1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam.
2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's.
3. Don't use Google Webmaster or use AMPs? Good luck finding your page on the 1st page.
4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized.
Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" attitude before they become a huge conglomerate which controls major aspects of many people's lives (which they arguably already do) and leaves everyone (like small companies that don't use Google or just regular people who don't want a Google account) separated from the world they're forming.
>2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's.
I get recapthca ALL the time for just not being logged on and deleting all filthy cookies on exit; and not "honoring" 3rd party cookies at all... and I don't care. Best part is that if you live in a country you don't speak the language you get google services in one of the country official languages -- so
what you should do and mark is often unclear. The next best part is a road trip through Europe (edit adding "?hl=en" to the url tends to fix the issue in most of google services)
>4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized.
History is a far greater offender.
>1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam.
Years ago, I recall my company hosted gmail started detecting CEO mails as spam... and he was pissed for not getting responses.
>Your browser sends language preferences, doesn't it?
Since http1.0[0]... I have wanted to add another header -> "RespectAlHeaders:All-Custom-CrRafted", so the wimpy implementation of ip->country->language is duly removed.
I was getting really long and annoying recaptcha all the time, presumably because I use Safari which has all that anti-tracking stuff. But lately (past 2-3 months?) I only get a single challenge, I wonder if they've found a way around the protection or if they've just changed the model
OMG, me too, and all I did was to tighten up cookies (disable 3rd party trackers, erase all cookies on close, etc).
Now I've got a PhD on solving "traffic light" and "crosswalk" Captchas as a result.
I started to resent Google for this, except now I think twice before going to a web site that will give me these hurdles, so it ended up helping me to focus on my work. Now I appreciate the extra work.
"Moving to Fastmail" is such a popular alternative that if they ever get to any kind of reasonable size we'll be in the same position all over again.
That should not be the suggestion. Many smaller providers encourages the competition necessary for an open network, not a small number of huge providers.
I have mostly moved to self hosting email. I still have a lot of legacy registrations with various companies that go to gmail, otherwise everything else is self host on a hetzner vps (2.50 eur per month) which doubles as a wireguard vpn.
First time setting up an email server was quite a chore as I have no background in email, getting all of the moving parts to play nice required some patience.
My second email server used Mail-in-a-box scripts which I highly recommend. Zero to functioning email server in a few minutes. The slowest part is DNS propagation. Anyone comfortable setting up a domain name and the basic DNS settings that are invloved will have no problem self hosting email. The setup includes web-based client. I use k-9 mail client on my phone.
I find the catch-all email feature very helpful in creating ad-hoc addresses for spammy companies (eg car insurance). I can sign-up with spammy.companyname@mydomain.com and it will direct to spammy@mydomain.com.
I'm not completely de-googled, but I am consciously and gradually reducing my exposure to google, and other large networks.
I've been using Fastmail for about 5 or 6 years now. My only problem is the 1GB mailbox size limit I have. Maybe I should upgrade. Otherwise I love it. Their webmail client is phenomenal and works with mobile and desktop. I don't like their Android app but I haven't tried it in a year. Their web client is so good I don't need an app for them.
I do see mail going to spam though. It's never bugged me that much.
You can also just use the native imap client provided by your operating system. The beauty of using a provider and service that adheres to open email standards.
We're still a fair way away from that! We're growing steadily, but not at the same rate that "give it away free and work out how to monetize it later" services do. Worth it for having a sound business model and no venture capital breathing down our necks to turn evil though.
Thanks! I was looking for an export button for them earlier today so when I saw you comment I couldn't help myself.
A zip file with all notes in it would be fantastic. I just want to feel like my data is safe from Apple having a bug that wipes it. Read a lot of Catalina horror stories.
IMAP looks promising and might be all I need. Neither Spark or Apple Mail seem to let me export mail as txt but presumably there's a mail client out there that does in which case problem solved. Thank you for point that feature out, should throw it up on:
It's not the ideal solution and certainly not as easy as clicking a button but, for a quick 'n dirty solution, you might look into using "offlineimap" and configuring it to sync only your notes folder instead of all of them.
I use Fastmail scared that my emails will go to spam. But ideally I want to live in a world where my emails hosted on my email server will send like they did 10-20 years ago.
I want to use Fastmail, but their minimum price for using your own domain is $50/year. At that price I can get Exchange Online with double the storage. And given that they have an office in the US, I would expect them to follow the same laws that Microsoft and Google have to regarding requests from government agencies.
This looks to be a good alternative except it does not have HIPAA support.
Even though I have shut down my practice for the near future, I will still need to have information protected for several years to the Health Department's requirements for psychological records.
Email providers who lack this support will have difficulty gaining traction in the health world.
