A handful of colleges have outsourced their e-mail to Google's Gmail service, hoping to shrug off an administrative burden. Those colleges could not have been pleased to hear about a security flaw in Gmail that gives the owners of some Web sites access to a visitor's Gmail contact list.
It appears that Google has fixed the problem. But that, along with a snafu in which the accounts of 60 Gmail users were suddenly, inexplicably cleaned out, has led writers at ZDNet and Wired to question the security of the mail service more generally.
Security has been one of the main concerns of college officials who have questioned switching over to a private e-mail service like Gmail. But running one's own e-mail service certainly does not prevent problems and security holes. –Scott Carlson
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