Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/google-account-registration-now-requires-sending-an-sms-via-phone-instead-of-receiving-an-sms/36082

by negura • 2 months ago

637 492 2 months ago

discuss.privacyguides.net

findbizonline• 2 months ago

When did it start?

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 2 months ago

Recently helped a small business set up a Google Workspace account and we hit a wall during registration.

Told the owners that if Google is already being difficult during signup, imagine being locked out later with client work on the line. Pulled up a few horror stories about Google lockouts to drive the point home. They ended up with another workspace solution.

super256• 2 months ago

With which workspace solution did they end up with?

p0w3n3d• 2 months ago

I assume "next leading brand" ;P

thisislife22• 2 months ago

No idea, but there's Zoho.com ...

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

and we hit a wall during registration.

What does this mean? The scanning a QR code and sending a text message from this article, or something else?

thrownaway561• 2 months ago

Everyone hates on Microsoft, but their platform is 50x better than Google. Personally nowadays I would be looking at Proton if I was going to setup a workspace for my company.

windexh8er6• 2 months ago

This is hilarious. Microsoft has had many issues and outages with M365 in the last few years. I mean, I guess if you don't rely on mail, then sure.

xp847• 2 months ago

I have to say, I’m finding the “New Outlook” deeply unsatisfying coming from a GSuite company the past 4 years. MS was better in 2021 than it is now. The new one reeks of Jony Ive style minimalism. I constantly can’t find anything I need, and it takes a lot of fiddling to do simple things.

I generally have rooted for MS over GOOG on this type of thing, so I am not saying this out of fanboyism.

eowln• 2 months ago

Outlook is better than Gmail? This is a hotter-than-the-Sun take.

Have you actually tried both?

bilalq• 2 months ago

When trying to upgrade from the Business Standard to Business Plus plan, Google will reduce your workspace storage from 2TB/user to 0 bytes for up to 24 hours while it upgrades you.

These are actual quotes from support:

Upon checking, I see that the storage is showing as 0 bytes, because of the upgrade that has been done from business standard to business plus. Not to worry as this is very normal.
I understand your concern and how important it is for the storage to be updated due to the business requirements. > To give you full transparency into what is happening: when a Workspace subscription is upgraded, our backend systems must first detach your previous Business Standard storage allocation before provisioning the new Business Plus limits. During this transition window, the quota temporarily defaults to zero.
Now please turn ON user storage limit nor shared drive storage limit. Once you turn ON, please wait for 5 minutes and then please turn it OFF.

^ That last attempt to try to force storage quotas to reset faster didn't work, btw. Still took hours.

gedy• 2 months ago

Google Workspaces are just like Windows 11 on the network, and constantly running Windows update. You never know what changes, installed/uninstalled, or breaks.

bborud• 2 months ago

This is why I have I have started planning to transition away from Gmail for all domains I manage. Gmail doesn't actually get any better as a product - just more annoying as they try to upsell me on crap I don't want or need. It gets a bit more shitty every year.

The sheer size of Gmail means I have zero chance for support even though I pay for a service. The risk is too great to be acceptable.

FireBeyond2• 2 months ago

Yeah, I can't even register a new Gmail/workspace account at this point. "This phone number has been used too many times."

traderj0e13• 2 months ago

What do they use instead? Grass tends to be greener on the other side. Though it wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft offered better support despite having a worse product.

dotancohen8• 2 months ago

This is useful. What were the horror stories?

Which workspace solution did the client settle on?

benoliver9992• 2 months ago

I've been reasonably happy with it since 2013 now.

This last year however, I've started to hear complaints from staff of annoying popups about AI stuff people don't want to use

dvh3• 2 months ago

Any Gmail person can tell me why Gmail is tolerating Gmail phishing emails that use Google's own services (e.g. https://storage.googleapis.com/savelinge/... ?

More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665414

dewey2• 2 months ago

The same reason spam filtering is hard. It's not possible to catch every misuse of the service without too many false positives.

dvh3• 2 months ago

The same 5 urls has been used for 3 months

cyanydeez• 2 months ago

Ok, it's even harder when you do not care because they people are either freeloaders or locked into your solution because it's a customized mess.

benoau3• 2 months ago

It's probably possible to catch a lot more of them, but why look too hard when you can hide behind section 230 immunity and pocket ginormous profits instead of spending on this lol...

torben-friis2• 2 months ago

Spam is getting horrible lately. I get all sorts of new techniques including:

- using legitimate sites to bypass filters, like sending you a bill through a legitimate bill-creation site

- pretending to be a tracking service for something you supposedly ordered, then over the course of days pretending the package got lost on the way and offering a discount code for the 'purchased' amount, expecting you to use it on their phising site.

