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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Think of it the other way around: how much per month is Google making by reading your email (with bots) to generate a marketing profile so companies can buy targeted ads to sell you stuff? Besides, feature-wise, you get a LOT more from ProtonMail than, say, Fastmail, which is the low-feature, no-frills, non-encrypted alternative.

If you aren’t paying for the product then you ARE the product.

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Google have not scanned emails for the purposes of targeting advertising for a couple of years now.

I'm not really sure this is 100% true. I recently got a fight confirmation email and immediately started getting "things to see in LOCATION" push notifications from Google maps. I'm not sure of course that they really read my email, but it did convince me to look at alternatives.

They still scan for implementing things like assistant functionality but not outright advertising.

I would actually like to see a source for this claim. Google did state that it would stop scanning emails for targeting ads "later this year" at some point in time. But I haven't seen a document after that reaffirming that this has been done.

I suspect GDPR would have been sufficient threat since not all people involved in a scanned email were guaranteed to be Gmail users, so gaining consent would have been problematic.

As a Fastmail user (that's perfectly capable of managing his own PGP keys), what features am I missing? I honestly can't think of a single feature that'd make me go "I wish Fastmail had that".

How about labels that operate independently of folders like Protonmail has?

If you're not using your own domain, and are instead using the provider's domain for addresses, one huge difference is that Fastmail recycles deleted addresses within a few months, whereas ProtonMail never recycles addresses on its domains. That to me is critical.

> Think of it the other way around: how much per month is Google making by reading your email [...]

That is a really weird way to think about it. For all I may know, google may be earning a million dollar by selling my data ... does not make the alternative product worth the money google is making for me to pay to avoid it.

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