The Case Against Gmail (2020)
migadu.com
migadu.com
We need a moved-permanently redirect for emails :-/
The thing that worked for me was making a big spreadsheet, working through it, and adding a label to messages still going to my old domain to catch stragglers.
Hopefully the last time I'll ever have to do this.
Most mail providers have an automatic forward system, and/or an automatic reply. There is more than enough for most of the biggest names.
The demise of email forwarding is getting closer
An anecdote: A few years ago I used to have my own domain. Then one day my credit card expired, the new one did not work and my account got frozen. I fixed it, then I forgot to actually extend the domain and it stopped working. Of course, no incoming email, no access to my old mail, etc.
Fortunately I could buy the domain again after a couple of weeks of time, so it did not end in a catastrophe, but it was truly a very stressful time. I know, it was my fault, but shit like this happens all the time to people.
If Google bans your account for whatever reason you can do nothing.
It is important to avoid circular dependencies though. My Fastmail account has one Fastmail-managed email address that my domain registrar's emails are configured to go to.
You can use Cloudflare to top up your account to the max (because they sell domains at cost), and then move to a registrar of your choice to save a bit of money.
When you die, your domain will not be reacquired for a decade, giving your accounts on various sites (or even sites themselves) time to expire. 2FA everywhere is a must, obviously.
I often seen privacy advocates make sweeping statements like this, but I have a hard time understanding their concerns because I haven't really gotten an answer as to how they see it happening.
EDIT: Also to be clear, I think it is completely valid to object to data collection on moral / ethical grounds alone. And the fact that even if you merely send an email to a gmail account means your data will be tracked is a violation of that choice. However I think claims that this is in turn a great threat to democracy are often used as a kugel to convince other people that they are wrong for not sharing those moral / ethical objections.
The standard answer is, that it creates a strong power imbalance. When every politician can be brought down by scandals and one entity is in posession of all the scandals - then they could controll every politician. (it is not like this today, but this is what we privacy advocates want to prevent)
It allows the government to censor things without having to explicitly deal with legal challenges, and in exchange the company gets good will and favors holding back regulation. That easily leads into things like election manipulation.
There's also the massive target it paints on their back in terms of data breaches.
There are also other things to consider. IIRC with one of the NSA related leaks, there was the story of employees abusing the data collection for personal purposes. Private companies have even less oversight towards the public on how the data is being used.
[0] https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
Let's say Alice and Bob are doing life and emailing each other about normal life stuff. Charlie runs their email server.
Charlie also runs an advertising business to fund his email server. He somehow reads (not necessarily manually, but the details don't matter) the emails coming through his server to learn what people are more likely to be interested in buying. Everyone benefits, right? Alice and Bob get free email, the advertisers get well-targeted ads, and Charlie gets paid by the advertisers.
Well, along comes the Police. They know that Charlie is able to access contents of emails going through his server, because it's how he funds his email server. The police would need a warrant to search Alice and Bob's communication for something that might incriminate them in an investigation, but Charlie doesn't need a warrant. The police strike a deal with Charlie of mutual benefit. Information for another revenue stream. But still, the police are upholders of justice and only use this "email tap" for good.
Time goes on and our glorious democracy erodes into an autocratic state (ask Germany - it happens!). Suddenly our justice-loving Police have become the Gestapo, but money talks and it's in Charlie's interest to stay on the Gestapo's good side, so the email tap remains in place and we have Alice and Bob, good people that they are, collaborating on how to resist the autocratic state, which gets funneled straight to the Gestapo. Bad guys win.
Essentially it boils down to this: the means for the public to resist tyranny is a necessary prerequisite for freedom. Conversely, the more power (and information is power, especially personal information) is centralized, the more impactful a potential hostile takeover becomes, and the easier to orchestrate (much easier to infiltrate/control one source of information than thousands).
Compromised email was arguably the largest determining factor in the 2016 US presidential election.
Gmail is a legacy of Old Google, like Maps -- it serves no profit motive, just engineers building something cool for everyone with some sort of flimsy pretext of "it keeps users in our ecosystem" tacked on to it. Google now does have a premium-ish offering, "Google One", in an attempt to get some money out of gmail, but really it's just an artifact.
