Stop using gmail.com for things you care about

https://medium.com/@xdvl/stop-using-gmail-com-for-things-you-care-about-14af40e43a88#.o3ln6fpl9

by dvl • 10 years ago

83 50 10 years ago

medium.com

wineisfine2• 10 years ago

I doubt Google is just closing accounts without a good reason.

detaro2• 10 years ago

I doubt Google is not regularly making mistakes.

(A paid provider might make them too, but has more incentive to care and fix them. + I suspect they actually have less automatic abuse filtering, because free offerings are more vulnerable to that)

dvl8• 10 years ago

The main problem is not assuming those mistakes.

All I got is "read the ToS"

TheSpiceIsLife• 10 years ago

It's a good point thought. I use Gmail as my primary email for quite a few things, and my other email is also a free service. What am I to do if I need support for either of these?

What email provider should I use?

jakobegger2• 10 years ago

Whatever provider you choose, use your own domain. Then you can always switch.

greenyoda• 10 years ago

You could try FastMail. I've been very happy with their service, and have even had good experiences with their customer support.

dethi• 10 years ago

Protonmail if you want really secure and private email service.

dvl8• 10 years ago

I really thought the same, if you browse on Gmail forums you'll see a lot of similar histories.

JabavuAdams• 10 years ago

At this point, that's a well-known psychological bias.

Gmail is a large-scale impersonal system / organization. In every other walk of life, we see such large organizations making mistakes, for essentially inscrutable reasons.

Why would Gmail / Google be any different? The onus is on you to show that, rather than the OP to prove he's above reproach / faultless.

falcolas2• 10 years ago

Not to mention that it's impossible to prove a negative - that you've never broken Google's EULA in this case.

wozer• 10 years ago

Why do you doubt that? There are quite a few examples.

jakobegger2• 10 years ago

The absolute lack of customer support for Gmail made me switch to Fastmail a couple of years ago. I use my own domain now, so if I ever become unhappy with Fastmail I'm not locked in.

Email is so vital to my personal life and my business that it is worth paying 50 bucks a year.

dvl8• 10 years ago

I have my own domain but some old things were still on gmail.com address.

a3n2• 10 years ago

Your own domain, plus ABG, is really the way to go. I'm a very happy customer of Fastmail, my preferred ABG.

mrb• 10 years ago

"Your own domain, plus ABG, is really the way to go. I'm a very happy customer of Fastmail, my preferred ABG."

ABG?

chx• 10 years ago

Both Gmail (important and unread) and Google Inbox gives you a birds eye view of important emails. Can fastmail do this?

chrischen2• 10 years ago

I find those features useless.

dogma11382• 10 years ago

If you are paying you can use Gmail for Work which is a paid service which comes with 24/7 phone support.

However like any service when it comes to your business read the TOS and the contract very well. Basing your business on "free" services is never a good idea, a paid contract usually gives you some sort of protection and better terms than "provided as is".

Jabbles• 10 years ago

Last time I saw this on HN it was something like an art professor who'd been storing pictures of cherubs or something and it had tripped Google's child-porn detector.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810946

dvl8• 10 years ago

That was the first thing I thought was "maybe I have uploaded some copyrighted material to Drive or triggered some filter".

I also suspect of a problem with my credit card.

But Google refuses to tell me what was wrong.

chrischen2• 10 years ago

If someone emails you child porn, would that disable your account?

falcolas2• 10 years ago

If cherubs trigger it, it probably doesn't even need to be porn.

lambshanks• 10 years ago

I use fastmail.com for electronic mail, and I gladly pay for it.

Marvel at the simplicity: you pay for a service, and the provider's incentive is to serve you!

This versus the alternative where you use a "service" provided free of cost, and the "provider" makes money by selling data they have harvested from your interactions. You give away your privacy; you have no reason to expect support; you are not actually the customer.

dvl8• 10 years ago

I'm thinking about move my domain to fastmail.

Oletros• 10 years ago

and the "provider" makes money by selling data they have harvested from your interactions.

Which provider sell your data?

bsclifton• 10 years ago

I hate to be obvious, but you get what you pay for :P I dumped gmail for Exchange and now use Office 365. Reasonable price, great support.

dvl8• 10 years ago

I was paying Google Drive to get extra space for emails too :(

raverbashing• 10 years ago

It's a good thing that GMail is not ad supported... oh wait

Being condescending with customers may backfire for them

dozzie• 10 years ago

The only drawback is it's Microsoft, and extrapolating what is happening to Windows, you can start expecting advertisements and "telemetry" soon.

thinkxl• 10 years ago

I use https://posteo.de/en and am very happy so far, it's 1 EUR per month.

Features for the curious:

- 2 GB email account

- 100% green electricity

- Saved data can be encrypted data

- Two-factor auth

- Ad-free

- Sign up without personal details

I'm not related with them in any way, just a customer. The only con is that you can't use your own domain.

dvl8• 10 years ago

I'm also looking to move my domain from Google Apps, I'll consider Posteo. Thanks.

eertami• 10 years ago

The only con is that you can't use your own domain.

lern_too_spel• 10 years ago

It looks like your problem is you discussed your account closure with people who don't work at Google and can't get any information about your account instead of using the official form (https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/disabled2). One of the people you talked to pointed you to the official form. Did you try it? Unless the official form also doesn't work, your conclusion appears invalid.

gpm• 10 years ago

And what's the alternative?

I could use an ISP (or in my case university) email, but I'll lose access to that in the future when I change ISPs (or graduate).

I could use <other free email provider>, but they will probably have the same problem, and unless I'm using one of the other giant services (e.g. outlook) are probably more likely to disappear than Google is to randomly ban me.

I could use a paid provider, but they are probably still more likely to disappear in the future than google is likely to randomly ban me.

Instead I would prepare to mitigate the damage of losing access to your account. Have local copies of emails, don't use two factor authentication with one factor being email.

dogma11382• 10 years ago

Or well pay Gmail... https://apps.google.co.uk/products/gmail/

SNvD7vEJ• 10 years ago

The solution is to register your own domain.

emdd• 10 years ago

But that still doesn't actually answer the email provider question.

dvl8• 10 years ago

I could use a paid provider, but they are probably still more likely to disappear in the future than google is likely to randomly ban me.

That was my main reason to still use Gmail till today.

From now I'll be making regular backups, and always use an email address on my own domain, so I can freely change provider without much problems.

KayL• 10 years ago

Backup Emails is easy, just set up auto-forwarder to Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. But losing the Google Account, you won't even able to login some single sign-on services.

atomlib• 10 years ago

I use Yandex Mail For Domain https://domain.yandex.com which is free with the exact same features regular Yandex.Mail has (“unlimited” mailbox size, Yandex.Disk, letters up to 30 MB in size). By default you can create up to 1000 mailboxes per domain but if you state why you need more they can lift the limit. There is DKIM support. They do have one weird restriction though. I have no access to abuse@ and spam@ mailboxes since they use these for spam reports.

What's far more interesting is that their tech support actually answers. It may take a day or three but they do talk back.

xbmcuser• 10 years ago

This part I dont get about Google they ban you but don't tell you why. At least they should make a chart of offences of 1-5 and put different offences in the chart according to severity of offence. So when banning you they can say for this number it won't mean much to rest of the world but the person getting banned could probably guess why.

Stop using gmail.com for things you care about

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