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Comment by Arcuru | Hacker News Reader

The email monopolies annoy me the most when other apps assume you have gmail/apple/etc.

Notion recently launched email integration that only works with GMail, and all the marketing was basically "we added Email to Notion" instead of "we added _Gmail_ to Notion".

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I ranted about this before, tailscale doesn't allow you to signup with your own username/password, they expect you to use google/facebook/microsoft accounts (or bring your own OIDC server, which is overkill if you are an individual user). As someone who got his google account blocked and got locked out of half of the internet, I can only warn anybody from ever using 3rd party logins.

Have you seen headscale? It's a bit of work if you don't have a selfhosting setup but it enables you to use the service without being at the whim of Tailscale.

Ironically the reason headscale exists is at the whim of tailscale. Because tailscale allows headscale to use their client. If they revoked that ability, which they reserve the right to and could do at any time, headscale would be non viable as software for most use cases

May as well use NetBird in that case.

Tailscale is heavily focused on authorization (authz; what you can do), and considers strict identity verification (authn) crucial to that goal. So they chose to delegate the latter problem to a party that's already solved it better than Tailscale could. This is reasonable and I'm with them.

But I do agree with you on your point; once you lose your Google account, you lose a lot more - including your personal TS network, which may include offsite devices, grandparents' PC, etc.

Unfortunately your TS account is also heavily tied to the chosen ID provider, I don't think you can change it at all (even if you go thru support). I would prefer to be able to link two IDs to a single TS account (e.g. Google and Apple), perhaps be able unlink the one I don't want anymore. I see a security concern in there (you either have a weak link, or you can't unlink an account you don't control anymore), but it would still be nice.

> I don't think you can change it at all (even if you go thru support)

I thought you could, but there's one exception (that I can't recall). If you signed up with that specific OIDC provider, you can't switch but you can with the other stock OIDC providers.

I remember the same, and I think GitHub was the exception.

I raised a ticket as i created mine as a test using Apple login and wanted to change. Was basically told to just create a new account with them.

You can login with a passkey now: https://tailscale.com/kb/1341/tailnet-passkey-admin. It looks like you still have to use Google/etc. for your main account initially. But still, this would prevent getting locked out.

>As someone who got his google account blocked and got locked out of half of the internet,

Say again please? How did you get locked out of so much I ask? I use one gmail account for mostly unimportant emailing and as a dumping ground for email signups that later spam you to death with "promotions". That's about it, and I'm able to use a hell of a lot more than "half the internet".

I'm honestly curious about the mechanics of how and why one could let aving, or losing, a google account affect them so much.

Does this really take so much imagination? They used their Google account for signing up to everything else, so when they lost access to the Google account they were locked out of everything else as well.

Given Google's well known history of randomly blocking accounts with no clear reason and no normal route for recourse, I can't fathom why anyone would do such a thing. Even back in the early years, it happened often enough to be leery of depending on this company for so much.

Long story, I give the brief summary: I signed up around 2006 for gmail bringing my own domain (that was free at that time). Over the years, that "gmail" was turned into google accounts. Since 2012 google decided custom domains are no longer free, but kept existing users if it was non-commercial usage. Somewhen around 2023 they decided to kick out users using their own domain, forcing them to convert to paid google workspace subscription. I compared prices and instead moved my domain to Microsoft365. Since then the first thing I login with google is a message telling me that I need to upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription. All my notes in google keep were gone, google maps bookmarks etc. And yes, I can't even access those free services google offers anymore with that account.

More annoying than that is the email monopoly operators deciding any non-monopoly email is spam, effectively driving businesses into their corporate packages. As a business, you have no guarantee that if you run your email server or have a hosting company run it, you'll actually be reaching customers.

And worse, your customers blame you instead of the provider, forcing the switch even more. "I don't have any problems with other emails, it must be your fault."

Is this not the logical result of fighting spammers? It’s easier to trust messages coming from mega corp when you know mega corp has invested in mechanisms that ensure their systems aren’t being used to send spam. I certainly don’t like the negative impact on people who choose to self host, but I also don’t see it as an intentional effort to shut out legitimate emails.

Case in point a bit further down in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43902653

It's always good to have an alternative reason beyond "we want to crush the competition", especially if one of these pesky anti-trust lawsuits comes around.

It's very easily possible for both to be true, there is a "fight spam" reason and there is also a "monopoly" reason, and of course unless you very stupid you never mention the second.

Their systems still do send spam. Yes probably an extremely low percent, but I do see @gmail.com spam.

I've been self-hosting for about 15 years now, and the only deliverability problems I've had in the past were with ISPs. I have no problem sending to Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and so on, or any business who hosts their own E-mail. Very occasionally, I get bounces from people who still get their E-mail through their ISP, like from AT&T or something. But I just go through the ISP's opaque process and deliverability goes back to normal.

Same here, 10 years self hosting. I've heard this claim a lot but I've never actually seen it, or seen evidence of it.

The worst I've ever had was gmail refusing to accept a ~50MB zip file as an attachment. And you know what? I'm not even mad about that one, that's totally fair.

It's frustrating because it sidelines everyone who made a conscious choice to use alternatives or self-host, and it normalizes the idea that Gmail = email

I remeber even I was applying for a job but the company's spam filter automatically bounced back everything from Yahoo. Fun.

In fairness, there was a time when yahoo's network was a major source of junk mail.

That's discrimination of people by their email address.

It is. But if a provider is not taking junk mail seriously, what is the alternative?

There is a limit to have much effort the receiving network can be expected put into filtering yahoo ham from the yahoo spam, and a limit to even how possible it is to reliably perform that filtering. Just expecting your users to put up with the influx of junk you can't filter (without too many false positives) and putting up with the processing load of attempts to filter it, are not valid options beyond a certain point. Yahoo knew they were a problem for some time before others started blocking mail from them en-mass and did nothing, or at least nothing useful, to fix it at their end despite warnings.

Also, “choice of email provider” is not a protected class in any jurisdiction that I know of.

Also/instead (too late to edit this to the end of my previous reply): for tech jobs it is discrimination by knowledge (or lack thereof) about the industry applicants are looking for a job in, which for non-entry-level rolls is perfectly valid!

It sounds more like discrimination of poor email hosts.

If they add Microsoft they will probably cover 99% of companies from small to medium - including practically every tech startup along with all the small creators and note taking influencers.

I hear you!

one thing: given that gmail is free includes forwarding and all-but-unlimited storage, I work around these limitations with a (free) new gmail account that I use for notion etc.

(this issue also affects Advanced Protection gmail users, who are often blocked from various integrations... the workaround is to create a gmail account for those and setup bi-directional filtering/forwarding...)

Exactly. I wanted to try Superhuman.com, and they only support Gmail and Outlook. I use Fastmail.

We're building what you're looking for!

Had the same problems myself so decided to build a product I actually needed.

https://marcoapp.io

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