We started using more than one device and web accessed mail became the norm. POP3 still exists and you can use mail clients and delete everything off the server. Come to think of it, maybe we can then use syncthing to sync the mail across all other devices? Maybe?
So you could just use Email in these archaic programs called Thunderbird etc. If you really wanted to use gmail. You know, without adds, without the need for an ad blocker, without AI recommendations and at your leisure.
But hey, you'd have to install something on your computer for that.... how horrible.
And who uses computers for work anyway, you can just write your essay on a tablet. (but there are also email apps on those)
It's a shittier way to work but hey it's easier.
One of the nice things about Gmail at the time, was that you could access your emails when not home. If you were at a friend's or on holiday at a net café, all you needed was to know your email and password.
That sounds silly, but at the time the majority of ISP mailboxes were pop only. Or those Webmails you could get were attached to what you would now think of comically small mailboxes. Full history Webmail added a convenience we didn't get before.
I'm selfhosting my email (Stalwart Server) and I'm happy!
Who else doesn't see ads in Gmail? I never have and have been using it since its inception.
on the other two inbox tabs sometimes, promotions and updates. just checked, saw one in the app for Verizon in promotions.
I use Firefox with ublock origin and pihole, blocking over 1 million sites.
I do on the browser version not the mobile
even in Promotions and Updates tabs?
(and got royally pissed at Google for sunsetting its cool Inbox app).
inbox was amazing! closing down the project radicalized me against everything google touched from that point forward lol
Fr. I was so upset when they axed inbox. I found an alternative, but iirc you can't bring your own email or something like that.
How people will accept having their entire lives scanned, categorised and sold off to the highest bidder is beyond me. Fastmail - or any other paid product - for the win.
The question should be "How do countries/EU accept most of their citizens surveilled by a monopolistic company subject to a foreign country's intelligence agency?".
I don't think it's my personal responsibility to care unless I'm casting a vote. I don't have enough extra energy to avoid surveillance anyway. Expecting billions of people each to take personal responsibility of finding out how to de-google, de-apple, de-microsoft, de-amazon, de-meta is too much. What percentage of people can install and configure Linux and Graphene OS and move everything from normal social media to Lemmy and Mastodon? We see the answer in current reality.
How people will accept having their entire lives scanned, categorised and sold off to the highest bidder is beyond me
Me too. It was painfully obvious what Google will do once they launched Gmail and I never used it because of that.
cutting ads out of your life cuts them off at the ankles. so what if they know in some database that I bought something, I don't see their ads, so it's useless info.
This is why the dark ages line is only half true. Paying for what you consume is normal anywhere else. Bringing that back to the internet would be a good thing IMO.
Absolutely!
I pay for Tuta, and it works great! I pay €3.60 because I haven't fully committed, and I'll probably prepay a year to get that down to €3/month. It's really not that expensive, and I get to use my own domain as well (so me@mydomain.com).
I've been slowly trying to claw my workspace email back to my Gmail account so I can stop paying for workspace and move it to proton, unfortunately I have a metric buttload of Android apps and Google auth wrapped around my workspace emails.
Imagine using a google service. Do yourselves a favor and use anything else, even outlook, over Google.
as long as they keep gemini out of it enough for me not to notice, fine
Don't give them ideas
pretty sure theyve already got that one
And Hotmail deleted all my emails after not signing in for some period, twice. Then, I just stick with gmail since the early days until now.
emails
emails
emails
emails
Oh Barbara. For someone absent on 'mass nouns' day in elementary school, you've come far.
People who complain about the fact that "emails" is an incorrect plural form, even if it's incredibly common and accepted, and sometimes language evolves and changes, should be sure that they write it 'E-mail', and also don't forget to capitalize Internet!
What gmail did to email, was provide an insanely good spam filter compared to others. It was in their best interest to keep everyones ads out of your email except their own.
To this very day, I know nobody - NOBODY - who even comes close to Gmail's spam filtering capability.
To this very day, I know nobody - NOBODY - who even comes close to Gmail’s spam filtering capability.
I disagree. Perhaps you need hard evidence for a claim like that.
I have a gmail account, and a proton mail account. My gmail account is packed with spam. It has so much spam its crazy. The account is basically unusable. Which is fine, because I no longer trust google. It's been years since I've told anyone to use this account.
On the other hand, I can count on one hand the number of times I've got a spam message in my inbox on protonmail. In fact, I remember. It's 2. The account isn't as old, but I've used it to sign up for at least as many things. It's my main account now - partially because I've turned anti-google, but also because its not choked by mountains of junk.
(To be fair, I suspect the main reason that my gmail account is so bad is that it has a popular username, and other people have accidentally signed up for things with my email accidentally instead of their own. Nevertheless, the fact is that the gmail is spam-central, and the protonmail account is clean.)
The Gmail spam filter filters out emails from Google, half the 2FA authentication emails I get, things I've actively subscribed to and hit "not spam" on several times, and does not block "You've won a Home Depot gift card!" from h3uu3hb382jeop1fe@je7qow.xy
So far, Proton has been doing a better job than Google ever did for me. Especially considering that they don't even read my mail content, that is genuinely impressive to me
They regularly filter first emails from my self-hosted domain to friends. So clearly they know jack shit and just go overboard on false positives. Google is full of pieces of shit.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en
Did you set up SPF and DKIM? It helps Google know you are not a spammer.
I just checked - SPF is set up. I had never heard about DKIM, but I checked, and it's also enabled. So as I said, google is just full of shiteaters.
They would also filter out a newsletter I signed up to that I actually wanted to read.
That's the Postini purchase from a ways back. It's truly amazing.
Even Thunderbird has a better spam filter after you train it for a few days.
I mean, if anybody knows what an ad looks like, it's Google.
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