Comment by cproctor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cproctor | Hacker News Reader

I started transitioning away from Gmail (to Fastmail) last fall, forwarding my gmail and using a signature asking people to update their address book. This is a good day to make the hard cutoff.

One strategy for explaining the problem to non-technical people is by comparing regular email to the walled-garden email used by some banks, phone companies, and the like--where you have to log into their website to see your 'inbox' and use a web form to send messages. It's super annoying and the other party has complete control of the communication channel.

"Dynamic email" could be implemented to inject this kludge into your email client, giving the AMP sender (who likely has more power than the user) the same level of control over the channel. Imagine opening your email client and finding a message which asks for two security questions and a captcha, then lands you in a messaging interface which limits you to 200 characters and denies basic affordances of email like archiving and forwarding.

I find the arguments that email is already mutable because images are externally-loaded unpersuasive. In 2013 Google started caching images in gmail "to protect you from unknown senders who might try to use images to compromise the security of your computer." [1] Email marketers were upset at losing engagement metrics. Now a practice that used to be considered abuse is being rolled out as a feature.

[1] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

Did the same thing a few weeks ago. The original reasons were that gmail was incredibly slow in FF, and I wasn't really comfortable with Google reading my mail.

People point out that the email is read by an automated system, but that doesn't change the fact that Google is building a profile of me and selling it to advertisers.

With Fastmail there's a business model I can understand. I pay them money and they provide me a service.

The really dark side of all this is that we're quickly moving towards a world where you only get privacy if you can afford it.

>> I wasn't really comfortable with Google reading my mail.

Neither G Suite Gmail nor regular Gmail have been used and/or scanned for ads personalisation since back in 2017: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

Even if they stopped using the data for ad personalisation, they're obviously still scanning it. The new auto reply suggestions feature relies on that. While they might not be using that data for anything nefarious at the moment, there's nothing stopping them from changing their mind in the future.

Personally, I just feel more comfortable paying 4 bucks a month to a company that isn't trying to monetize me.

correct me if i'm wrong, but doesn't every email service scan emails? be it for spam, security, viruses. they have to scan them. i thought this is standard industry practice.

Typically, that's based on the email metadata such as the sender address, or mime types of the attachments as opposed to the actual content of the email.

I think that's only correct as of like 1995.

Even simple tools like spam assassin read the body, and you can bet that almost any public provider is doing more than spam assassin.

But they do not sell it or analyze it for advertising...

Neither does Google.

So they claim.

So you think Google gives it for free? Thought it is common sense: If you are not paying for it, you are the product.

There are ads on Gmail. They just aren't based on emails.

Not to mention all kinds of actually free services. Think colab.

> selling it to advertisers

If you’re in China or occupied Tibet it may be not only advertisers but also an oppressive and adversarial government. Maybe not today but next year.

And, if available in one place, eventually available elsewhere.

That applies even if you're in US given what we now know from Snowden.

The other dark side is that half of the email you send from your fastmail account will still be going to Gmail and hence can still be used by Google to build a profile of you, if they so desire.

Some is better than all, and most people I interact with are technical who either already switched, or are considering switching.

btw, my email to Fastmail:

After reading GMail's announcement about dynamic email and your position statement on AMP, I am thankful to have switched to FastMail and looking forward to remaining your customer. I'm writing to ask you not to implement AMP dynamic email. Even though you don't have a huge slice of the email market, your customers are probably disproportionately privileged and informed (they choose to pay for email...), which positions you to resist these erosions to privacy and democracy in ways that individuals can't.

More pragmatically, I see your non-support of AMP as a big feature. If you don't support AMP, companies can't as easily put pressure on me to use a communication channel where they have all the control.

Thanks!

As a FastMail customer and strong AMP opposer, I do understand FastMail's position that they may support AMP for compatibility. It's the unfortunate nature of the beast that most people have Gmail, and emails are hence sent under the expectation that the end user probably has Gmail. FastMail would be shooting itself in the foot to not implement AMP for Email if it becomes popular, because people expect their email service to work with the emails everyone else is sending.

However, if FastMail does add AMP for Email support, I expect them to do much more to ensure I can see the historical record of AMP data, and for them to take significant measures to ensure that user privacy is protected. And of course, that we can just shut it off.

>forwarding my gmail and using a signature asking people to update their address book.

That's why everyone should use e-mail with their own domain name. It gives you freedom to change e-mail provider whenever you want, without having to notify anyone about it.

Yeah, I switched my main domain email over to Fastmail two weeks ago (still on the free trial!). I'm liking it so far.

I just switched the MX records over, hopefully I can keep my grandfathered free G-suite account as a searchable archive for the time being (I should also back-up all the mail in there but haven't had time to). It wasn't quite organised enough for me to want to bring it over.

I'm using DuckDuckGo for search now on my home laptop and phone, Safari on my Mac and Firefox on Windows machines instead of Chrome, Apple Maps on my phone. The one thing I can't see moving off at this point though is YouTube since so much of the content I watch is only there.

To be fair. In some places at least there are regulation in place and non E2E-encrypted email is an insecure channel. The webbased inbox, mostly integrated in the respective e-banking platform is actually the most convenient and safe way to communicate with a bank. You (sadly) can't reasonably expect regular clients to know about and care to use PGP.

What happens when gmail blocks forwarding to non-Amp providers?

For OP it shouldn't be a big deal, because forwarding is just a temporary aid while transitioning from one email address to the other.

I've just about completed the move (to runbox) without forwarding and it wasn't that big of deal. Just set aside a bit of time every once in a while to update all the accounts that are still sending to my gmail account.

Eventually I'll set up a permanent auto-reply saying "this account is no longer monitored, please contact me at xxxxxxx@runbox.com".

Forwarding is definitely not just “a temporary aid.” To others, forwarding is quite transparent, your original address is the one they associate you with until you make the effort of switching

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