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Comment by SN76477 | Hacker News Reader

https://gsuite.google.com/products/gmail/

About $60 a year

I have about 8 accounts that I use.

I have one for myself, and one for my wife, and find the $120/year a hefty price to pay for...email. It doesn't even include the registration of my personal domain, and it doesn't include web hosting. Google Apps is pretty nice, and it feels good to be paying for the product instead of being the product - though I am skeptical that my $10/month would let me talk to a human if something went wrong.

I'm considering moving; Rackspace has pretty good hosted email for $2/user/month. We use it at work - webmail is acceptable though nothing to write home about, and their IMAP implementation is solid so you can just use a client.

But you pay $480/year for 8 email addresses? Ouch.

> I am skeptical that my $10/month would let me talk to a human if something went wrong.

I have received exceptional support over the years, including them calling me twice when I reported an issue. My account is worth $5/month and I live in Fiji.

Agreed.

I've had to contact support a few times in the last few months for coworkers email issues. We're a very small company paying $5 per month.

To contact: https://admin.google.com/AdminHome then help button --> Contact support

It says it's exempt from ads in this specific context, but is it actually free of their data mining? If they still use the data to track and push whatever they're selling you in other contexts, the presence of the ads themselves is an ancillary concern.

According to the article it is.

Right, I read it. But it's still not actually clear to me whether they are ceasing ALL mining of email data for business accounts, or are just not funneling it to a specific set of ad programs. To me, at least, that seems an important point of clarification.

They're not ceasing it for business accounts, they've never done it for business accounts. The article is about free Gmail accounts.

If you look at the terms for G Suite (the paid business product), that is a top selling point. Businesses who pay for G Suite don't want Google using their data for anything, and Google complies.

Edit: in response to comment below, here are the main docs describing, including the Data Processing Amendment:

https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...

https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650?hl=en

https://gsuite.google.com/terms/dpa_terms.html

I'm really not trying to be pedantic, but that's not what the article says. It says that Google never data-mined business accounts to serve ads, not that they never data-mine business accounts under any circumstances. If that's true, and you can point to marketing or a service agreement that outlines these terms, I'd be happy to know and will gladly buy a paid account.

EDIT:

I think these are the terms and I don't seem to see this guarantee, but IANAL

https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en_in/terms/2013/1/premier_te...

https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en-GB/terms/emea_reseller_pre...

You'd probably have to be more specific about what you're defining as "mining".

Essentially, scanning the data for anything unrelated to providing the service itself. I know this is a little murky with their suite, but if the data is being used in a way elsewhere (e.g. to train models for other services or collecting data in expectation that it could be useful to a Google app I haven't signed on with), that should be made explicit

From the G Cloud FAQ [0]:

> Google Cloud does not scan your data or email in G Suite Services for advertising purposes. Our automated systems scan and index your data to provide you with your services and to protect your data, such as to perform spam and malware detection, to sort email for features like Priority Inbox and to return fast, powerful search results when users search for information in their accounts. The situation is different for our free offerings and the consumer space.

[0] https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650?hl=en

This hardly frees you from Google's data gathering. They will have records of your IP address used to collect the emails and your access history, so they know (roughly) where you live, what times of day you are active, and can probably infer stuff like when you are on holiday. If you are in the same house as someone else, they probably use Google too and the shared IP address lets Google tie the two identities together. So they get to discover your relationships too.

So will any host. When you are paying for it though, the terms of service clearly define what is collected and what it's used for, and you can choose to enable or disable that type of data matching

Isn’t that assuming you are using the web mail and not en email client?

OP asked for no ads, not for an email host that knows nothing about its users... (Which can have its perks if someone tries to hack your account.)

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