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Oops! I just noticed that I missed a fat-finger typo, referring to msn.com as man.com. Oh, well; 'a' is just one key off from 's'. Actually, out of curiosity, I checked and found that there is a man.com site. It seems to be a gay men's site that advertises it self as a "search site". Somehow, I doubt they did what I said they did. OTOH, msn.com has developed a bit of a reputation for sleazy business practices. No surprise, I guess. ;-) Sometimes you find fun things when you mistype a host name. F'r instance, why would what's obviously a site targeting gay men have "Men Seeking Women" as one of the items in their nav list? To show that they don't discriminate? Oh well, it's off topic here. | Matthew Gillen wrote: | | It's beyond me why anyone would use their ISP-provided email for anything but | | interacting with the ISP anyway. It's as much a vendor-lock-in mechanism as a | | "service" provided to the customer... | | In some cases, it's because they want to be able to look at your email. | Remember a few years ago, when man.com was caught picking photos out of their | customers' email and web sites, and using them in advertising? It really hit | the fan when people found out, and they agreed to stop doing it. But first | they tried justifying it by saying it was legal because they stated in their | Terms of Service (ToS) document that any files stored on their machines | became msn.com's property. | | Fact is that the management, especially the marketers, at many companies | consider anything they can trick you into "giving" to them is theirs to use | in any way they feel. If they can make a profit selling information from your | files, they feel that it's their right to do so. Some of them even argue that | they have an obligation to their shareholders to do so. This should be good | enough ground to avoid any "service" that puts your files on their machines. -- There are three kinds of people in this world, those who count and those who don't.
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