A GMail idea...

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Wannabe Baiter Joined: 15 Jul 2008 Posts: 84

For those of you baiters pretending to be lads, if you started seeding the thought that gmail accounts are no longer safe, do you think we'd see a migration of lads away from gmail and back to yahoo? I suppose this is more for the safari-seekers than the rest of the baiters, so I may be appealing to a minority here.

In my head it goes down something like this: a couple of dolla-choppers spread the word about knowing lads whose gmail accounds have been hijacked by something--a virus, a malicious lad, Scotland Yard, whatever. Then it starts happening to baiter-lads (blads? XD) who have to get new accounts with another service...

Do you think we could start spooking lads back to yahoo? Thoughts? Concerns? Agreements? Tacos?

Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 8:48 am

I'll take a taco. But that's just because I'm hungry.

As to the rest of your post...I don't know. I think it would probably take a lot more than a few baiters to make the lad-masses consider GMail to be unsafe. What that "a lot more" would be I do not know.

Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 9:15 am

Most of the lads run Yahoo accounts still, it's just that over the past year or so, since Gmail started, more people in their target audience have started using it, so the smarter lads are just following the trend in the hope it makes them more believable.

They still run their Yahoo accounts, if they are in West Africa, because Yahoo has the market saturation there that google and MSN failed to capitalilse on intially.

Trying to get them to drop Gmail? they'll drop you first, most of them don't have their own computers, they know they can't be traced anyway, it would take a very powerful juju to convince them otherwise.

If you do come up with a modality and try it, I hope it works.

Wannabe Baiter Joined: 15 Jul 2008 Posts: 84

My idea was not convincing them to switch because they could be traced, but because there was a weakness in the gmail system that someone was taking advantage of.

Given the rash of Martian astronaut letters recently, I was kind of hoping a similar rumor-fest could have the lads running at our beck and call. Though the more I think about it, the more improbable it seems. Confused

Posted: Thu Jul 24, 2008 11:41 am

For the West Africans (or others in less developed countries) Another advantage that Yahoo has over Gmail is that with a slower connection, Gmail sometimes won't load, or takes a long time.

Maybe you could start a rumor that the reason Gmail takes so long to load is that "they" are scanning your account for key phrases...

Posted: Thu Jul 24, 2008 12:03 pm

There are vastly many more scammers than baiters, so I don't think a concerted approach would have much impact.

If I wanted to persuade an individual lad to switch away from gmail, I would extol its many virtues, but express concern about the fact that nothing is ever deleted from their central server (even when a message is "deleted" or an account is "closed") [1]. Then mention that the police have even managed to trace criminals right back to the days when gmail started. But frankly I doubt this will work in most cases.

[1] This is actually close to being true - I think that messages are not truly deleted until a year after they are closed.