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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I don't work for google. I use Google, I have multiple Gmail as well as hosted by Google workspace domains.

Overall I think this is reasonable. I can't see why people are upset, when the general burden to make it "live" is low.

There are specific corner case problems: people who cannot login for various reasons, can't get Google humans to help, and who get mail forwarded so are limping along. And, there are a surprisingly high number of people who seem to trip up over account recovery. If I had one criticism of google here, it's that they're judge, jury and executioner. There's no appeal mechanism for ordinary mortal. It's capricious, sometimes squeaky wheels get oiled, sometimes not.

I pay for google 1 and I takeout periodically.

Don't depend on "free" for critical functions.

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>Don't depend on "free" for critical functions.

All the cards are stacked against the users though. It's not that easy for a non-tech person to use any sort of email/photo library etc that isn't free from Google/Apple etc.

Even self hosting email is impossible now. You won't be able to send emails because nothing trusts you.

If Google intentionally incentivized everyone to move their entire digital lives into their platform for profit, they should have some sort of responsibility for that. There have absolutely been significant impact to people's lives because they've gotten locked out of their account for reasons that even Google can't explain, and there is no recourse or action they can take.

I think we're in the fine grained differences between "should" and "must"

I definitely think they should have better account recovery process, if need be for $, prove identity and get your data as takeout if they want to decline service but I would be amazed if any part of the current agreement we make with them could be said to obligate it.

As a defacto monopoly I do tend to think they should be made to have some process. Which jurisdiction?

singing up for email isn't difficult. neither is paying for a place to store your photos. Google is just that much easier so anything require beyond that is now all of a sudden too difficult for the average user. that's on you and your own inherent laziness to take the easy way out.

Some people have mental or physical chronic illnesses that make these things legitimate barriers.

> for reasons that even Google can't explain, and there is no recourse or action they can take.

It's even worse. When it was publicized that Google wrongfully flagged multiple accounts and tipped the police for child porn, they refused to reinstate those accounts. Instead, they chose to retaliate by further defaming the account owners on the record. That was after the police cleared their names and they haven't made a single apology to this day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32560361

This is my judge/jury/executioner thing. Objectively only google decides what Google does with our data, and only google decides if they are right or wrong. "We can't be sure we're wrong" is their getout clause in the court of public opinion regarding CSAM.

Another line of reasoning i see frequently is "you don't know all the material facts" which is of course also almost always true. So the original complainant may have multiple things going on, may have been abusive, using facilities otherwise for commercial gain against T&C, had innocuous but IPR abusing files, you name it. None of this would ordinarily trigger lockout. Google just avoid having to say sorry and re-enable by handwaving "other reasons" statements.

Ive been selfhosting email for past 3 years now.

Got a second parallel email server last year.

Mailinabox. A cheap vps.

I had trouble one time when I stupidly used my email as credentials for local testing SMTP server, I was banned for like a day. Had to send an appeal to spamhaus or something.

Other than that, it has been pretty smooth sailing.

> Even self hosting email is impossible now. You won't be able to send emails because nothing trusts you.

That's not been my experience - I've successfully self-hosted email for nearly a decade now.

Really nice guide here: https://thomas-leister.de/en/mailserver-debian-stretch/

Same here, been self hosting on a managed VPS for about a decade for my business, there's very little maintenance, our deliverability is excellent.

Not that there are zero issues, in particular if you set up a brand new mail server with zero reputation, it can take a while to get yourself out of the hole.

I think for normal people though it makes a lot more sense to just pay for email. I'm not sympathetic at all to someone who complains about the quality of service of free Gmail. You are the product, so for the ten millionth time, it's going to suck for you somehow. Fastmail costs 3 bucks a month, if you have 3 bucks, go buy it, it's better (or buy one of their many decent competitors).

There are people who have experienced problems.

https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-...

Of course there are; I'm assuming the GP has too. All I'm saying is that I've personally had no trouble, thus disproving the assertion that it's impossible to self-host. I don't know what I've done differently - perhaps I'm lucky with the IP range that I'm in?

