an insight from history might be in order, for you, max.the stasi, which was the east german government's secret police, was well known for the info it kept on the country's citizens. i don't remember the figure correctly, but it had files on 8 million people - out of a total population of 25 million. husbands were spying on wives, best friends on each other. almost everyone was an informant. however, as extensive as the stasi's collection of information was, this maha archive, in the end, was its own undoing. they had so much dope on people, that extracting and using it (almost) became impossible.now, keep on one side the fact of the amount of information
google can gather. their stated aim is organizing the world's information (somethign that probably hasn't been tried since the library at ancient alexandria, maybe.) and, they've been launching new, powerful, and compelling services: gmail is a perfect example for how it shook up the entire scene: gigs of storage instead of 2/4mb msn/yahoo were offering, breakthrough paradigms in searching/sorting etc etc etc.keep, on the other side, the fact of computers, what they are today, where they are headed, and what can be done with them.then, rethink your comment, about the 'reading' of email, 'manually'. just as a thought experiment.