This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
They bought up postini. Before then their spam filtering was poor.
They then leveraged that to get enterprises ising postini into their email service. This created a vacuum for enterprise spam filtering since many customers did not like the Gmail enterprise features or changes to UI.
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.
They would also filter out a newsletter I signed up to that I actually wanted to read.
A couple years ago I signed up for an email provider so I could use my own domain and avoid Google being able to kill my email account. They've got a spam filter, but it's ridiculously bad. I've been looking for better ways, but still haven't found them.
Ironically, I'm hoping a free locally-run LLM will soon be able to filter emails appropriately. I haven't seen anyone trying yet, but I'm sure they're out there.
Protons spam filter is really good in my experience as well, and you can also use your own domain.
The only downside so far imo is that you can't just add it as an imap or pop3 server to any mail client, you have to use their apps or host their bridge somewhere. Something to do with their e2ee I think.
I get a lot of spam/phishing in one of my Gmail accounts for some reason. They send me PDF attachments with nude pics on them of hot ladies that ostensibly want to meet my penis and stuff. "Click here!" it says on the nude pic PDFs, with links to .ru websites and junk
Wait, you open attachments from spam?
How else would they get to see naked ladies?
Proton
Something bugs me about Proton. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop on that one. It feels like a honeypot or something. Like - I question if it's going to be around in 10 years. I don't know what gives me that feeling about them, but I've resisted moving over to them completely.
I mean, if anybody knows what an ad looks like, it's Google.
Even Thunderbird has a better spam filter after you train it for a few days.
I am using my mail provider's standard filter and at most I get 5 mails per week that make it through. And that's with my mail being publicly available on my personal website. Not sure what sort of sites people sign up for, but spam has never been an issue, even away from Google.
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
Odd not a single mention of hotmail in there the original web based email service which arguably was the one of the prime options till gmail offered way more storage.
When I left college, my university closed my email account. That sucked, but I moved on. Then the paid service I used closed down, so I had to change again. That sucked. I lost access to my Xbox Live account because they send all my "update password" emails to that old address and won't update to my new address without confirming the change on an email that no longer exists.
Now I've had the same email address for 17 years and really really don't want to move on, even though I hate that it is with Google. They went from "don't be evil" to "be as evil as possible."
And that is why I pay for my own domain. The service can change, but my domain is eternal (or near enough for my purposes)
I'm regretting not doing that 20 years ago.
I did the conversation a few years ago.
Yes it took me a full year probably of updating accounts. But it's doable if you do it in small chunks at s time. I set up a forwarding to my new domain and when I felt like it updated a few more accounts. Untill one day, nothing showed up anymore.
Worth it
Actually deleted my Gmail account I think
I joined gmail in beta so similarly had had my address for an absurd amount of years.
Last year I completely switched over to proton for everything and keep my gmail as a junk account for shit I want to sign up for but don't want to dirty my main with.
It was a daunting feeling undertaking at first but honestly it took me a couple of hours to go through and change the email on things I actually use and want to keep.
It was a nice freeing feeling and really helped me weed out what accounts I truly use and want to keep. I would highly recommend it as a cleansing exercise as much as anything else!
I bought a custom domain and use it with Proton. If Proton shuts down or something I can easily use the same domain with another provider.
That is a good point. I have moved to Proton mail but I keep my Gmail account as a backup and it's part of my still used Google account. Can't see myself ever shutting it down completely just in case, as much as I avoid Google as much as possible now.
Ctrl+F: "thread" "conversation" zero results
I feel like people have forgotten how email worked before, when webmail providers were emulating the desktop client model of "received messages go in Inbox, Sent folder is for sent." Gmail's conversation view was shockingly intuitive, one of those "why hasn't it always been this way?" things that feels so obvious in retrospect.
I turned that off so many years ago I forgot it exists.
Yeah, abjectly hate conversation view.
I read some sysadmin forums about Conversation View, and most of them say users regularly ask how to turn it off. I always turn it off immediately.
I have always used conversation view in my desktop email client. Not sure why you think this is revolutionary or exclusive to gmail.
Labels were a pretty simple yet novel concept for categorizing mail which i seldom see in any other provider, sadly.
Incidentally the same labels make Gmail fundamentally incompatible with the way IMAP works causing lots of weirdness whenever you use any standard email client not specifically designed for Gmail.
My free Bluebottle account had tags, which are basically labels, but that was like 100 years ago.
Who else doesn't see ads in Gmail? I never have and have been using it since its inception.
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.
(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
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.
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).
Imagine using a google service. Do yourselves a favor and use anything else, even outlook, over Google.
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.
as long as they keep gemini out of it enough for me not to notice, fine
emails
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Oh Barbara. For someone absent on 'mass nouns' day in elementary school, you've come far.
Eudora! I had forgotten all about that one.
