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Comment by redserk | Hacker News Reader

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

I’ll stop you here. Google offered it for free and, at the time, offered such an high amount of mail storage for free it sounded insane. At the time, my ISP gave me a 25MB or 50MB inbox and that was considered pretty decent, when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB.

They absolutely have a right to take ant steps they deem necessary to prevent malicious use of their product, and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free, but Google wasn’t forced to provide a free email service, much less one that went so far above and beyond their competition.

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> and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free

And I'll stop you here. It's less than obvious that there's no obligation. If you provide a critical service that folks rely on at a price less than your cost, you drive out competition, and it's a critical part of your own business model, dropping the service without warning is IMO on the border of what Google should be allowed to do.

I’d say that if Google suddenly stopped providing Gmail for free, destroying the primary means of communication for billions of people, governments would be justified in immediately nationalizing Google with no compensation.

Corporations aren’t magical entities that somehow exist outside of social obligations and can do whatever they want as long as their own terms of service permit it.

Maybe they could announce a pricing increase for a somewhat distant future date.

Maybe $1/month starting in 2 years, then increasing to $2/month for the next year, $3/month for the next, on until they feel they're covering costs.

That way it gives people time to look for alternative free providers, or time to get used to the idea of paying for email.

> Corporations aren’t magical entities that somehow exist outside of social obligations and can do whatever they want as long as their own terms of service permit it.

Where's your support for this statement in the law?

The support is there by no constitution guaranteeing human-like rights for corporations, allowing lawmakers to restrict them however they see fit.

The rights of google's owners still apply though.

When push comes to shove, the law stops mattering, every time. That’s true for individual rights and it’s true for corporate entities too. The era where things like that don’t happen is a very small slice of human history that is currently coming to an end in real time all around the world. Not long ago, a government simply taking over a company was something that occurred quite regularly.

The existence of law itself is the only necessary support... Law is merely encoded social obligations that the government will enforce. That a single law constrains corporations in any way (and that is clearly the case) proves the statement.

In the broader context GP is clearly advocating for what the law should be, or should be changed to should certain events come to pass. Demanding support in existing law for a proposed change in law is nonsense if that's what you meant to do instead of narrowly discussing the nearly vaccuously true quote you pulled out.

People can actually make new laws. Happens all the time.

Yeah! I can't believe people know basics about cartels, trusts and dumping.

It does feel like a lot of very intelligent people here basically start at a first principles belief in property rights, and discover or dispute all of the rights and protections put in place over centuries to patch up the issues that occur when that philosophy meets reality. It reflects poorly on our education systems that these apparently weren't covered or were unconvincing when presented. Or maybe it's just a reflection of the era? In practice organizations seem to be repealing these protections through limited interpretations or loopholes, so maybe that skews people's expectations?

It's not a poor reflection of our education system, it's all just motivated reasoning. Smart people will move heaven and Earth to argue themselves into a belief that their self-serving position is actually borne of some global altruism.

There is a lot of information, in various forms, on the internet that are specifically designed to misinform those who hadn’t taken a course on that particular topic, but leaves the reader feeling they learnt something. Right now LLM’s are good at picking those apart for the reader if they decide to dig deeper, however, I fear this era might not last.

> LLM’s are good at picking those apart for the reader if they decide to dig deeper. I fear this era might not last.

Yeah, I'm not sure that pinning one's hopes for a better-educated populace on LLMs is going to pan out well. Education requires trust and active defense against malign actors.

> Right now LLM’s are good at picking those apart for the reader if they decide to dig deeper

They are not.

Except gmail is hardly a cartel, etc. I've never had a gmail account.

I'd assume that you also never tried running your own email server and have the email actually delivered to a gmail address, then.

I've self-hosted email systems for businesses for nearly 20 years. I've actually had far easier times delivering to Gmail/Workspace clients than Outlook. Outlook constantly breaks strict DKIM with some of their protection scanning nonsense for emails that seem to get good deliverability almost everywhere else.

Exactly. Outlook is the main source of deliverability headaches.

Isn't that a good thing? I'm quite happy with Outlook filtering out trash.

No. It will do things when shuffling the email through its various scanner platforms that will make their systems think the original sender is outlook's systems. So then when their later downstream service looks at the email it's like "cool an email from Outlook, let's see if Outlook is allowed to send for this domain...hmm...seems like outlook isn't allowed to send and I'm supposed to reject emails coming from unapproved senders so rejected!"

