Google’s email nastiness | Hacker News Reader

Google’s email nastiness

blogs.reuters.com

16 pointspx10 comments

My first thought was: Clean some of your crap out of your mail folder! Temporarily, at the very least, to stop the bounces.

Personally, I think a hard bounce is more courteous to the senders. Sure, it'll mess up list subscriptions, but that's what you get for not keeping tabs on your quota. But a bounce will alert the sender so they can follow up with a reliable method of communication.

I know people will get their knickers in a wad over this, but I don't think that anyone should rely on email for anything of real import. 2010 or not, it's not (obviously) very reliable in that you'll never know if the recipient actually read it. Fax it, call them, send a letter.

I worked support for an email provider for a while, and I regularly shook my head in awe of the epic stupidity (ignorance, if you prefer) of people trusting such an ethereal medium for "important" correspondence.

Also, what if the emails don't bounce? That then means Google holds them hostage, and the only way he'll ever get them is to pay for the upgrade. The senders will never now they didn't get through. I don't think that approach would be very welcomed by the majority of users.

>But in every case, the email ended up sitting there on my mail server until the problem was resolved.

Where has he been getting his email hosted? Every host I've used bounces when over quota. Even paid ones.

>But not once did Google send me an automated email saying that I was about to run out of storage space.

Which would be useful, I admit. But jeez. Download the messages, delete them off Gmail, and wait for the storage to go up so you can put them back. You can do that, you know, and it would take literally seconds to clear up enough to start receiving again.

Low-worth rant about using a free service to the max is saved by the hilarity of the comments, some of which are one notch above "why do you keep them all? I print all of mine out on paper where they are safe" or "Google might delete them when its maildir gets too big or uucp fails"

"That’s incredibly aggressive and rude"

More likely just an oversight - it is the way email servers have worked since the dawn of time (at least I think so).

>Google behaves as though everybody using Gmail uses the web interface

And what is up with them including free imap/pop support? Seriously, Google, get it together.

You are currently using 642 MB (8%) of your 7489 MB.

I don't know, maybe if you have a lot of mail, you should check that once in a while.

What a fool. No one has any right to complain about a service they get for free.

I disagree. I think that if, for example, someone offered you a free foot massage, and broke your foot, you would have every right to complain. Even if a service is free, you have a right to complain if the person does not deliver what he promised. In this case, the rant may not be deserved, but I don't think that your statement holds true in the general case.

That was a very stupid rant.

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