It's possible to self host.

It's impossible to self host with the guarantee most emails sent from that host won't be outright rejected or flagged as spams by centralised mail services.

IP range is definitely a problem. I manage to get blacklisted a couple times per year by Hotmail, who still only support IPv4, despite SNDS always saying everything is fine. They don’t seem to care that blocking a whole IPv4 netrange of a reputable VPS provider because some other customer was sending junk mail will cause collateral damage.

IP/domain reputation is also probably an issue; I’ve been using the same IP address and domain names for over a decade so services like Talos are reasonably satisfied I’m harmless. If someone sets up a server and it has never sent mail for their domain before—or, worse, they get a radioactive IP address—it may be hard to become accepted by other email providers.

I get the sense that the relative lack of trouble I have maintaining a mail server is more to do with being effectively grandfathered in and worry that if I ever have to shift away from my current provider that email sending is going to become a lot harder since I won’t have my IP reputation any more.

"Don't depend on "free" for critical functions."

Yet that is exactly what so-called "tech" companies enable, and arguably encourage, millions of people to do. They certainly do not discourage people from using their websites and apps, for any purpose, from what I have seen. That would make no sense. Imagine Google showing a warning along the lines of "Do not use Gmail for important purposes." Instead the message might be "Here is something to enhance security". These companies have conflicts of interest vis-a-vis computer users. It's like an opioids company tasked with preventing addiction. The best they can do is promote treatment of addiction. This is a poor analogy because selling drugs is regulated. Handing out free email accounts, in order to conduct commercial surveillance, is not.

> Google also reserves the right to delete data in a product if you are inactive in that product for at least two years.

This part is unreasonable no? I sometimes don't use a product for a while, like google drive for instance, and the prospect of coming back to it and discovering that all my data has been deleted is a bit on the dreadful side. I don't want to have to keep track of which product Ive been using and how long since I last signed into all the time.

Yes. I think it's pretty Awful. "Reserves the right" isn't "will" but it becomes clear it could be "at will"

If you care about having your data stored permanently, I think it is fair to say you should pay for it (eg: Google One subscription) or buy something on the Google Play Store as listed under the inactivity exceptions policy.

If you expect to get something served to you for free forever, Google has a bridge to sell you.

We already pay with our data. None of these services are free and you know it.

Consider, with how much data Google has, that they don't care about having your data, especially if it's clearly been untouched for years.

Though either way, my point stands: If you value Google storing your data, pay for it. If you don't, that implies you don't actually care about your data because you refused to place any explicit value on it.

No, my point stands. We already paid, and continue to pay, Google. Google is wanting to double dip.

Are you finding the "delete data" part unreasonable, or the "two years" part? If it's the duration, I am curious what time limit you might find reasonable.

If it's the "delete data" part, I can see why a company might not serve a piece of data in perpetuity when an user appear to have abandoned it, unless we want the company to assume ownership of that data.

I think, it's the "can't keep all alive by using one sub product" part. If I use e.g. email, my drive should be fine. From this, it's not even clear if adding and removing content to drive via email would maintain drive for "activity"

My reading of https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290 is that any activity on the account that required login counts as activity, independent of which sub-product is being used. Although it would help if they could clarify.

I think the product is the bad part. Should be if an account is inactive then they can delete data not if a product hasn’t been used. If you use gmail, your gdrive shouldn’t empty even if it has been 2+ years since you used the drive.

> Don't depend on "free" for critical functions.

It's not free at all, Google uses every bit of data you reveal to them to power their ad business. It's a form of payment even if we don't talk about it this way.

This line of thinking also reveals an explanation for this new "Inactive Account" policy. Google doesn't care to keep old data — one needs to either feed them new signals they can sell / use to train their AIs or else... your account gets deleted.

It’s fair to delete data. It’s not fair to delete the account.

People have email addresses linked up to all kinds of other accounts. Sometimes my only way into an old non-Google account is a gmail address I made a long time ago. Often there is no way to change the email address linked to an account.

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