Gmail not only fails at spam classification, they classify these messages as important and nag you with first priority notifications and summaries.

traviswingo• 2 months ago

I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable, so the number of spammers/scammers has increased dramatically.

The number of spam calls, texts, emails, iCloud account unlock requests, etc I’ve received in the last year is insane.

thisislife22• 2 months ago

If I put on my tinfoil hat, it seems to be something deliberate, to push us all towards accepting hardware / software attestation and better "online id" stuff - "Don't you want to identify and stop the spammers and phishers?".

Email scanning and file scanning (on our computer) became acceptable when the level of spam and malware became intolerable. But it was at cost of our privacy. Today, Gmail scans all your mails and makes money from it. Both Windows and macOS have built-in anti-virus or malware scanners, and file indexers, and thus know all the applications and files in your system (which provides for more data on your profile with them). Now with both OSes, and even browsers like Chrome and Firefox, including AI, they will now use our own computers to not only collect our personal data, but even process it on our system and use it to build even better profiles to more profitably exploit us.

glitchc• 2 months ago

Spam is now AI powered. Let that sink in for a bit.

cjbgkagh2• 2 months ago

Gmail spam filtering is so bad that I believe it has to be intentional. I think they see email as a long term ad revenue opportunity and want to desensitize people to the spam.

whywhywhywhy• 2 months ago

pretending to be a tracking service for something you supposedly ordered

There’s a leak or someone is selling the data in a lot of the delivery companies in my country. I order something then without fail the fake text message pretending to be the delivery service. Only thing they screw up is claiming it’s failed to deliver too soon and the weird urls.

Messed up these companies are either selling it or being irresponsible with data.

gorbachev• 2 months ago

I'm not seeing any of this, and I've have been using the same email address that forwards to gmail for decades at this point, and it's in every major email data breach.

I get, maybe, one actual spam email per year through gmail's spam filters.

I get more actual spam at my work email, which is not hosted by gmail, even though the email volume of emails sent from outside of my employer's network is orders of magnitude smaller than my personal email volume.

nutjob2• 2 months ago

like sending you a bill through a legitimate bill-creation site

Why aren't these things opt-in? Ditto for every other thing that sends you email. I reflexively mark anything I didn't sign up for as spam on principle.

Aboutplants• 2 months ago

It follows the same logic as physical junk mail. We accept the fact that we will receive junk mailers in our physical mailbox and just toss them out.

000000000001• 2 months ago

Yeah, but junk mail funds the USPS, without it Republicans would've killed the postal service long ago, See the Pension requirement that they pushed in a vain attempt.

mminer237• 2 months ago

There is a big difference between advertising your services and trying to literally steal people's money.

JoshTriplett3• 2 months ago

We shouldn't accept that either. The USPS could stop accepting junk mail, if it were funded properly and didn't have to rely on junk mail for revenue.

Griffinsauce2• 2 months ago

In the Netherlands you put a sticker on your mail box with either of these: - NO ads, NO magazines/papers - NO ads, YES magazines/papers

Some municipalities even make it opt-in so you'd need YES/YES to get mail without a name and address on it. (ie. not direct mail)

There are also laws to enable opting out of direct mail (with name and address).

In effect, junk mail is just gone once you slap a sticker on your mailbox. This is not an unsolvable problem if you just regulate things.

account4213• 2 months ago

Who is we? We definitely don't accept that where I live.

tclancy• 2 months ago

Ah! I have no answer for it, but am happy, Virgil-like, to now have a theory why the same stupid, obvious "Costco" spam from an @gmail.com address keeps showing up in my inbox no matter how many I mark as spam.

deng• 2 months ago

Google is fine with everything if it's their service. I've completely blocked *.bc.googleusercontent.com, because it's basically used as a spam farm for years now, but Google couldn't care less as they apparently can't be bothered to even slightly inconvenience their compute engine users.

