Why I stopped using Gmail

What resonates with me is the growing feeling of vulnerability with google integrating everything and weaving it through my entire online existence coupled with their arrogant refusal to deal with people except through deaf automated machines. It feels like you're playing hide-and-seek with a giant growing robotic panopticon that's trying to find arbitrary infractions as an excuse to disable access to Gmail. It's probably an irrational fear, I haven't been targeted yet (and neither has anyone I know), but I have also never had any positive experiences with google customer support. Fear is fear and it's insidious in a relationship. Maybe if I had a positive experience with google customer support at any point in my almost 8-year relationship with the company--anything to help me believe that "things won't be so bad" should things go wrong, I would feel differently. Heck, if they just sold real support at some fixed price/event I would probably be OK. I don't like feeling like helpless input to a triage operation.

For me, the Google warm fuzzies have all been evaporating since Google+ rolled out and people started to lose access to their Gmail because of pseudonyms on Google+. Now, bugs in a rollout are to be expected, but it was the stubborn-headed defenses of the policy and bans by deaf Googlers that's the most threatening to nobodies like me. Yeah Google fixed problems for VIPs, but I'm not a VIP. Unfortunately, Google really hasn't done anything to regain my trust and they continue to hide behind their machines while growing the beast larger.

Unfortunately for Google this all made the reality of my relationship with them very clear to me--Google is just maintaining a big enough herd that it sells to advertisers. It's the herd that matters, strays are expendable. In the months before Google+ rolled out I purchased my first smartphone (Android) to bring Google and Gmail further into my life. In the aftermath of Google+, I'm looking for ways out. I used to centralize all my email at Gmail, but I've started to undo that. For now I still have Android Market on my phone, but the other apps are being slowly purged and replaced as I have time to explore and learn about alternatives. (It also does not help that search has become awful seemingly in the last month or so. The latest example is that for whatever reason (even using verbatim mode/personalized/world etc) if you search for "octave blah blah" looking for information about using GNU Octave, Google's search insists on showing me page after page of results for "matlab blah blah" instead.)

My goal now is to make my Google account expendable. If I lose access, I want to be able to just easily create a new one. Clearly the fundamental problem is I place more value on my account than google places on me. I am toying with deliberately destroying my google accounts following a schedule of a few months (the only thing holding me back is my library of Android Market purchases)--I already do periodic deletions of my other social networking sites just because I find ekarma/gamification counterproductive to happiness.

Solution: use Gmail inside a native mail client like Apple Mail or Outlook. All of these "issues" are inherent to Google's style guide and have nothing to do with Gmail as a product. In fact, almost all of his complaints are about Google+!

My favourite takeaway from this article - "Google does not want me to love their products. Google wants me to love Google. All of it."

Couldn't agree more.

I find his concern about losing access to his account interesting because the only feature I get sad that that gmail doesn't have is an easy export/backup tool. Backupify has a nice service, and I realize I could run IMAP either locally or on a seperate server, but that's less ideal to me than the ability to set up incremental weekly backups to my dropbox/S3/box.net/etc account.

My only problem is, we hardly saw these disagreements when Microsoft was pretty much implementing similar features across the board with Live, and Yahoo was doing the same. This was way earlier than Google (apparently around the time when Facebook was trending up).

"Nobody told the artificial intelligence that it’s above my pay grade to invite professors to social networks."

Yes, yes, yes. Add the same gripe for Facebook and pretty much most of the recommendations by algorithm (70%?) falls into this category.

Did I miss what the author is using instead?

Then get an Apps account and don't complain if there is a fly in your free soup.