Maybe I'm the stupid one here, but how does Google offer to provide people 4GB of email and storage... without actually storing that? And like you yourself men

Maybe I'm the stupid one here, but how does Google offer to provide people 4GB of email and storage... without actually storing that? And like you yourself mention, to add security to prevent automated hacking scripts from 0wning accounts to add to a botnet (attempts that happen orders of magnitude more often than an NSL or FISA warrant) they have to add IP tracking for individual accounts. You talk about GPG but there's little safe way to do that from client-side JS, would defeat most of the point of offering free email for Google in the first place, and is already supported just by offloading that onto a real email client.