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What Gmail did to email (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 month ago by lemmee_in@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

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When Gmail first appeared in 2004, the idea of having what seemed like a never-ending space for email was revolutionary. Most paid services were providing a few megabytes of space, and here came Google promising a full gigabyte (which, at the time, seemed huge) for free.

Over the years, however, Gmail has added a plethora of features that it touts as “improvements” but some of them are irritating. Worse, it looks for ads for things that it will never need and sticks them at the top of email list.

Back in the dark ages before Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other free cloud-based apps, most email happened either via paid services or inside of walled gardens. In the former, you paid a service provider for an email account and downloaded your email into an app that only lived on your computer — an app with a name like Pine, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, or Thunderbird.

For the most part, nobody was scanning your email to find out the last time you bought shoes, or whether you were shopping for car insurance, or that you had recently been buying gifts for a relative’s new baby. Nobody was taking that information and selling it to vendors so they could drop ads into your email lists or surprise you with additional promotional messages. Your email lived on your computer alone. Once it was downloaded and erased from the server, it was just yours — to save or erase or lose.

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[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 16 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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.

[–] timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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).

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah, I recently went through a lot of that pain. But I'm now 99% gmail-free, and most of the stuff forwarded from gmail is junk.

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

yeah my workspace has a catchall with forwards. I had practically abandoned my old gmail, but I need a viable google account for my phone

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's fair, and it's certainly a process.

I largely went cold-turkey and got a phone w/ GrapheneOS and refused to install Google Play. I replaced a bunch of apps with FOSS alternatives available through F-Droid, and I have a handful I can't replace installed through Aurora w/o my Google Account. I made a separate profile for Google Play apps, but that only has like 2 apps in it that I rarely use.

It's surprisingly functional, but it did totally suck during the transition period. But I'm mostly free of Google crap now, with the main leftover being Google Sheets because I like the =GOOGLEFINANCE() feature and haven't found a replacement.

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Nice tips, thanks!

[–] RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[–] thermal_shock@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] Tehdastehdas@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah very fair points. Although in defense of the EU it’s not like it isn’t fighting back.