Could you sue Google for slander in a case like this? They are explicitly labeling your messages as being manipulative or dishonest without any just cause. Why does it matter it’s an algorithm instead of a careless person in power?
I have all my mailboxes with gandi.net. Each domain you buy from them comes with 2 fully managed emails, and I think 3GB storage each, for just over $1/month. I basically never get spam, nor blocked emails. They have 2 webmail interfaces too, but I don't use them. As a bonus, gandi financially supports a ton of open source projects, which never hurts.
I use https://mailbox.org/en/, it's from a small German company and I can use my own domain with the smallest plan for just 1 € per month. Their spam filter also seems pretty good.
> Few bucks a month add up and can be considered expensive by many.
I pay around 3$/month for Fastmail, I don't think it's expensive, an email address is the primary communication method everyone uses nowadays and it's useful every day.
> but we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" attitude
I think that's exactly opposite. We need more competition, not forcing a private company to behave in some way that "we" (and who is "we"?) find acceptable.
The problem is that Google is not just Google the search engine, or Google the email provider, or Google the video service, or Google the website analytics engine, or Google the online office suite, or Google the ads syndicate.
Because Google is all of those things, it has accumulated too much market power, to the extent that they are market distorting. Bing and DDG (which is not an independent engine, but collates results) are irrelevant to a company's Internet presence. There is no such thing as SEO for Bing. Whereas Google can make-or-break you.
When Google the ad syndicate and Google the search engine collude (as it were) to place your competitor's ads ahead of your organic search result, a top result even, and to distinguish such ad results as ads only technically, by the narrowest of definitions, this compels you to advertise with Google the ad syndicate. Just as an example.
This behavior is harmful to the market (not to mention to users, but that's a different subject) and it is a given that Google the monopoly^Wsingle entity will continue to make such moves, whack-a-mole style so it's futile to squash any individual behavior even if you could. Ergo the reasonable solution is to break them up.
Have you actually had a lot of problems sending e-mail to Gmail users from your mail server? For me Gmail has not been great about accepting e-mail and not marking it spam (occasionally have issues), but others like icloud.com have been worse.
>Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" attitude before they become a huge conglomerate which controls major aspects of many people's lives (which they arguably already do) and leaves everyone (like small companies that don't use Google or just regular people who don't want a Google account) separated from the world they're forming.
I mean, I get captcha's all the time while working from Google's network. You're exhausting from a shared quota. That's life on the modern internet.
Bitch about Google all you want, it's not like they decided this is how the internet should work. Prior to Google, my company integrated with reCaptcha because no other choice existed to reduce automated abuse.
What about stop being so entitled? Google is offering free awesome services for very little and you’re saying these things.
It seems you're not getting the point. The problem is not for users of those "awesome" Google services the problem manifests itself for people sending legitimate emails from legitimate email accounts to a Google account.
Google tags those as spam and refuses to deliver them, while always shifting the goal posts and providing sub par support (an number of essentially useless links) to the sender of the email to a Google account.
This happens, btw, also when the sender account never spammed and sent legitimate mails to the Gmail user for years.
So your snarky comment is completely out of line here.
It's not about people mooching free "awesome" Google services for free it's that Google is a rotten net citizen and is behaving like shit to the entire world.
> the problem manifests itself for people sending legitimate emails from legitimate email accounts to a Google account
It's funny to me that people in this thread are complaining about Google being large enough to serve as a de-facto authority, when the only way one could solve a "legitimate emails are being blocked" problem is to have a definition of 'legitimate' that would come from... an authority.
Google is dropping the ball but I don't know what the solution would look like that isn't just "Someone else be Google now." ;)
What about stop being so entitled? Google is offering free awesome services for very little and you’re saying these things. It’s so demoralizing. Get off your high horse.
I don't use gmail these days (except as a honeypot out of laziness), but I get plenty of email from google hosted domains. The issue isn't (just) that people want to use these services and want Google to have more reasonable policies, there is also the issue of having to tolerate Google's policies because other people use their services.
Emails from Google servers are notable to me because there is no way to report spam (and the signal to noise ratio from Google is pretty low for my case). Google's opaque approach to email means that deliverability issues become even more tedious to deal with than they should be.
It’s been a while since google made anything awesome hasn’t it? Maps is still great, but things like AMPs are so terrible that they were a bigger part in driving me to DDG than privacy.
Maybe I’m weird, but I’ve never been in an AMP where I wouldn’t rather go to the actual side and use reader mode.
1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam.
2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's.
3. Don't use Google Webmaster or use AMPs? Good luck finding your page on the 1st page.
4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized.
Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" attitude before they become a huge conglomerate which controls major aspects of many people's lives (which they arguably already do) and leaves everyone (like small companies that don't use Google or just regular people who don't want a Google account) separated from the world they're forming.