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...
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. :)
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
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.
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.
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.
Yes, a label is just a more versatile folder. If you don’t like that, you can just use a single label per email, but I genuinely can’t see any value in that. But you can if you want.
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.
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.
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
Anyone got an invite? 😅
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.
I’m mostly over on ProtonMail but I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable fully deleting my Gmail :/
btw you can use freetube or libretube for youtube, and use an openstreetmaps clientt to replace google maps
20 years of surveillance by Gmail...
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.
11 years of ProtonMail let's goo
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
