff some major administrative headaches.  Once details
are available, we'd have to take a close look before going this route,
of course.

response 31 of 38:

Feb 17 12:51 UTC 2006

Those would be my concerns as well.

Google is now officially inviting participation in beta testing of this
service.  https://www.google.com/hosted/Home

response 33 of 38:

Feb 18 14:43 UTC 2006

Assuming there are privacy issues with Google, don't we already accept a
lack of privacy on Grex?  We're told that Grex is a poor place to hold
private information.

response 35 of 38:

Feb 19 18:53 UTC 2006

There are also privacy concerns.  Grex could be broken into and could have
information compromised by an attacker, or grex may become the target of
government investigation due to its open nature.

As far as I know, the latter has never happened except that grex was served
a subponea once for someone engaged in credit card fraud.  It was satisfied
and the matter closed as far as grex was concerned.  Even in our ultra-
paranoid, government gone wild (show us where the taxes come from, baby!)
US-centric world, no one has ever expressed a major interest in grex.
Therefore, I personally feel that the privacy concerns are overblown.

As for the latter, grex has had security problems on the supposedly
ultra-secure OpenBSD that it just didn't fix for a year or more at a time,
so I wouldn't be surprised if someone had compromised it.  In particular,
at one time, an unprivileged user could `cat' a terminal device in /dev,
and when someone telnet'ed to grex, could then see the user's data as they
typed it to grex.  In particular, user names and passwords were easy to
steal that way.  It's unclear how many accounts were compromised that way,
or whether any of those accounts could be used to leverage greater access
(e.g., did someone `su' while someone was cat'ing their terminal?).

So, a reasonable user should expect no privacy from malicious users who
may break into grex, but privacy from prying spook-like spy eyes is probably
not a big concern, or at least shouldn't be.  In particulr, if mail were
outsourced to google, it'd probably be about as secure as it is now.

response 37 of 38:

Feb 21 22:49 UTC 2006

I think its a great idea.  Grex does not have the resources to fight
widespread email spamming.  The email spammers could be the end of grex.  This
is a way to solve the problem