The Case Against Gmail (2020)

https://www.migadu.com/blog/gmail/

by 0xmohit • 2 years ago

54 65 2 years ago

vundercind2• 2 years ago

Uuuugh that reminds me that one of these days I’m gonna have to set aside the four or so hours it’ll take to get most of my important things pointing at my owned-domain email address, so I don’t lose everything if Google’s ban hammer automatically decides the almost-nothing I do on any Google site violates policy and I lose it.

We need a moved-permanently redirect for emails :-/

sunshowers2• 2 years ago

I'd always used my own domain so I could switch providers without hassle, but then... I transitioned my gender, and changed my primary domain as part of that.

The thing that worked for me was making a big spreadsheet, working through it, and adding a label to messages still going to my old domain to catch stragglers.

Hopefully the last time I'll ever have to do this.

rakoo5• 2 years ago

We need a moved-permanently redirect for emails :-/

Most mail providers have an automatic forward system, and/or an automatic reply. There is more than enough for most of the biggest names.

diggernet• 2 years ago

Don't worry, Google is working on that.

The demise of email forwarding is getting closer

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40045069

vundercind2• 2 years ago

That doesn’t help with the nightmare scenario of Google’s systems deciding I’m a threat because I never post YouTube comments or something, and shutting off the account. That’s the thing I’m worried about.

criddell2• 2 years ago

Gmail is not even a Freemium service. It does not have a paid tier with which it compensates the free tier.

You can pay for Gmail through Google Workspace.

bell-cot• 2 years ago

If your Google Workspace account only has a small number of users, can you get any real customer service?

mikl2• 2 years ago

As a (paying) Migadu customer, I’d happily recommend them. No fuss, no muss. Just e-mail.

pphysch• 2 years ago

To be fair, this is 99% of users' experience with Gmail. Just email.

mikl2• 2 years ago

Yes, but Migadu is subject to Swiss privacy law, since they’re located here. They can’t (legally) do what Google does.

asah• 2 years ago

While there's of course risk in SaaS-hosted anything, it's not true that Google is only an "ads company" - they take gsuite/GCP deadly seriously and these products aren't going away.

xyproto• 2 years ago

They take money even more seriously and money is incentive for gradually trading away user privacy.

tqi• 2 years ago

We believe, any entity having access to so much personal information is a great risk to world peace, freedom and democracy.

I often seen privacy advocates make sweeping statements like this, but I have a hard time understanding their concerns because I haven't really gotten an answer as to how they see it happening.

EDIT: Also to be clear, I think it is completely valid to object to data collection on moral / ethical grounds alone. And the fact that even if you merely send an email to a gmail account means your data will be tracked is a violation of that choice. However I think claims that this is in turn a great threat to democracy are often used as a kugel to convince other people that they are wrong for not sharing those moral / ethical objections.

lukan• 2 years ago

"but I can never get an answer as to how exactly they see it playing out."

The standard answer is, that it creates a strong power imbalance. When every politician can be brought down by scandals and one entity is in posession of all the scandals - then they could controll every politician. (it is not like this today, but this is what we privacy advocates want to prevent)

dotnet00• 2 years ago

An example of how this could play out is how easily Google and other big tech cooperate with government requests nowadays (compared to, say, a decade or so ago, when Apple was openly fighting the FBI in court to not be forced to make a tool to unlock locked iPhones).

It allows the government to censor things without having to explicitly deal with legal challenges, and in exchange the company gets good will and favors holding back regulation. That easily leads into things like election manipulation.

There's also the massive target it paints on their back in terms of data breaches.

There are also other things to consider. IIRC with one of the NSA related leaks, there was the story of employees abusing the data collection for personal purposes. Private companies have even less oversight towards the public on how the data is being used.

giantrobot• 2 years ago

With only metadata, just who is mailing who, you can build pretty useful social graphs of people[0].

[0] https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

indigochill• 2 years ago

I'll take a stab at it, since I'm one of those privacy advocates (and also prone to making sweeping statements like this).

