Using public webmail accounts has been in the news ever since Sarah Palin’s infamous Yahoo account. And while I still don’t believe using one of these public webmail accounts for serious business is ever a good idea, there has been some back-and-forth on the issue around the blogosphere. First, Don Reisinger at Cnet wrote a blog detailing five annoying things about using Gmail. This was responded to on ZDNet by Garett Rogers, who sings the praises of Gmail–going so far as to claim that all other mail clients annoy him.

Whether Gmail is annoying or not is missing the point. There is probably something annoying, to someone, about every single mail client, web or otherwise. Gmail may well have more annoying features than most, I don’t know, I don’t use it. I have two email addresses, for one, I use Microsoft Mail on my local PC; and for the other, I access Microsoft Outlook through a corporate VPN using two-factor authentication. I do feel secure with both, am quite happy with the feature sets, and appreciate being in control of my own archives.

One of the things Reisinger gets annoyed at is the fact that Google scans email for the purpose of delivering context-relevant ads. Now in all fairness, Google doesn’t have live people reading everybody’s email, this is all done with a bot. But all the same, it could be seen as an intrusion; and beyond that, do you really want to have your employees looking at ads in every email? It’s counter-productive. Rogers calls desktop clients “old school”, as if that were a bad thing. Easy access to emails from up to a year back is important to me, and for some companies, required by law. While he is correct to say that simply storing these emails on the local drive leaves open the door to a hard drive failure or file corruption, that’s what archives and backups are for. Am I “old school”? Yes, I suppose I am, but in this regard, old school is what’s going to afford the greatest level of security and control. The advantage of access to email from any location also isn’t just limited to webmail, and so the purported Gmail advantage of global access is really no advantage at all. I too can access my email from any location. On my first account, which I access with Microsoft Mail, there is also a web interface, so I can gain password-controlled access from any computer. And for the second, the corporate VPN takes care of that, allowing me to log in from anywhere.

Thinking about using Gmail, or another public webmail? For personal stuff, it’s fine. For sending and receiving ecards from friends, if you want to remain anonymous, or just to have an extra account to use for when you have to give an email address that’s likely to be harvested for spam, it’s great. But I would never use it for business.