The only thing deleting does is remove the links to the file from your account so you have no way of monitoring it. Not that visits to the original image is ever tracked in you account anyway.

So Ipernity is one program I would avoid if I cared about keeping any sort of control over my files.

Ok, I take back all my snidey little jibes in that case… but that’ll learn ya!

Anyway, I wholly endorse your “lesson 2″ (having gone through loadsa fun & games with a seemingly endless succession of email providers). Webmail definitely seems to be the way to go, and preferably one of the “big boys” (Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL/ICQ etc).
My personal preference nowadays is for Google (despite all my concerns about their “privacy policy” etc), mainly cos they’re user-friendly, they’re (generally) fairly reliable, and they offer a host of other damn useful freebie add-on services.
They displaced what used to be my first choice (ICQ) quite a while ago cos ICQ used to have a limited storage capacity for freebie users. (I was a “premium” user but then, bizarrely, found I couldn’t renew my subscription for some obscure reason so suddenly my unlimited storage capacity dropped down to their former limit of… er… 2Gb I think. Since their merger with AOL though they now offer unlimited capacity even for freebie users, so I’m still using them as a backup for whenever Google falls over.)

The great thing with webmail is of course that one keeps the same address even if you change your ISP, physically move, or whatever. And it can be set up so its slightly less easy for some busybody snooper to do a backward audit trail sorta thing.

Thanks for sharing this new find.