Barbing• 2 months ago

They seem unable to prevent phishers from using their acquisition, AppSheet, to send relatively convincing, targeted (to nobodies like me) emails that make it to primary inbox.

So, pleas ignored, forward these recruitment scam emails to the legal/fraud/phishing teams of the impersonated brands. For a company without the appearance of caring (in my opinion), perhaps law firm letterhead can encourage necessary prioritization.

gowld• 2 months ago

That page looks phishing-related but doesn't appear to directly serving abusive content?

Does that XML get processed by a mailreader?

<ListBucketResult xmlns="http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01"> <Name>savelinge</Name> <Prefix/> <Marker/> <IsTruncated>false</IsTruncated> <Contents> <Key>winbridge.html</Key> <Generation>1775478745793193</Generation> <MetaGeneration>2</MetaGeneration> <LastModified>2026-04-06T12:32:25.871Z</LastModified> <ETag>"3616712a8e68db66062a3f514b5fb7c8"</ETag> <Size>626</Size> </Contents> </ListBucketResult>

dvh3• 2 months ago

I shortened url to remove PII. Full url causes few redirects before landing on scam site.

zzo38computer• 2 months ago

I am guessing that service returns the XML file as a directory listing; the file called winbridge.html does exist in that directory (and contains a JavaScript code to redirect to a different URL). (Another comment said they shortened the URL to remove PII (which I am guessing was in the fragment part of the original URL; the JavaScript code makes a new URL from randomly selecting a domain name (even though the list has only one) and appending the fragment part as the path), so I suppose the file name was removed and then this directory listing is the result.)

opengrass• 2 months ago

I got this a few weeks ago, it was a URL like "sms?:number" which tries to pre-fill text in app. Didn't work for me (Fossify) so I had to copy the number and verifier text from that URL and send it manually. It's for saving money spent on providers like Twilio.

reconnecting2• 2 months ago

Gmail has been evil both for client privacy as they use email scanning for marketing purposes, and for 'spam' filters that reject legitimate emails.

The fact that they're introducing QR/SMS/MMS/whatever they want is actually an interesting signal, because it will harm the customer experience, which might result in the growth of responsible paid email services.

riddlemethat2• 2 months ago

The only “real” competition for Google Workspace is Microsoft if you need a full collaboration solution beyond just email, and 99.999% of customers of such hosted solutions need that full solution. It’s why Dropbox worked even though hacker news users probably roll their own sync solution.

reconnecting2• 2 months ago

Tuta, Fastmail, and Posteo are all much better alternatives to Gmail in terms of privacy.

My comment, as per subject, is about Gmail.

tomjen35• 2 months ago

Proton has calendars, drive and meet.

And is not a US business, which is an important selling point to several companies and public institutions here in Europe.

rapnie• 2 months ago

Gmail has been evil

It is good to realize that it has never been "Nice Uncle Google" and always an advertisement moloch offering tools to hook their product. All that trust that was bestowed was never warranted.

TimByte4• 2 months ago

I agree with the broader point, but I'm not sure the migration to paid email is automatic

xp847• 2 months ago

This seems pretty optimistic. If you ask 30 random people on the street if they’d rather give Google their phone number and jump through whatever dumb SMS hoops, or switch to a new email address and pay a few bucks a month for it for the rest of their lives, I’m thinking Google is getting all 30 phone numbers. Sadly.

sumanep2• 2 months ago

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=31971&hilit=s...

spwa42• 2 months ago

The real problem for privacy is that governments are increasingly outsourcing the verification of identity and bot protection to private companies.

carlosjobim3• 2 months ago

Outsourcing? Governments have never been involved in bot protection or online identity verification for anything else than their own websites.

It's like saying that the government has outsourced burger making to McDonalds.

red_admiral• 2 months ago

Estonia is the exception here, not sure about the other Baltics. Switzerland is trying. The UK is trying to try.

spwa42• 2 months ago

I do mean for their own websites.

aboardRat45• 2 months ago

LiveJournal allows verification with Russian State ID "gosuslugi".

aboardRat45• 2 months ago

And what do you expect instead? To get a Russian gosuslugi ID, you also need to bind your phone and ID number.

And of course their database is leaked in real time.

