You're confused. Google reads all incoming emails to enhance its ad targeting, Apple doesn't [1]. I don't have to opt out of Apple reading my mail because it doesn't read it by default.

Still waiting for some facts instead of rhetoric about how "everyone's doing it".

[1] https://www.apple.com/privacy/

"iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and you can always just opt out altogether."

Apple,Yahoo!, Google and every mail sever READ all the emails.

They are read for anti virus purposes, categorization and for full text search.

You're conflating reading email for the purposes of providing an online email service with reading email for the purposes of building a profile of a user to help target advertising.

These are very different. In the former case, if I delete an email, its metadata is gone too (indexing, antivirus, etc.). In the latter case the email provider is literally building a dossier of my personality, preferences, and contacts that persists regardless of how much email I delete (or even if I delete my whole account).

To put it another way, Apple reads my email in the trivial sense - so the email itself can be stored, displayed, and searched. Google reads my email in the intimate sense - so it can learn more about me and augment my ad profile. These are not at all the same thing, and confusing the two is dangerous because it lets privacy invasion off the hook as just "providing a service".

https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated "Ads based on your interest". Notice no where in there does it say that these interests are based on your emails.

Gmail does a lot of stuff that requires email parsing: * Spam filtering * Search indexing * Applying rule based filters * Priority Inbox * Picking up automated emails corresponding to receipts, flights, or calendar appointments and making them available to search or see in Google Now. * To train the Smart Reply feature

One primary reason Apple doesn't do this is that Apple doesn't have a cloud based email service. They are forced to do everything on device. I have about 10Gb of email in my work account and 16Gb of email in my personal account. Do I want to sync 26Gb of email to my phone, tablet, and desktop, all so that they can do purely local indexing, filtering, and other smart AI based features? If I'm a user in a developing country on a 2G or 3G network, do I want this to all happen locally, or in the cloud?

There are tradeoffs in all scenarios, and the theorized nasty things from all of the speculated profiling going on don't seem to be very apparent. And if all of these profiling is going on, then why is what Google thinks I'm interested in so often wrong? Perhaps there's a disconnect between what people imagine Google "could be doing" and what they're actually doing.

Apple has iCloud email service

Wow, you're right. It's so under the radar, I don't know a single person who has ever used it, or mobileme before it. The point still stands though, in the sense that Mail.app is written with the assumption of IMAP/Exchange as the primary use case, and so they have to assume local processing unless they implement proprietary protocols/IMAP extensions. I don't think you get credit for starting with a legacy POP/IMAP client, and then say "this was architected for local processing for your privacy", in the sense that, it already existed that way because most Mail clients prior to Gmail had to treat the MTA as a relatively commodity store. (you're claiming credit for doing something that was always that way by default) If they launch a rewrite-from-scratch end-to-end client for a proprietary email service protocol, and offer features on parity with gmail, but all with offline processing, then it's worth talking about.

Apple is in the same position as Microsoft with the PC. Microsoft wanted the PC to be the center of the universe, the center of the home, and all processing to take place on it, because that meant MS Software would be in control. Cloud based processing commodifies your platform, as the Web helped commodify Windows and paved the way for the iPhone and Mac to be viable and usable (since most of the apps people wanted to run were now web apps)

Apple wants the iPhone to be the new central hub of everything, because that drives sales of hardware and drives lock-in to their proprietary walled garden. By coincidence, this aligns with enhanced privacy, but Apple is beholden to Wall Street just like Google is, and if there was a new product which threatened to tank their stock, and they had to compromise "principles", you'd start to see a weaseling away.

When Apple reaches saturation with their primary business, the iPhone, and they need to drive huge growth, they'll diversify into other areas. If they are driven into services, they will inevitably run up again the issue of having to process inherently personal data in the cloud.

I think you're assuming more from Apple's privacy statement than they say.

"We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers."

How do you get from a phrase like that to "... if I delete an email, its metadata is gone too (indexing, antivirus, etc.).?" In particular, the antivirus and indexing data---particularly any manual signal you provided to Apple on whether you thought that email was spam---is likely retained to improve the quality of their service for you and other customers.

They said they're not building a profile on you to sell to advertisers. It'd be really surprising if they aren't building a profile on you to improve things like, say, Siri's understanding of your interests, or Maps' understanding of your area, etc. So is the third-party advertising where we draw the line?

You original

> How do I opt out of google reading my email when I communicate to someone who had a Gmail account?

Perhaps the one confusing and using wrong terms is not me.

You're right I should have clarified that I meant I don't want Google to read the contents of my email and form a profile about me even if I don't use Google services instead of just saying "read".

Edit: I still haven't heard any justification from you for why it's ok for Google to do this nor any evidence that Apple does the same thing.

I didn't said that Apple makes a profile, I have said that Apple/Microsoft/every mail server reads ALL the emails.