Let's say Alice and Bob are doing life and emailing each other about normal life stuff. Charlie runs their email server.

Charlie also runs an advertising business to fund his email server. He somehow reads (not necessarily manually, but the details don't matter) the emails coming through his server to learn what people are more likely to be interested in buying. Everyone benefits, right? Alice and Bob get free email, the advertisers get well-targeted ads, and Charlie gets paid by the advertisers.

Well, along comes the Police. They know that Charlie is able to access contents of emails going through his server, because it's how he funds his email server. The police would need a warrant to search Alice and Bob's communication for something that might incriminate them in an investigation, but Charlie doesn't need a warrant. The police strike a deal with Charlie of mutual benefit. Information for another revenue stream. But still, the police are upholders of justice and only use this "email tap" for good.

Time goes on and our glorious democracy erodes into an autocratic state (ask Germany - it happens!). Suddenly our justice-loving Police have become the Gestapo, but money talks and it's in Charlie's interest to stay on the Gestapo's good side, so the email tap remains in place and we have Alice and Bob, good people that they are, collaborating on how to resist the autocratic state, which gets funneled straight to the Gestapo. Bad guys win.

Essentially it boils down to this: the means for the public to resist tyranny is a necessary prerequisite for freedom. Conversely, the more power (and information is power, especially personal information) is centralized, the more impactful a potential hostile takeover becomes, and the easier to orchestrate (much easier to infiltrate/control one source of information than thousands).

thfuran• 2 years ago

I certainly agree that the third party doctrine is a threat to freedom.

dghlsakjg2• 2 years ago

You don't see how a hacked email account or server could influence global politics?

Compromised email was arguably the largest determining factor in the 2016 US presidential election.

pyrale3• 2 years ago

The case against gmail is very simple for me:

- I need to own the domain name to make sure mail is sent to my property.

- Gmail for is a paid service for custome domain names.

- Why would I pay for an advertising service?

jsnell2• 2 years ago

Why do you think you'd be paying for an advertising service in this scenario?

- Gmail doesn't show ads to Workspace users.

- Your emails aren't used for ad targeting, whether it's a Workspace account or a normal Gmail one.

pyrale3• 2 years ago

Company promises are temporary, data is forever. And gmail is an ad service, having some paid clients doesn’t change that.

metadaemon• 2 years ago

Been paying for Migadu for a few years now. No complaints, love it.

colesantiago• 2 years ago

Even if it is Migadu or Gmail, unless you run your own email inbox:

It still isn’t yours.

PreInternet01• 2 years ago

Look, it's quite simple: if you want to host your own email, it's entirely feasible.

Not, 'anyone with an RasPi can do it', but definitely 'you can find someone who will host you.'

And yes, the 'powers that be' definitely conspire against this scenario, as they do with federated social media, etc. etc., but that's not a reason to give up!

flerchin2• 2 years ago

Losing my gmail would be crippling. I feel existential dread even considering it.

hollerith• 2 years ago

Do you mean losing access to the archive of past messages stored in your gmail account?

If not, can you explain why it would be crippling to switch to another email service?

flerchin2• 2 years ago

Most online accounts are tied to my email as an id. Suddenly losing my gmail would mean losing those accounts too. I'm fairly certain I could recover eventually, but it would be a disaster.

The message archive is not a consideration.

Switching to another service is definitely indicated, but it would be months of toil to migrate all the aforementioned accounts.

catlikesshrimp• 2 years ago

Start migrating to another provider while you have time. And learn to host your own email server with your own domain on vacations.

"There is no free mail" *meal

AceJohnny2• 2 years ago

The case FOR gmail:

1. it solved spam

2. it solved finding specific emails in the haystack of your years/decades of emails

It's hard to overstate how important 1 is, for anyone who doesn't know how mail was 20 years ago. Google was able to leverage its dominance (in concert with the other huge hosts like Hotmail) to impose significant changes to email infrastructure, by requiring stuff like SPF and DKIM.

