20 years of surveillance by Gmail…
Being a bit nostalgic, but Gmail was such a leap forward when it was released. In a world where everybody took the shittiness of hotmail for granted, using Gmail was like peeking into the future. In many ways it was.
Now Gmail is that shitty hotmail we took for granted.
Feels somewhat familiar, doesn’t it.
That, and Chrome was cool when it came out, now it’s just evil…
WOULD YOU LIKE TO SIGN IN? SIGN IN. SIGN IN. SIGN IN.
How about no means no, Google?
It certainly was cool and popular from day one. However, it was also spyware from day one. Tech magazines wrote reviews about it, but the hype train was going so fast at the time that people somehow ignored the privacy aspect.
Nowadays people are beginning to realize just how evil it has always been.
but the hype train was going so fast at the time that people somehow ignored the privacy aspect.
The privacy aspect was vastly overshadowed by the leap in performance. I was tempted to the dark side for a few years because FF performance was rather bad and chrome was super performant. I ended up switching back a bit before the proton release and have only used it or edge as a more open browser for when I have to use a browser that doesn’t block everything.
What’s the new Gmail?
I personally swapped over to Proton Mail recently. Exporting over all saved email, groups and labels from Gmail was easy. I love it so far, it’s very similar to how Gmail works. I’ve set Gmail to forward everything to my new one so I don’t need to go to back very often.
The only bugbear I have currently is while multi-selecting emails in the inbox, then open one up to read it and back out, the selections aren’t remembered. But they are pushing improvements all the time, so I’m sure that will be fixed with time.
Port87? (At least I hope, because I made it. :)
This looks nice but my worry is itll be gone in a year or two and then i lose access to accounts and important emails and people are emailing a non existing email. Any step y’all take to prevent this?
I’m funding the project myself, and I should be able to fund it for many years. Of course the goal is to become profitable, and that will mainly be done through business and enterprise accounts. I’m working on a custom domain feature though, which would allow you to bring your own domain. That way, you could ensure that your email addresses will always be yours.
Interesting idea. I signed up for the waitlist. I keep considering hosting my own email server but it’s a huge pain in the ass just like BIND can be
Signed up for the waitlist, it sounds interesting.
Many websites prevent providing aliased Gmail address, how you’re planning to address that issue?
I use a dash (hyphen) instead of a plus. It’s worked everywhere I’ve tried it. You can still use a plus if you want, but the address it shows for a label in the UI is with a dash.
That looks… surprisingly promising
I’m looking at Tuta. It’s not free (well, they have a crappy free tier), but it’s cheap, is end to end encrypted (as much as email can be), has extra address support, and supports custom domains. So if I hate it, I’ll switch to something else (maybe ProtonMail). The initial switch from my Gmail will suck, but it’ll hopefully be a one-time thing.
I remember when getting an invite was such a big deal.
$100/pop on eBay. At the time, Hotmail inboxes had a storage limit of 2 MB.
From the comments on the article:
There was this brief shining moment when we had Google Now and Google Inbox and, at least for me, they were incredibly useful tools. Then they transformed into a content chum box and a stale email platform respectively and, while I think I know why, I’ll never understand WHY.
I feel this so hard. Inbox was so great and being forced back into old-school Gmail was so disappointing. RIP Inbox.
This.
I’ll never forgive Google for killing Inbox. Of all the projects they killed, that one hurt the worst. I went from being able to actually manage my email to it turning right back into an unmanageable mess overnight, and in spite of their promises, not a single one of Inbox’s features that enabled this were ever implemented in main Gmail.
That was a big turning point for me in being able to trust them for anything
I always wished for Inbox to simply become the new interface for Gmail. My wishes were destroyed once it got discontinued.
There was a brief moment between Jelly Bean and Kit Kat in which Google Now and Inbox made being tracked by Google kind of useful in everyday life
Until the idiots all complained about it being ‘creepy’. Ever since the tracking completely continued, but no longer with any benefit to us.
Great job idiots. Why people just don’t opt not to use features they find ‘creepy’ I’ll never understand. They are only satisfied if they bring it down for everyone.
11 years of ProtonMail let’s goo
20 years on, I still prefer folders instead of labels. And I still don’t want messages group as “conversations.”
