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Comment by Gud | Hacker News Reader

Dump g-mail. Get yourself a domain name, a third party mail provider and forward your gmails. Google sucks, they’re no longer the tech company there were 20 years ago.

They’re an advertisement business.

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I have had a personal domain forever and never used it. I’m happy with iCloud and decided to ditch Gmail. It took less than five minutes to set up iCloud and my registrar to use my personal domain for email. Easy and no extra cost or service was required.

Unfortunately the iCloud webinterface is completely disabled when Advanced Data Protection is enabled, including iCloud Mail/Contacts/Calendar, even though these services are not covered by end to end encryption. This means basic features like filters are missing too.

You can reenable the web interface in iCloud settings under system preferences on a Mac (not sure if it’s on iOS). The web interface will require just in time verification with an iCloud device to confirm log ins though. Works pretty well.

It would still break end-to-end encryption if I allow it.

However I just found out Apple added a way to manage rules in iCloud Mail to iOS 17. It's in Settings > [Your Name] > iCloud > iCloud Mail > iCloud Mail Rules. They did not mention this anywhere, but it's there and it's new!

Unfortunately still unusable for me because it allows only a single condition. No AND or OR conditions. For example still not possible to filter by FROM and Subject and the same time. And you can only filter a very limited amount of fields: FROM, TO, FROM or TO, CC, Subject and List-ID. For example it's not possible to search the body.

iCloud Mail and Calendar are way too simple to be useful for me. Calendar only searches 1 year back, even if everything is synced (I actually need this quite often). No weekly view in portrait mode (I use this all the time in Google Calendar). Calendar and Reminders don't integrate at all (Google Calendar shows tasks from Google Tasks). Not possible to sync calendar subscriptions across devices.

Why not just use a client for your gmail inbox and your domain one?

Not being cheeky just wondering whether I should have an extra forwarding setup.

You can pull in emails from your old gmail via imap into your new account. Within roughly 5 years from 2010 to 2015 I switched over from an iCloud account and gmail to a custom domain and server. In that time, almost all logins were transferred. 5 years is a long time, though.

When mighty G would ban your account (completely with Google services, Youtube and whatever) you would know.

Or just a plain 'Wrong password' except it's the right password, it's just Google thinks it's wrong, but you can't do anything with that address.

Funny, this last one just happened to me and I blamed myself. I made an account for my son, wrote down the username/password then didn't touch it for nearly a year. I got to log in and it keeps saying wrong password.

As someone who was in tbat situation: Gmail allows you to configure some account to have almost a full access to other Gmail account; do that for any important account you provision.

Why would you wish to stick with Google? They’re probing every e-mail you’ve ever sent or received for data.

They will only become worse and worse, the trust I had in them is long gone. Just avoid them and let them go out of business

Google is bad, but every other company and your ISP and your hardware manufacturer is also probing your emails.

It's a question of size. I use Fastmail, and even if they do that (and I hope they don't), it's a relatively small company, so the impact is also smaller.

> your ISP and your hardware manufacturer is also probing your emails

How?

Both are asked by your various governments to spy on you. I am not privy to the most current technical details - if you go through old NSA presentations that Snowden revealed I am sure you'll get the general idea of how it works.

Because gmail stopped supporting user/pass auth and instead switched to a retardedly complicated Oauth nonsense.

But the situation at most email hosts is like this: they only support user/pass auth, no 2FA.

It’s hard to think of things that I care about less than the minutia of my email. Google’s an advertising business? So what? My Gmail has worked flawlessly for 19 years. If somehow Gmail fucks me over in the future, I’ll deal with that when the time comes. Until then, I’m not giving my email a second thought.

> If somehow Gmail fucks me over in the future, I’ll deal with that when the time comes.

You should at least try to imagine how catastrophic losing access to your email would be. How many accounts on other websites are linked to your email? Which of your banks have you set up backup emails beyond your primary? What about car registration and voter registration? For me, those both use email 2FA. For a while I was using a Nest thermostat; my house temperature in a large part was linked to my email.

> You should at least try to imagine how catastrophic losing access to your email would be

Why exactly? Doesn’t seem like much fun.

I don’t imagine a lot of catastrophic things that might happen to me. If really really bad things happen they happen. Some I work really hard to prevent. Others might happen and I don’t do anything to prevent them. Most things are somewhere in the middle.

> I’ll deal with that when the time comes

No, you won't deal with that. Because 'your' email address would be no longer yours and there would be nothing you can do at that point, including reading your past emails.

I don’t need any of my past emails. If they’re gone they’re gone.

Can highly recommend Migadu for those geeky enough to handle their own DNS setup. No affiliation with them except as a very satisfied customer.

I tried, used it for like a year.

I found the conversation view to be no where near as good as gmail. The ui in general just was far below gmail. So in the end I slithered back on over to gmail.

Also, I remember auto-filters not working very well and not putting my emails in the right folders

The webmail provided by migadu is just one client, there are a dozens out there much better for using emails. Migadu's service is not an interface, it's emails.

> The webmail provided by migadu

TIL. I have been using migadu for more than an year and I didn't know they have one.

I just don't understand it. On the one hand, you can lose access to your mails and have almost no way of getting them back if you use GMail. On the other hand, you have an alternative but still stay with Google because their interface is better? I use an alternative and I don't care about the interface - it's good enough. I can read and write emails, there is human support, that's all I need from my email provider. I'd probably be happier if they had a better interface, but it's really not that important. I'm not judging it, that's your choice, but I just find it strange.

+1 never had problems with my emails being blackholed, and incoming spam filtering is good.

My favourite feature is the subdomain addressing (something@me.domain.com => me@domain.com).

Can’t say I’m a fan of the webmail, but I’ve only used it when I’m without an imap client.

When was Google not an ads company?

Google was founded in 1998, though it was preceded by the research project in 1996.

AdWords debuted in 2000, then AdSense in 2003.

My memory as a user is Google didn't "feel" like an ad-driven company until years later, in the wake of the 2008 DoubleClick acquisition.

tl;dr Google has been driven by ads since essentially its founding.

That costs money, plus you have to trust the mail provider more than you trust Google.

Plus now its your job to convince other mail providers that youre not a spammer.

Specifically, convince Google that you're not a spammer.

They've effectively embraced, extended, and extinguished vanilla email.

Why are you lying and spreading FUD? I work in the industry and Microsoft is by far the most picky one and their filtering is totally opaque.

It's not very hard to get along with Gmail spam filters unless you're trying to send thousands of mails.

Every year I read another article detailing the futility of trying to get along with gmails filters. Most often these writeups end with the author giving up and using Gmail.

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