Companies giving things away for free or steeply discounted from the cost of goods sold is a perennial issue when it comes to centralized capital; Google has a pool of infinite money (search ads) and it uses that to buy its way into a bunch of markets where it is incredibly difficult to compete. Maybe early on you could have stopped Youtube or Maps based on standing antitrust law, but personal email has always been given away for free long before Google got into the business, so a product would have to offer something phenomenal to break into that space.
Doesn't utterly stop it; for example Google has had various versions of chat over the years but they have been roundly whooped by Slack.
Last time I checked Maps was still wildly unprofitable -- too many use cases of maps are searching for a particular destination rather than a general class of things, and balancing ad results and organic results has been something Google has gone back and forth on.
The extent to which Google uses user data from maps searches to track user interest is pretty overblown; there's a lot of struggle involved in trying to extract even slightly useful information.
But things like browsing maps, satellite pictures, and turn by turn directions are straightforward losses for Google, and reflect that earlier spirit.
You can pay for Gmail through Google Workspace.
Running your own mail server has a bad stigma around it that doesn't have to be true. I understand it is not a task for everyone, but it doesn't have to this don't bother just use Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail etc etc mentality. I have been running my own since 2002 and I would never consider doing anything else for such an important part of my life.
The big mail providers have built a walled garden to hold your email communications hostage and they want you to believe that you can't send email without them. There are many of us that know that is bullshit and it is time to move the needle back. I am excited to read Run Your Own Mail Server by Michael W Lucas when it comes out in Aug.
Not, 'anyone with an RasPi can do it', but definitely 'you can find someone who will host you.'
And yes, the 'powers that be' definitely conspire against this scenario, as they do with federated social media, etc. etc., but that's not a reason to give up!
Exporting your mails for you to keep locally or on another company's server is a good way to avoid a scenario where getting locked out of your account turns into a disaster.
If not, can you explain why it would be crippling to switch to another email service?
The message archive is not a consideration.
Switching to another service is definitely indicated, but it would be months of toil to migrate all the aforementioned accounts.
It took a year for me. The sooner you start, the sooner you're done with it
"There is no free mail" *meal
People don’t remember how much fun it was to integrate ActiveDirectory into anything before ubiquitous G-Suite/Workspace logins. Or deal with dozens of external accounts for hundreds of users at a company. Easily a blocker for any startup trying to sell to bigger clients.
Looking back I feel so stupid lol. But I really thought these technology companies were doing something alien to how corporations behaved in the "dark ages". Gullible.
I still wanted to have an email on my own personal domain. I use Fastmail and been pretty happy with it.
It still isn’t yours.
- I need to own the domain name to make sure mail is sent to my property.
- Gmail for is a paid service for custome domain names.
- Why would I pay for an advertising service?
- Gmail doesn't show ads to Workspace users.
- Your emails aren't used for ad targeting, whether it's a Workspace account or a normal Gmail one.
Frankly, it's just that much easier for me to feel secure when I get that service from people whose main business is email and not advertising.
Let's say you wanted to host email with your own domain for the rest of your life. It's likely at some point you'd lose the domain.
I've had my own domain and been running my own email for almost 30 years (from back in the day you had to pay Network Solutions more than $100/year just for a domain). My current domain provider lets me renew for multiple years, I get plenty of notifications about it expiring, etc.
I can see a case where if something medical happens to me for a long term at the wrong time I could potentially lose it but I don't see why that would apply to most people, that's a very specific instance.
All people get old. The chance of something medical happening in a life is near 100%.
1. it solved spam
2. it solved finding specific emails in the haystack of your years/decades of emails
It's hard to overstate how important 1 is, for anyone who doesn't know how mail was 20 years ago. Google was able to leverage its dominance (in concert with the other huge hosts like Hotmail) to impose significant changes to email infrastructure, by requiring stuff like SPF and DKIM.
Frankly, other email providers are riding on the wave of Google's efforts and impact to sanitize the email space.
If I recall, gmail started out with 1gb in ~2004.
It was pretty standard at the time for an email account to allow 20-100mb. 1gb of free, no questions asked email storage was completely wild, then they doubled it!
Prior to this, it was a regular thing for people to go through their emails and delete old ones, and download attachments several times per year or even more often.
Keep in mind that in this era, it was not uncommon for a computer to have just 20gb or HDD, so a free 2gb was a serious amount of storage.