It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free. Now there is a hard limit unless you pay.
I’ll just leave this here.
claw back that value!
Did you read the article you referenced?
Or maybe I’m just not seeing the connection.
The cycle is:
- Provide a useful service to users at a loss to make the service indispensable
- Claw back some of that value for business customers (advertisers) to lock them in
- Claw back some of that value for the company
They’re describing how nice step 1 was.
Everything else wrong with Gmail and Google aside, those are the least reasonable complaints? You can use labels as folders. You can also disable conversation grouping, but I doubt you go more than a week before turning it back on.
It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free. Now there is a hard limit unless you pay.
I don’t think anybody expected that to last forever. That said, the free limit is still way more than enough for most people. I’ve got 20 years of emails in my account, and I’m just barely past my free limit.
It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free.
Within a week you could tell there was a set maximum, the speed of increase steadily fell the higher the storage value got. It was a good marketing ploy, but there was never a “forever expanding” promise made.
What if a message covers 2 different topics?
IMHO the entire OS should be based around files and labels, not files and folders.
On Linux file systems it basically is. A file name is just a label for an inode, and the same inode can have as many file names as you want.
Still this requires different directories for the hardlinks to be in the filesystem, and there’s not an easy way given a file to list all “labels” that file has, without checking other directories for files with the same inode.
findhas a way to search by inode.
From the article:
When you have enough storage that you never have to delete anything, you can keep an infinite record of your life. Packages, receipts, itineraries of past trips, messages from loved ones, photos, appointments, documents — you can just label them, archive them, and search for them later.
I don’t want Google to have that information for free, to analyze/monetize/sell to 3rd parties. That’s one of the reasons why I quit GMail. It was difficult too because I was registered to literally 100s of websites with that address.
This is where I got lucky. I’m up my Google workspace for free still (grandfathered in) and I can just switch my MX record whenever I feel the need to no impact. I’ll keep my same email address since it’s under a custom domain.
I remember how excited I was when I finally got an invite code. Now happily gmail-free for 2 years.
Google Maps and YouTube I can’t avoid but otherwise ungoogling successfully.
btw you can use freetube or libretube for youtube, and use an openstreetmaps clientt to replace google maps
What I am really looking for is beyond our email, it’s proper integration between calendar, contacts, and map.
I want to be able to share calendars with my family, and link contacts from certain events (birthdays, meetings, and also just meet-ups). I want those contact’s addresses to be available as navigation destinations in the mapping app. I want to be able to bookmark (“star”) map locations.
If you finally achieve this please make a post about how you did it!
What do you do for mobile?
I use proton mail but otherwise I would probably stick with the default iOS.
I self-host caldav with radicale and use native Debian/ios calendar apps. Immich to replace Google photos was especially satisfying.
So Apple, got it
I wish osm+ was as good as maps. It’s so close and I’ll still use it for in town destinations.
Have you given a try to Organic Maps ? It is more friendly than OSMAnd Although, it still lacks a better search bar I think.
Back in the days that was awesome. I had some kind of shitty Hotmail like German mail provider. 100MB storage, lots of ads. Google pushed into the right direction, almost unlimited storage, at first no ads. This was a huge step forward for email back then. Anyways I ditched Gmail and most of their services years ago, paying for mailbox.org for years, never looked back.
Anyone got an invite? 😅
Gmail is still good for me at least. Does everything I want, doesn’t need new features and I don’t see ads or anything.
What more would I get from someone else? I’m not going to pay for privacy at end of day.
Well if you’re not going to pay for privacy, you won’t get it either 😂
Same. Got no real reason to move away from it, and for all the shit people give it, you weren’t there when it came out. We were drowning in spam about nob pills.
But maybe you would pay for the service of someone else doing all the server stuffs and software development on your behalf? If you’re a paying customer, the company should also respect you and your privacy.
On the other hand, if you’re using the service for free, then the incentives suddenly shift towards you being the product.
“If you aren’t paying for the product then you are the product” doesn’t apply anymore.
Nowadays, even if you do pay for the product, you are still the product, as companies see more money on the table and will go for it.
Really depends on the company. For example American ISPs definitely do that, but then again they aren’t really privacy oriented anyway. Look for an email company that is more privacy focused. Companies like that aren’t really playing the same game as Amazon, Microsoft and other.
