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At stake, said commentators, were cherished individual rights to liberty and privacy.

“Google is risking its reputation for honesty and for putting the user first,” wrote Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal’s respected technology columnist. “The problem here isn’t confusion between ads and editorial content. It’s that Google is scanning your private e-mail to locate the keywords that generate the ads. This seems like an invasion of privacy.”

Mossberg concluded that the proposed system “has the potential for big problems if the content scanning were ever misused by Google. Google might also be forced to use such content scanning in the service of government subpoenas or court orders that might apply to years’ worth of its customers’ e-mails.”

Other privacy advocates went after Gmail and Google more vociferously than the measured Mossberg. “Google is ... creating incredibly detailed dossiers on every one of us,” said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a highly regarded civil-liberties watchdog.

The privacy issue mobilised the troops. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, based in San Diego, California, and 30 other privacy and civil-liberty groups from around the world signed a public letter to Google demanding that it suspend Gmail.

The groups urged Google to be more explicit about its policies and practices concerning the sharing of data. Google already retained data showing the computer address where every search originated and the nature of the query. Mixing that data with identities and names would now be possible, since Gmail required individuals to register for the service by name. A Gmail user conducting Google searches would be potentially identifiable.

All that personal information in a single, electronic repository was disturbing, since it offered one-stop shopping for dishonest employees, hackers, divorce lawyers, private investigators, and overzealous prosecutors.

“The Gmail system sets potentially dangerous precedents and establishes reduced expectations of privacy in e-mail communications,” said the April 6, 2004 letter. “These precedents may be adopted by other companies and governments and may persist long after Google is gone.”

It challenged Google’s view that computer scanning of e-mails to insert ads was more benign than people reading private e-mails. “A computer system, with its greater storage, memory and associative ability than a human’s, could be just as invasive as a human listening to the communications, if not more so.”

Adding to fears was Google’s offer of free, hefty storage and permanent e-mail retention. This meant that e-mails would be retained indefinitely on Google servers, even though the strongest privacy protections in America would be exhausted after 180 days.

Some of the company’s big investors were furious about the way Gmail was rolled out — and about the timing. How could Eric Schmidt, the chief executive, have allowed this to happen just weeks before the company was set to reveal its plans to float? He was supposed to prevent the Google guys from doing things they regarded as really smart but the rest of the mere mortals on the planet would consider dumb or at least ill-timed.

The Gmail fight had the potential to give Google a black eye and damage its credibility. Left unchecked, Gmail could undermine the single most important asset that Google had: the trust of hundreds of millions of computer users and advertisers around the world.