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Comment by eterevsky | Hacker News Reader

From time to time I'm thinking about switching to Fastmail. I just had a look at Fastmail vs Gmail page (https://www.fastmail.com/gmail-alternative/), and I find some of the comparisons inaccurate, and others just plain funny:

"No creepy typing predictions" - Fastmail just advertises a missing feature as an advantage

"Use your own domain (you@yourname)" - marked as missing on Gmail. On Fastmail you're paying $5/month to have your own account, while in Gmail it's $6 or free if you're grandfathered in with GSuite Legacy.

"No ads" - ads are also missing in paid Gmails accounts

"Notification settings that respect your attention" - Google makes a big deal of detecting the importance of a particular email threads. I doubt Fastmail is better at this than Gmail.

Also Fastmail claims better privacy, but I'm not sure what it is based on.

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I think you might be preaching to the wrong crowd. Fastmail users (which I am one of) are mainly interested in Fastmail because email (and co) is the only thing they do.

> "No creepy typing predictions" - Fastmail just advertises a missing feature as an advantage

To the privacy conscious, that’s a feature. I and other users pay them enough not to have to harvest, collect, train ml models on, or use our data or metadata in any way, for predications or other pseudo-features.

Why do you think Google does it in Gmail? I'm 100% sure it doesn't train any ML models on the user emails.

By default, custom suggestions are turned on when using smart compose [0] and:

> Smart Compose personalized suggestions are tailored to the way you normally write, to maintain your writing style.

[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9116836

How are you a 100% sure?

Better privacy - I imagine it’s based on not allowing the world’s largest advertising company to sell their knowledge of everything you do.

Google doesn't use email contents for ad targetting:

"We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos." (https://policies.google.com/privacy)

You know what data Fastmail sells about me to advertisers? Nothing.

I have no idea what Google is collecting or selling, beyond legalistically phrased ts and cs.

Working for Google, I wonder if you have a conflict of interest in defending them so much.

> You know what data Fastmail sells about me to advertisers? Nothing.

Why do you think so? Specifically what are the reasons that you think this about Fastmail that do not apply to Gmail?

> Working for Google, I wonder if you have a conflict of interest in defending them so much.

I mean, technically I probably shouldn't be writing anything about Google products. But my area of work is so far from Gmail, that I only interact with it as a customer.

I don't know whether it will convince you that I'm not very biased about Gmail, but I do want to point out that I find at least one argument in favor of Fastmail pretty convincing and it's human support. Google has a pretty abysmal track record of handling accounts that they think are suspicious and if ever I change company I don't want to be in a position where my account is blocked without any recourse.

> Specifically what are the reasons that you think this about Fastmail that do not apply to Gmail?

Not OP, but one of them is an email company, one is an advertising company.

Google has a number of completely unrelated businesses. The fact that one of them has to do with advertising doesn't mean it would monetize other businesses through advertising.

Conversely here's a reason why I think Google is _less_ likely to invade Gmail users' privacy: It's already one of the most scrutinized companies in the world. If it were doing something shady with emails, it would likely to be picked up. Furthermore, it's a big company. More employees would know about that and it's more likely that someone would whistle-blow.

> Google has a number of completely unrelated businesses. The fact that one of them has to do with advertising doesn't mean it would monetize other businesses through advertising.

Correct, but 80.78% of Alphabet’s revenues were from advertising related income last year. See Note 2 to their financial statements[0]. Alphabet is through-and-through an advertising company at its core. It’s a fair assumption that their other ventures are potentially used to generate more advertising revenue in one way or another.

Also as a former auditor, I’m glad we’ve disclosed your conflict of interest working for the company. Unfortunately that means others cannot take you as seriously as you’d like.

[0]Alphabet Inc. - Form 10-Q (2021): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204421...

That does not mean they don't train all sorts of models on the data, or harvest it to fill out their profiles of users, or any number of other things Google exists to do that are user-hostile.

> in Gmail it's $6 or free if you're grandfathered in with GSuite Legacy.

You can also just forward another email address to your free @gmail.com address and, after a quick verification process, send emails as that alias. Google Domains lets you forward email for no extra cost outside of the domain registration fee.

Recipients of mails you send through that system always see it as something like "sent by example@gmail.com on behalf of example@customdomain.com".

It's not a big deal for many use cases, but it's not the same thing as having email on the domain.

Further, at a technical level, a Markov chain can hardly be described as "creepy". Sadly, a lot of folks are not impervious to marketing snake-oil, such as the one you pointed above.

We’ll, it’s creepy because of where the data comes from (in gmail). It reads common patterns in email, then uses that to make predictions.

The predictions aren’t creepy, but using my emails in “anonymized” training data is creepy.

Note: I am a (very happy) Fastmail user, and I do not use Google at all anymore

Google certainly doesn't use emails as training data. Source: I work for Google and know that there are strict policies regarding what can and can't be used as training data.

I think your original should be clear that you work for Google. It may certainly affect people’s judgement of your comment.

My top comment just points out inaccurate comparisons. Also, as you can notice I'm not hiding that I work for Google, though I do consider myself just a customer in this situation.

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