True, there are exceptions, and they should be sought out and supported, just not something that can be relied on anymore
No I wouldn’t pay for the services of someone else when I can get it for free.
I’d pirate it if I could though?
It’s a package deal in each case, so you’re not really getting the same thing.
- When you don’t pay, you get email services, but you sacrifice your privacy.
- When you pay, you get email services, and you get to keep your privacy.
Of course, people don’t see equal value in these things. You might not appreciate privacy as much as someone else, and that’s ok. You make your own compromises based on your personal values. We all make compromise at some point.
It is way past time for the US government to offer their citizens email that is not owned by a private company and used as a tool to steal your private information.
This private-public partnership that controls all of our banking and communication is pure bullshit. It is basic services the government should provide. Instead we have private companies either charging us exorbitant fees or turning us into the commodity.
Meanwhile the government has complete control and can tell them to stop servicing us at any time and there is no redress. The government can literally tell your bank to stop doing business with you and you have no rights. Plus, being a private company, they can also stop servicing you because they happen to have a hair up their ass today.
There is no real choice anymore and the consumer always gets screwed. We really fell down the privatization well of retardation and it does not look like we are clawing our way back up anytime soon.
Have you seen government owned IT systems? No thanks.
Yeah I get the old adage about government run programs. While a cute stereotype I would like to remind you if it wass not for the US government the Internet as we know it would not even exist.
It’s true the government can do things very very well. However, it needs proper finding to do so and Republicans most of all are unwilling to spend the cash to allow the government to many effective hires at the scale necessary for something like national email.
It would also likely be a surveillance mess given 3 letter agency interests in communications. It would take a pretty significant shift in national security strategy (and possibly a time machine to elect Al Gore and/or stop 9-11) to get us out of that mess.
If the government can get your current email or bank account shut down, why do you think they couldn’t/wouldn’t do that on a government-provided one?
You would have actual rights and redress with a government agency plus when someone hacks the government’s data it would be a big deal and people would go to prison instead of a private company just shrugging their shoulders and saying oh well.
The government would not need to sell your data. The government would not be able to just change terms of service on a whim. The government would be mandated to provide the services without having to enshittify services later on to capitalize on profits.
The current system of the government calling the shots but not being held responsible should come to an end and these basic services should be provided as a right. To think that private companies can literally destroy your life by removing your ability to bank or communicate and not be held responsible is beyond ridiculous.
While I don’t disagree with you in principle, I do find it a bit funny that you’ve picked one of the easiest services to change between as your hill.
There’s no reason you _ have_ to use Gmail, or Hotmail. There are a billion email providers and if you have enough technical knowledge, you can even run your own (I really don’t recommend this though, it’s harder then it seems to do it safely and securely).
If you pick a provider outside the US, your government can’t do dick about getting it shut down, and if you pick one in a particularly privacy-conscious country, you can have everything encrypted to the point where the provider themselves can’t read your messages.
Also, I assume this is similar in the States, but I’ve seen government IT projects in the UK and some of them are truly awful. I wouldn’t necessarily trust them to look after important emails for me. Plus a single source of email would be an awfully tempting target for hacker groups around the world.
I was very excited to get an invite shortly after it’s opened and I still have all the emails that tell me my friend XYZ accepted my invitation to Gmail.
It was a time when getting a Gmail invitation wasn’t trivial.
Here’s a video recalling how exciting it was to have a Gmail.
Nowadays it’s different and possibly less good, but searching in Gmail is still very easy, which is awesome
The search has been broken for me for a while. I get better results in the iOS mail app. Searching from within gmail will just flat out not show old results.
When I look for things on Gmail on my laptop, I get detailed and complete results, when I do the same on the Gmail app, it seems like I get all results up to maybe two years ago (and it doesn’t show the rest). This second thing is really annoying, but at least on the computer version I always get everything
That’s almost the exact opposite experience for me. Maybe there’s been a more recent update, but I remember searching for specific phrases in decade old messages and the gmail (web site) search would just flat out refuse to show things but I could find them from my phone. I’ll try again, but to be honest, I’ve somewhat given up on google search in general for results that aren’t recent.
