Before more people come in to defend Google, ive known for quite awhile that theyve been snooping their own employees emails. Before gmail went live nearly 10 years ago, there were beta accounts one could get. The only way you could get one was via invitation, and people were willing to pay money for those invites. This one girl i knew who worked at google decided to sell her invites to people. She was selling them to friends. Some how google found out about this. It was against company policy for people to be selling these invites. But, they found out she was and fired her. Thr rumor was they somehow pieced the info back to her. But unless the forced a confession out of these people, we surmised it was because she was sending all of these invitees paypal links for payment. She even told us later thats the only way they could have k own she was selling invites to gmail. So, yeah, not surprised by this at all.

Personally, i use my own smtp server to do all of my mail. It is not completely secure since the nsa can see everything, but its better than trusting google or hotmail.