The way it sometimes bounces emails around in their own systems lead to them sometimes mixing up who actually originally sent the message. This causes all kinds of problems and seems entirely unique to their crappy setup.

In our case, we're a small business, and we don't do email marketing. So I'd say that anything of ours that gets dropped by Outlook isn't trash. The only non-hand-typed email we send are transactional - actually transactional as in "here's your invoice" or "here's you're tracking number".

You know, you could achieve 100% spam filtering by just deleting every email. You wouldn't see any spam at all!

That did work for decades up until recently. It took me a bit to realize that google email recipients had stopped receiving my emails.

They basically force yourself to register to their service go allow your emails to be possibly analyzed. It takes dozens or hundreds of emails to warm up a single self hosted email account

We needed a stamp.

Regulated "Emails cost 1 penny" would have worked fine. All you need to do to meaningfully fight spam is have a cost that isn't completely negligible; Spammers started out at a rate where they spend less than a day's wages to message literally every human being on the planet; At those costs even finding a single person you can convince of your Nigerian prince account nets you a profit.

We controlled the pipes and the formats in the 90's and 00's almost unilaterally. We should have made a stamp.

YMMV but I never had issues with Gmail accepting mail from my personal server. And I didn't even do anything Gmail-specific, just standard SPF+DKIM and making sure my server is not an open relay etc.

Microsoft on the other hand...

I self-host an email server and can definitely send email to Gmail addresses.

Been doing it for over 20 years without issue, for myself and many other customers.

I should have been more clear that I feel bad for the users.

I don’t have much empathy for Google.

There were plenty of free email services before gmail. Google isn't at fault here because they provided a better experience.

There are plenty of free email services _after_ Gmail too. If Google want to destroy their product, have at it.

There aren't any alternatives that let you keep you @gmail.com address.

I'm not able to continue to receive mail at the apartment I lived at a decade ago. It turns out after I stopped paying for the apartment I lost the ability to control that mailbox.

This is a normal thing to happen in the physical world. We really shouldn't have such strict connections between email being a primary identifier for a user, requiring only a single one on an account, and not letting users change what they consider their primary email address. Email addresses can and should change over time. If someone really wants to ensure you have a piece of digital real estate one should get into the "ownership" game and get your own domain. People somehow end up buying and selling houses all the time which is far more complicated paperwork-wise, and yet we act like registering a domain name and configuring it for an email provider is just nearly impossible for normal people to handle.

Is there an RFC for email to redirect email for a user no longer at that address? Not exactly like setting up mail redirection with the postal service, but similar in outcome.

e.g. a server connects to the gmail MX server, and gets a response like "example@gmail.com now found at foo@example.com"

There's probably a ton of issues with this approach, but it would make switching email providers simpler on the user-end.

Most email platforms support some form of forwarding. Its not quite the same as your suggestion that's similar to an HTTP redirect but still the ability to configure your email user to just pass along those emails to another address is a common feature. These systems usually just rewrite the envelope recipient address and reprocesses the email based on that new address.

In the end though this still requires that original user to have exclusive ownership to that username in perpetuity and requires the email hoster to continue to actually host email services. It does nothing if, say, Google wanted to shut down email services on @gmail.com or start requiring paid accounts or whatever.

It's a giant pain in the ass in the real world. I don't think we should accept such friction for switching providers online just because we have such limits in superficially similar operations.

I don't disagree but how would that work given the existing internet infrastructure? The gmail domain and MX records will always necessarily be at the behest of google and so the label 'xyz@gmail.com' will always necessarily be 100% under their control.

The only real solution is to use your own domain and MX records, which anyone who cares about keeping a vanity email address should do. Which to me is the virtual equivalent of keeping a PO box or such.

Having migrated off an @gmail to a personal domain, yeah it's a pain, but you rip the bandaid off and you're free. Changing the address on my mail sucked when I bought a house, but it would be silly to never ever move because changing your mailing address is unpleasant.

Its not really just superficially similar, its incredibly similar. Its their servers, its their domain. If they want to stop hosting email services on their domain and delete gmail.com IN MX records they should be allowed to do so in line with whatever contractual promises they've made. If an apartment complex wants to shut down and tear down the building they can do so once they've completed all lease commitments.

