Also consider what happens to unencrypted email you send or receive: any upstream servers can be subpoenaed, as can the person on the other end. Encrypted mail only works when it's encrypted end-to-end and your adversary cannot seize the sending or receiving computer. I imagine that people who encrypt their received email end up in court because their sender was not so careful. Do you trust every person that will ever mail you to keep your secrets safe? Why?
Ultimately, if the government is your enemy, you need to take a lot more precautions than "don't use Gmail".
(Not kidding, I really do that.)
See http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe..., which is specific to g-mail, but the same rules apply for other products that store user information. There is a whole team that works on this to monitor the process and help product teams implement the policy.
Deleted messages are wiped within ~60 days. The delay is needed to ensure that all copies of the message are deleted, including those that may be on tape.
Seriously? So you reuse all tapes after 60 days? That wouldn't be a smart thing to do if you really care about retention, and I don't mean solely retaining deleted mail, but just retention of data in general. Regardless of stated policies, I don't believe you. Business critical data like that would not only be stored for 60 days- not in Google.
I didn't say that.
Someone stated that it was well known that g-mail never deletes data. I posted a quote from the privacy policy that contradicts that. I also said (a few threads back) that there is a team of people whose job is to work with product teams to make sure they are following the policy.
I've worked at companies where the publicly posted policies had little-to-nothing to do with how the company really operated.
That has not neen my experience at Google. Handling user-data properly is taken very seriously. A significant amount of effort (and money) is expended making sure of this.
I can't control whether or not you believe me and I can't go into too many details or share too many war stories. I'm an engineer that has worked at both the bottom of the stack (building the hardware that runs in the data centers) and at the top of the stack (a large user-facing product) and I can tell you that I have many first-hand experiences where protecting user-data was prioritized over other concerns - often at non-trivial cost and effort.