Why oh why are companies still using third party email providers for their business?

Google can't possibly be doing this to hide the amount of spam issuing from gmail. Oh no, surely not. Such a thought would never cross their minds. That would be Doing Evil.

it's bad enough the Big G snooping on me, let alone its minions

Exactly. Apple are up to the same tricks in fact - anyone who's upgraded to Safari 3.2.1 and been unable to maintain a session in gmail might appreciate this.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8636387#8757944

Facebook has a similar anomaly: if I create an event, I can invite anybody to it by email address - unless that address is associated with a Facebook account, in which case I can only invite that person if they're on my friends list. Presumably Analytics (and Facebook) is identifying these addresses as belonging to user accounts and handling them differently, then in this case there's some bug with the latter process.

@Charlie Clark: "data protection legislation" bans me from knowing the rough location and configuration of my websites' visitors?! I've heard it used as an excuse for all sorts of institutional stupidity, but if it actually says I'm not allowed to analyse the things Analytics collects, the authors need a serious battering with the clue-by-four.

We had the same problem, but resolved it by replacing the users login from either @googlemail to @gmail or the other way round. It seems that Google is getting confused.

Steve

most likely an bug that no one has reported ?

"Why oh why are companies still using third party email providers for their business?"

Why oh why is anyone still using a free email provider for anything? Hint to the clueless: if you prefix all your email subject lines with "[SPAM]" then that's probably less likely to get you dropped by any half-decent filter.

As a web dev company, we stopped using Google Analytics some months ago as we noticed an increasing percentage of unlogged visits - i.e. people using various blockers to block or deny google-analytics.com. We subsquently developed our own in-house tracking system which is woven into each site's server-side code, and is therefore unblockable without blocking the entire website.

Information we collect from visitors includes: IP address, ISP, country of origin, browser type and version, time of access, pathing information (a list of pages on the site visited by the client in order and time elapsed between page deliveries), and most information submitted by the visitor on various site forms. Credit card, banking and paypal etc. details are not retained after being passed to the appropriate transaction-processing entity, for obvious reasons. All information retained is stored encrypted and provided only to the website owner (our client). Our website owners are advised that they must legally abide by the privacy policy they provide us for publication on their site.

This information provides us, and our clients, with essential statistical and demographic information required for site maintenance, marketing and planning. It provides us with valuable feedback about the ease-of-use and navigability of our sites, which we incorporate into site upgrades and future development projects. Without this information, neither we nor our clients have a business.

So data protection laws and google-blockers notwithstanding, we have a duty to our stakeholders and clients to ensure we can provide accurate information about their site usage. Yes, I am in favour of privacy protection, which is why we only share what we collect with the relevant client on a need-to-know basis. But it is easy to carry this concept into the realm of paranoia, which is why we were forced to go in-house with our tracking.

As with any website - our site, our rules.

gmail is far superior to the internal mail systems of companies I have worked for:

it searches better, keeps a longer history, and is more reliable.

i wish, i wish, i wish my company would adopt gmail - then maybe i wouldn't have to ARCHIVE(!) my emails!

you do realise that the DPA covers the processing of all data, personal data is only a part of that that's treated more securely. And since a court has ruled that an ip address is personally identifiable data, that probably covers a hell of a lot that google gathers.

@ ac

gmail for business, are you insane? you are opening up all of your companies communications to a third party, who have specifically stated that they will scan those communications for commercial purposes!! It may provide more functionality, but falls over badly in the security department, at least internal mail is internal!