When Gmail first appeared in 2004, the idea of having what seemed like a never-ending space for email was revolutionary. Most paid services were providing a few megabytes of space, and here came Google promising a full gigabyte (which, at the time, seemed huge) for free.
Over the years, however, Gmail has added a plethora of features that it touts as “improvements” but some of them are irritating. Worse, it looks for ads for things that it will never need and sticks them at the top of email list.
Back in the dark ages before Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other free cloud-based apps, most email happened either via paid services or inside of walled gardens. In the former, you paid a service provider for an email account and downloaded your email into an app that only lived on your computer — an app with a name like Pine, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, or Thunderbird.
For the most part, nobody was scanning your email to find out the last time you bought shoes, or whether you were shopping for car insurance, or that you had recently been buying gifts for a relative’s new baby. Nobody was taking that information and selling it to vendors so they could drop ads into your email lists or surprise you with additional promotional messages. Your email lived on your computer alone. Once it was downloaded and erased from the server, it was just yours — to save or erase or lose.
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Odd not a single mention of hotmail in there the original web based email service which arguably was the one of the prime options till gmail offered way more storage.
Don’t forget Netscape mail.
But hotmail / outlook.com still exists… Does netscape mail?
When I left college, my university closed my email account. That sucked, but I moved on. Then the paid service I used closed down, so I had to change again. That sucked. I lost access to my Xbox Live account because they send all my “update password” emails to that old address and won’t update to my new address without confirming the change on an email that no longer exists.
Now I’ve had the same email address for 17 years and really really don’t want to move on, even though I hate that it is with Google. They went from “don’t be evil” to “be as evil as possible.”
And that is why I pay for my own domain. The service can change, but my domain is eternal (or near enough for my purposes)
I’m regretting not doing that 20 years ago.
I did the conversation a few years ago.
Yes it took me a full year probably of updating accounts. But it’s doable if you do it in small chunks at s time. I set up a forwarding to my new domain and when I felt like it updated a few more accounts. Untill one day, nothing showed up anymore.
Worth it
Actually deleted my Gmail account I think
I joined gmail in beta so similarly had had my address for an absurd amount of years.
Last year I completely switched over to proton for everything and keep my gmail as a junk account for shit I want to sign up for but don’t want to dirty my main with.
It was a daunting feeling undertaking at first but honestly it took me a couple of hours to go through and change the email on things I actually use and want to keep.
It was a nice freeing feeling and really helped me weed out what accounts I truly use and want to keep. I would highly recommend it as a cleansing exercise as much as anything else!
Could you share some more thoughts on your experience with Proton over the last year after switching from Gmail?
I don’t know if I am the best person to ask as I am not really a “power user” or anything. It sends and receives emails and isnt google which is all I really need, I can’t really talk about any features it may or may not have that people might look for.
I like that I can make up to 10 different address from within that same account, send emails from any of those accounts from just a drop down box without logging in and out of different accounts.
I like that they give me credit to my account based in how much space I actually use in my inbox.
I recently upgraded to an “ultimate” type account which covers all their products for me and my gf to try and encourage her to move away from google. The way the drive works is a bit counter intuitive in my opinion and the password manager thing seems to work well across both windows and android but I’ve never used a password manager programme before so it could be dogshit in comparison to others, but it seems to work well for me.
Never tried the VPN as I pay for AirVPN.
Sorry, not very insightful for you in terms or details but I like it a lot and it all works well for me, I’ve never had issues with any of the apps or logging in and accessing my stuff. The primary thing for me was moving away from google.
Thank you, this is helpful! I hadn’t heard about the credit for unused space. That’s kinda cool.
I bought a custom domain and use it with Proton. If Proton shuts down or something I can easily use the same domain with another provider.
That is a good point. I have moved to Proton mail but I keep my Gmail account as a backup and it’s part of my still used Google account. Can’t see myself ever shutting it down completely just in case, as much as I avoid Google as much as possible now.
Ctrl+F: “thread” “conversation” zero results
I feel like people have forgotten how email worked before, when webmail providers were emulating the desktop client model of “received messages go in Inbox, Sent folder is for sent.” Gmail’s conversation view was shockingly intuitive, one of those “why hasn’t it always been this way?” things that feels so obvious in retrospect.
I turned that off so many years ago I forgot it exists.
Yeah, abjectly hate conversation view.
I read some sysadmin forums about Conversation View, and most of them say users regularly ask how to turn it off. I always turn it off immediately.
I have always used conversation view in my desktop email client. Not sure why you think this is revolutionary or exclusive to gmail.
