Is it legal for your ISP to give out your e-mail adress?

Digerati said:

Have you looked in your GMail spam folder lately? I regularly find legitimate mail in there too. It will often be forum reply notifications, including some from here. I find it frustrating, but inevitable - and all the more reason to never let a spam blocker automatically delete anything.

Doesn't Gmail have a whitelist feature?

In answer to the topic title:

Unfortunately, it's perfectly legal for ANYONE to give out your email address, last time I checked. If a company/ISP has a privacy policy that specifically states that they won't give out your email, and then you discover that they have, you could probably sue them and that's about it. Otherwise, you wouldn't have any recourse at all, because when you give a website/company your information, you're basically agreeing to the privacy policy (like signing a contract).

Personally, I think that selling/leasing email mailing lists should be illegal. It makes me mad that a company can make money by giving my email address to another company, especially when I have no idea what that other company might be, or who they might give my address to in turn.

Digerati said:

Have you looked in your GMail spam folder lately? I regularly find legitimate mail in there too. It will often be forum reply notifications, including some from here. I find it frustrating, but inevitable - and all the more reason to never let a spam blocker automatically delete anything.

Yes - I check my email in outlook constantly - and as this an IMAP account and I have the spam folder subscribed, it's easy to see when new entries appear in the spam folder.

Gmail, uses labels to impersonate the functionality of the folders of a normal IMAP account - simply dragging any good email into the correct location removes the Spam label, so should stop the repeat of the error. With other accounts I will sometimes go to the website to update a white-list where implemented.

As for deletion of spam Email the Gmail filter is set to delete after 30 days - my spam email is manually checked, and deleted if needed, long before that.

I assume from the way that Outlook 2010 works that Microsoft believes that IMAP is the way to go - if you let Outlook auto configure an account it will default to IMAP, if available, over POP3. It is I suppose closer to the way that exchange works.

The other major advantage for me is that as the server and local machine are automatically kept synchronised. This means that I can access my mail from multiple locations. (Desktop & Laptop), knowing that any changes I make in one place is automatically reflected in the other

One advantage I find with the outlook/IMAP route is that I can read email offline - not to easy with a pure web based set-up :)

I also tend to move mails, from subsidiary accounts, that I want to keep, into one Gmail account, in outlook, using rules, so I have a built-in off-site backup of important information.

Also by using a live account with the Hotmail/outlook connector and setting this account as default in Outlook 2010,for the calender, tasks & contacts, I gain the same off-line, off-site backup, and synchronisation benefits, that IMAP provides for email.