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Free E-Mail Services: Safe or Not?

By Carolyn Elefant

Last week, I asked whether lawyers make a poor impression on clients when using free e-mail addresses like Gmail or Yahoo. This week, there's a more serious debate brewing in the blogosphere over e-mail, specifically, whether free e-mail services are unsafe at any speed. In other words, are the confidentiality and privacy features of these systems so grossly inadequate that no level of caution can make them suitable for communication with clients? Toby Brown at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog cautions against reliance on these services. Re-reading the terms of service agreements from Gmail and Yahoo, Brown discovered that they both reserve the rights to pre-screen e-mail and target ads to content. Because these free e-mail services expose confidential communications to third parties, Brown believes that lawyers who use these services may be waiving confidentiality and could put themselves at risk of disciplinary action. I've reviewed the Google ToS agreement several times before but I don't agree with all of Brown's conclusions (Disclosure: My husband works at Google but not on any e-mail-related projects). For example, Brown only partly posts language from "Content from You" -- the ToS provision that says "By submitting, posting or displaying the content you...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on August 19, 2009 (boomark / email).