Frankly, other email providers are riding on the wave of Google's efforts and impact to sanitize the email space.

rrr_oh_man2• 2 years ago

Also: more than 5MB storage

kennywinker• 2 years ago

migadu's basic plan includes 50gb of storage.

dsr_• 2 years ago

It solved spam -- but is also the largest source of spam on the planet.

iagooar• 2 years ago

How much safer is "owning" your domain?

An anecdote: A few years ago I used to have my own domain. Then one day my credit card expired, the new one did not work and my account got frozen. I fixed it, then I forgot to actually extend the domain and it stopped working. Of course, no incoming email, no access to my old mail, etc.

Fortunately I could buy the domain again after a couple of weeks of time, so it did not end in a catastrophe, but it was truly a very stressful time. I know, it was my fault, but shit like this happens all the time to people.

croes• 2 years ago

But at least you can do something yourself.

If Google bans your account for whatever reason you can do nothing.

sunshowers2• 2 years ago

Domains usually have a 30 day period after expiry where only you can buy it back.

It is important to avoid circular dependencies though. My Fastmail account has one Fastmail-managed email address that my domain registrar's emails are configured to go to.

rakoo5• 2 years ago

It's "own your condo" vs "rent a condo" safe. You aren't safe from standard stuff going out, but you are safe from your landlord evicting you.

beardyw• 2 years ago

I have very much migrated my email away from my own domain to Gmail. I used to run a website but I have now retired (it and myself) but I retain the domain. My question was how long can I keep my domain viable as I get older, my health deteriorates, maybe my mind too. Having a Gmail account actually feels safer. My domain mail is redirected to Gmail and labelled so I can see what I am still getting.

pan69• 2 years ago

The other danger with losing your domain name is that a new owner can simply set up MX records and start receiving your email, e.g. password reset etc.

page_fault• 2 years ago

Does nobody know you can rent domains for ten years in advance? This argument comes up every single time. Just extend it for ten years (or better yet, nine years so you can always migrate) and then set up a calendar event to remind yourself to add another year every year. You'll have a looooong ass grace period to deal with payment issues.

You can use Cloudflare to top up your account to the max (because they sell domains at cost), and then move to a registrar of your choice to save a bit of money.

When you die, your domain will not be reacquired for a decade, giving your accounts on various sites (or even sites themselves) time to expire. 2FA everywhere is a must, obviously.

aareet• 2 years ago

I use my own domain for all email, but as I age, something that has started to concern me is the longevity of email going to my domain. No-one in my family is very tech-savvy so it's entirely possible they don't know to renew my domain and will end up losing all my incoming email as a result. In this sort of scenario, a big provider like Gmail which will clearly outlast me seems more reliable to pass on this account. Has anyone formulated a plan for someone inheriting your email account?

30minAdayHN• 2 years ago

I see the risk to be pretty minimal as most of my emails are sales, selling stuff to me. My assumption is that, it would be the case for many people. I'm curious if there are any stats around that.

I still wanted to have an email on my own personal domain. I use Fastmail and been pretty happy with it.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

Hard to care. It's been good for me.

rrr_oh_man2• 2 years ago

It has solved enterprise SSO for large swaths of the modern SaaS tool landscape.

People don’t remember how much fun it was to integrate ActiveDirectory into anything before ubiquitous G-Suite/Workspace logins. Or deal with dozens of external accounts for hundreds of users at a company. Easily a blocker for any startup trying to sell to bigger clients.

jdoss• 2 years ago

I agree with this post so hard. Email is the foundation for people's life online. In fact I am working on building a better self hosted mail platform in my free time because I believe in having the freedom to move your email to wherever you choose.

Running your own mail server has a bad stigma around it that doesn't have to be true. I understand it is not a task for everyone, but it doesn't have to this don't bother just use Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail etc etc mentality. I have been running my own since 2002 and I would never consider doing anything else for such an important part of my life.