CWwdcdk7h• 2 months ago

Last time YouTube wanted to verify my phone number it was easier to find a free service to receive SMS than for Google to deliver it to my actual phone. And Google didn't care I "verified" a number assigned to other side of the world.

mghackerlady3• 2 months ago

It's becoming increasingly hard to find a service that lets you see verification messages, and even then google doesn't like a lot of the numbers those services use

medvidek• 2 months ago

In my country there are several telco operators that will send you basically an unlimited number of SIM cards for free (as in free beer) that you can use for getting the verification SMS and then immediately throw the SIM away. The only "cost" is that you have to wait a day or two for the SIMs to get to your physical mailbox.

qingcharles4• 2 months ago

What happens when they ask for you to get another code to that same number, though? Can you access that number again?

hedora7• 2 months ago

Can you delete the phone number after verification + switch to TOPT (with the private key written down next to your password, probably in a password manager) for 2FA?

I think that's considered "more secure" in most account security flowcharts.

weberer• 2 months ago

Be careful. Google once locked me out of an account that I've owned for over 10 years one day. My username and password were correct, but they randomly flipped 2FA on (without my consent) and sent the recovery code to a phone number that I switched away from years ago. It was completely unrecoverable. There's absolutely no way to get in touch with customer service. Never make an account with them unless you're not willing to lose it randomly to automated bureaucracy.

catlikesshrimp4• 2 months ago

If you create an account from another country, since you can only send the sms verification from that country, locks your account to that country for at least one year. I created a US account years ago and it still is US. I don't even spoof my location.

dsr_• 2 months ago

... and gives me a message on my primary phone: "This number has been used too many times."

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

Supposedly, using the QR code on the smartphone triggers an SMS sent from your phone to Google in order to verify your phone number.

Does anyone have a better source of information than this one forum comment from someone who thinks scanning a QR code is enough to get your phone to send a text message?

EDIT: It’s just an SMS URI. It doesn’t automatically send anything, just opens a text message for you to send.

This is just the old phone number verification with a QR code convenience method.

yawnr• 2 months ago

It probably opens a prefilled text message and the user still has to hit send. That's the only API I know on iOS anyway.

philajan• 2 months ago

Can confirm this is what scanning the QR code does. I just went through this to get my Google dev account verified.

gruez• 2 months ago

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5724#section-2

noitpmeder• 2 months ago

I think it's probably enough to get your phone to open your texting app with a pre populated number and message body, then all the user needs to do is hit send.

goldenarm• 2 months ago

Regarding how easy simswap is in 2026, it's dangerously stupid from Google to rely on SMS

cute_boi2• 2 months ago

I don't know why verizon etc.. don't charge like $0.25 cents per sms. Then these provider would stop sending too many sms.

qingcharles4• 2 months ago

I wish it was. I've looked everywhere for several years for anyone offering this service so I can get into my 2004 Google account that they enabled SMS 2FA on one day, without any notice, but it has the wrong phone number. I have the username, password and the recovery email address is set to another I own too, but without the SMS code I'm hosed.

mghackerlady3• 2 months ago

What happens when your phone can't do that? I use a flip phone. It can't scan QR codes despite having a camera

tom1337• 2 months ago

then google has decided that you no longer should be able to use GMail (for now) and the internet (in the future)

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

Apparently it’s just an SMS URI.

It’s not something specific to a phone. It’s just a convenient method to enter your phone number.

user_7832• 2 months ago

Technically if you can copy paste the qr code into any qr reader website and manually do it, I think it's possible? Assuming it doesn't change the code very rapidly every few seconds.

dotancohen8• 2 months ago

My S24 Ultra no longer has rear cameras, they no longer work after the phone fell from a table. I can not scan QR codes either.

So many companies - such as electric car charging stations - require this without considering failure modes and alternative workflows.

raincole• 2 months ago

But isn't phone number verification usually works like... Google sends you a SMS, not the other way around?

q0uaur• 2 months ago

you see, in that case google has to pay, but flipping it like this makes the customers.. oh wait the product pay.

TimByte4• 2 months ago

That clarification matters, but I don't think it makes the privacy concern disappear

tardedmeme5• 2 months ago

The old method was for you to receive an SMS. Because it's easy to pay a phone farm 30 cents to receive an SMS now, they're changing it to sending. Phone farms will also adapt.

extraduder_ire3• 2 months ago

Can't you spoof or hide the "from" number in SMSs in a lot of countries?