It was a novel new feature they introduced decades ago. Email was far less organized before then.
Who else doesn’t see ads in Gmail? I never have and have been using it since its inception.
I do on the browser version not the mobile
even in Promotions and Updates tabs?
on the other two inbox tabs sometimes, promotions and updates. just checked, saw one in the app for Verizon in promotions.
I use Firefox with ublock origin and pihole, blocking over 1 million sites.
(and got royally pissed at Google for sunsetting its cool Inbox app).
inbox was amazing! closing down the project radicalized me against everything google touched from that point forward lol
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How people will accept having their entire lives scanned, categorised and sold off to the highest bidder is beyond me. Fastmail - or any other paid product - for the win.
This is why the dark ages line is only half true. Paying for what you consume is normal anywhere else. Bringing that back to the internet would be a good thing IMO.
Absolutely!
I pay for Tuta, and it works great! I pay €3.60 because I haven’t fully committed, and I’ll probably prepay a year to get that down to €3/month. It’s really not that expensive, and I get to use my own domain as well (so me@mydomain.com).
I’ve been slowly trying to claw my workspace email back to my Gmail account so I can stop paying for workspace and move it to proton, unfortunately I have a metric buttload of Android apps and Google auth wrapped around my workspace emails.
Yeah, I recently went through a lot of that pain. But I’m now 99% gmail-free, and most of the stuff forwarded from gmail is junk.
yeah my workspace has a catchall with forwards. I had practically abandoned my old gmail, but I need a viable google account for my phone
That’s fair, and it’s certainly a process.
I largely went cold-turkey and got a phone w/ GrapheneOS and refused to install Google Play. I replaced a bunch of apps with FOSS alternatives available through F-Droid, and I have a handful I can’t replace installed through Aurora w/o my Google Account. I made a separate profile for Google Play apps, but that only has like 2 apps in it that I rarely use.
It’s surprisingly functional, but it did totally suck during the transition period. But I’m mostly free of Google crap now, with the main leftover being Google Sheets because I like the
=GOOGLEFINANCE()feature and haven’t found a replacement.Nice tips, thanks!
How people will accept having their entire lives scanned, categorised and sold off to the highest bidder is beyond me
Me too. It was painfully obvious what Google will do once they launched Gmail and I never used it because of that.
cutting ads out of your life cuts them off at the ankles. so what if they know in some database that I bought something, I don’t see their ads, so it’s useless info.
The question should be “How do countries/EU accept most of their citizens surveilled by a monopolistic company subject to a foreign country’s intelligence agency?”.
I don’t think it’s my personal responsibility to care unless I’m casting a vote. I don’t have enough extra energy to avoid surveillance anyway. Expecting billions of people each to take personal responsibility of finding out how to de-google, de-apple, de-microsoft, de-amazon, de-meta is too much. What percentage of people can install and configure Linux and Graphene OS and move everything from normal social media to Lemmy and Mastodon? We see the answer in current reality.
Yeah very fair points. Although in defense of the EU it’s not like it isn’t fighting back.
Imagine using a google service. Do yourselves a favor and use anything else, even outlook, over Google.
So you could just use Email in these archaic programs called Thunderbird etc. If you really wanted to use gmail. You know, without adds, without the need for an ad blocker, without AI recommendations and at your leisure.
But hey, you’d have to install something on your computer for that… how horrible.
And who uses computers for work anyway, you can just write your essay on a tablet. (but there are also email apps on those)
It’s a shittier way to work but hey it’s easier.
One of the nice things about Gmail at the time, was that you could access your emails when not home. If you were at a friend’s or on holiday at a net café, all you needed was to know your email and password.
That sounds silly, but at the time the majority of ISP mailboxes were pop only. Or those Webmails you could get were attached to what you would now think of comically small mailboxes. Full history Webmail added a convenience we didn’t get before.
Eudora! I had forgotten all about that one.
Isn’t the linked article just a puff piece that says nothing substantial at all?
I’m still using gmail, but reading it trough the same old school local clients downloading everything trough imap. For everything important i have tutanota and private servers. Proton indeed looks like honeypot to me.
Proton indeed looks like honeypot to me.
What makes you think that?
Genuinely asking, since I literally signed up for their paid email service earlier in the week.
I’m selfhosting my email (Stalwart Server) and I’m happy!
We started using more than one device and web accessed mail became the norm. POP3 still exists and you can use mail clients and delete everything off the server. Come to think of it, maybe we can then use syncthing to sync the mail across all other devices? Maybe?
Would that not consist of just uploading them to another server? I guess you could run the synch server yourself, but then, you can also just run the email server yourself…
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