The big mail providers have built a walled garden to hold your email communications hostage and they want you to believe that you can't send email without them. There are many of us that know that is bullshit and it is time to move the needle back. I am excited to read Run Your Own Mail Server by Michael W Lucas when it comes out in Aug.

https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ryoms

criddell2• 2 years ago

When you die, do you have plans for your email server? Being able to give your family long term access to your email account by sharing credentials is a nice benefit of hosted email. They don’t have to worry about keeping a server running or paying anybody for access to it.

helloplanets• 2 years ago

You can download your Google mail (and other) data here: https://takeout.google.com

Exporting your mails for you to keep locally or on another company's server is a good way to avoid a scenario where getting locked out of your account turns into a disaster.

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

The problem with email self hosting is that the internet wasn't built for people, it was built for organizations that employ dedicated staff.

Let's say you wanted to host email with your own domain for the rest of your life. It's likely at some point you'd lose the domain.

cbull• 2 years ago

Why do you say people would "likely lose the domain"?

I've had my own domain and been running my own email for almost 30 years (from back in the day you had to pay Network Solutions more than $100/year just for a domain). My current domain provider lets me renew for multiple years, I get plenty of notifications about it expiring, etc.

I can see a case where if something medical happens to me for a long term at the wrong time I could potentially lose it but I don't see why that would apply to most people, that's a very specific instance.

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

I can see a case where if something medical happens to me

All people get old. The chance of something medical happening in a life is near 100%.

andrewla2• 2 years ago

The idea that Google gets value from gmail user data is simply false. The pushback from when Google first tried to do ads on gmail was enough to kill the idea permanently.

Gmail is a legacy of Old Google, like Maps -- it serves no profit motive, just engineers building something cool for everyone with some sort of flimsy pretext of "it keeps users in our ecosystem" tacked on to it. Google now does have a premium-ish offering, "Google One", in an attempt to get some money out of gmail, but really it's just an artifact.

Companies giving things away for free or steeply discounted from the cost of goods sold is a perennial issue when it comes to centralized capital; Google has a pool of infinite money (search ads) and it uses that to buy its way into a bunch of markets where it is incredibly difficult to compete. Maybe early on you could have stopped Youtube or Maps based on standing antitrust law, but personal email has always been given away for free long before Google got into the business, so a product would have to offer something phenomenal to break into that space.

Doesn't utterly stop it; for example Google has had various versions of chat over the years but they have been roundly whooped by Slack.

card_zero2• 2 years ago

Maps advertises businesses for free? And without tracking the user's possible interest in spending money on particular things? Really?

andrewla2• 2 years ago

True -- I let nostalgia get in the way of reality here. For a long time Google didn't even try to monetize maps, and then they did a bunch of unsuccessful tweak to try to squeeze some money out of it.

Last time I checked Maps was still wildly unprofitable -- too many use cases of maps are searching for a particular destination rather than a general class of things, and balancing ad results and organic results has been something Google has gone back and forth on.

The extent to which Google uses user data from maps searches to track user interest is pretty overblown; there's a lot of struggle involved in trying to extract even slightly useful information.

But things like browsing maps, satellite pictures, and turn by turn directions are straightforward losses for Google, and reflect that earlier spirit.

bitnasty• 2 years ago

There ARE ads in gmail

hnpolicestate2• 2 years ago

What does an Android phone look like without Gmail access? Does a Gmail ban = Google account ban?

hnpolicestate2• 2 years ago

Second question. Are there any other naive millennials who legitimately believed like me that Gmail, Maps etc was just corporate altruism back in the mid-late 00's?

Looking back I feel so stupid lol. But I really thought these technology companies were doing something alien to how corporations behaved in the "dark ages". Gullible.

rakoo5• 2 years ago

I'm still waiting for the revival of Google Wave. But I don't think we were simply naive: as we grew up we understood the social and political aspects of it all that weren't taught massively, unlike Google's niceness. We can't blame ourselves for not knowing stuff that was voluntarily kept away.

gmuslera• 2 years ago

It could had been, back in the day, when the "Not be evil" was Google's motto. That not anymore. Nothing last forever, specially good intentions.

The Case Against Gmail (2020)

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