What are you suggesting happen otherwise? Once you're an email provider you're forever committed to being an email provider for those users until the end of time?

I think people have forgotten the various historic monopolies and abuse they've perpetuated just because the new ones do it digitally.

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

This argument would have flown 30 years ago with Yahoo.

Since then we had Uber pumping so much money into a losing business until it drew the competition bankrupt.

And now we have AI pumping so much money into a losing business until they hopefully replicate Uber, only won't work and signs are all over the wall that they just burned a trillion dollars.

Which opens great prospectives for incumbents WHO LEARN FROM THE MISTAKES of the powers be at the time.

About time to start a "Don't be evil. FOR REAL." This time.

If in 30 years it's necessary to start "Don't be evil. REALLY, REALLY, REALLY this time" then so be it.

I'm starting the 2.0 version. Fuck AI. Fuck incumbents. Long live long life and freedom of choice!

(Please understand I'm being sarcastic. You should interpret this post as a joke)

Hi. I'm a VC bigwig and I'm very interested in purchasing your company. I, too, believe in Not Being Evil

I find your views interesting and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

No really - got more ideas about "Don't be evil. FOR REAL"?

Don't have an online presence yet, will let you know when I add that.

I remember in the early days you could watch your storage quota go up in real time.

Back when Google was still fun and innovating. Enshittification consumes all.

also, people changed. Seems like nobody wants to see cute fun stuff anymore. I bet they'd get lawsuits of people claiming false advertising since the numbers aren't strictly true.

Google's annual revenue is $350 billion. I can't believe someone would feel bad for such a company, because as you pointed out, this entire Gmail thing is part of the reason they have that revenue.

Google has done nothing but be a wolf in sheep's clothing. I'm not going to shed a tear because they have to maintain an email service.

Try signing up for a Google Gemini Paid account with a third party email... Better still, try signing up for a Gemini Paid account with a registered android phone that isn't triangulated to a desktop. If they can't own you, they don't want you at all.

"when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB."

The G in Gmail was for a gigabyte and that was what I got in the noughties for "free", when as you say my ISP offered something like 5MB on the end of a POP connection.

To be fair you can cram a lot of ASCII into 5MB. However you can email piccies to a mailbox with a 1GB limit if your modem doesn't melt first.

Obviously, this was during the "don't be evil" days.

Even then the reason they were giving people so much storage space was because they wanted people to get in the habit of keeping their private data on Google's servers so that Google could mine it whenever they felt like it. Giving users effectively unlimited space was a selfish move on Google's part, not a gift.

Also they make it really difficult to mass delete stuff. I'm basically stuck paying for their storage because I don't really have the skills to self host (but I'm working on it!)

They make it impossible to delete stuff if you stop paying!

I was on Google Workspace for about 10 years. I moved off their service because the mandatory Gemini price hikes meant that it no longer represented value for money.

I get excessive storage utilisation warnings for some shared drives I used to have but because I no longer have a paid up license, I can’t manage shared drives anymore. So I can’t delete them.

Google’s “support” team in India told me all sorts of lies about how to resolve the issue, but they’ve finally settled on a position that I would need to reinstate my Workspace account, at my own expense in order to delete the data to stop the emails and save Google money.

They refuse to acknowledge the patent absurdity of this situation and escalate it to someone who can actually fix it.

> I get excessive storage utilisation warnings for some shared drives I used to have but because I no longer have a paid up license, I can’t manage shared drives anymore. So I can’t delete them.

I had the same problem, and when my account was suspended, it was practically impossible to resubscribe because no Workspace plan could accommodate the amount of storage I used.

I'd thankfully managed to transfer out most of my important data elsewhere, so I made my peace with the less important Linux ISOs getting deleted.

Google has support?? How did you find it, and what other services besides gmail does it cover?

Note they said "workspace". This has some level of support baked in, as this is the paid enterprise product.

https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/support/contact...

They call it support, but that’s not the term I would use.

Not only that. I was probably not even a teenager or barely a teenager when registering a gmail was not as simple as clicking "sign up". You needed someone to refer you and upon registration you got 25 referrals in return. Needless to say, entirely ditched gmail forever ago and use it as a spam mail. They can have all the fun they want training slop on that.

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