Like email, I'd expect recieving to be more secure since it uses hardware the user isn't in control of.

There are free sites offering recieve-only SMS numbers, but they're almost universally at their rate limit for most services.

jmyeet2• 2 months ago

Everything is going to get so much worse and AI really is to blame. So many websites now have these verification pauses and CAPTCHs because of AI agents. Part of it is agents. Part of it is everyone running their own awful versions of Googlebot.

Years ago IIRC there was a "bug" where the Android emulator allowed you to create real Google accounts. This was found and I'm sure millions of these accounts were created. There's a whole black market for Google accounts. Whereas I lost a Google account I'd created for a relative because it hadn't been used in awhile and it was tied to a mobile number I no longer had.

I don't see how this ends without registering for a service like Gmail being tied to your government ID.

hedora7• 2 months ago

I don't understand the anti-agent blocks. What exactly is the problem if an AI agent reads your website and summarizes it for me? If it is bandwidth, why not spend the effort making a screen-reader friendly version of the site, and somehow shunt agents to that (saving 99% of the cost of serving the page)?

(I run an ad blocker, so the ads will not be displayed either way, but I see more agent blockers on ad free sites than ad supported ones anyway.)

jmyeet2• 2 months ago

Because people do things like this. They spin up OpenClaw and ask it "find me a computer with an RTX 5070Ti or 5080 that's in stock within 50 miles of me that I can go and pick up today".

So now the agent is crawling bestbuy.com, walmart.com, etc looking for PCs. I don't run one of these sites but I would bet the traffic looks a lot like a Web crawler and is incredibly resource-wasteful. If you were at the screen you might go and start searching for "5080" or you might go into Computers and start filtering. People just don't care if an automated agent is wasting someone else's resources.

Also, where's the ad revenue in an agent crawling your site?

It's just going to be an arms race like adblockers and CAPTCHA but it's going to be so much worse for real people who want to do anything.

DivingForGold• 2 months ago

Won't be registering any new gmail accounts in the future and will gladly dump the ones I have if Google tries to force obtaining my phone no.

xchip• 2 months ago

I also receive too much spam, I'll believe in their AI whenever they are able to fix spam.

aboardRat45• 2 months ago

spammers also use AI

arjie2• 2 months ago

I went through it to register just now. No QR code required. Same flow as it has been for years:

1. Personal/Child/Business

2. First/Last

3. Pick email

4. Date of Birth

5. Backup email / Skip

6. Password

7. Enter phone number

8. Confirm with 2FA code

9. Done.

I just made the email testregistrationflow@gmail.com and have since forgotten the password. So that’s one burned. But feel free to try testregistrationflow1@gmail.com and see if it works without a QR code.

The headline is clearly a misstatement of what is a specific flow for someone to make many Gmail accounts programmatically.

cute_boi2• 2 months ago

I just checked and it asked me to scan QR code and after opening QR code it will attempt to send some random token..

Google is probably doing A/B testing or they are using some sort of ML algorithm....

guidedlight• 2 months ago

They should probably go back to the original invite only flow they used when Gmail launched.

Every account having the ability to invite an only small finite number of new accounts is one way to thwart scammers.

sixhobbits• 2 months ago

Not really, even "legit" marketing providers have massive automation rigs to warm email addresses, make them behave naturally and email each other in rings for a bit before using them for cold outreach.

So they'd just do this to farm invites if they needed

lokar• 2 months ago

It was not finite, or uniform. I refilled the invites every week or so based on user behavior.

saltcured• 2 months ago

Not without some kind of delay function and probably filtering/evaluation of which new accounts get this capability...

Everyone here should be familiar with exponential growth of n-ary trees. If you can get one of these accounts and each new invitee gets to invite 2 more, you can already have accounts gone wild.

tomjen35• 2 months ago

That's certainly an interesting idea - mostly everybody should know someone who has a gmail account, so if you get a couple invites a month, that should be plenty and the setup would

Well I was about to say destroy scammers, but I just realized that they would send out spam to places where you could gamble your invites for Real Cash(TM) or just straight up buy them.

This would lower the creation of accounts, but then they would be rarer and worth more to spammers, since a spamming gmail would be rare.

And we would hear sob stories of people getting their accounts closed for inviting spammers.

Almondsetat• 2 months ago

"A tester in A/B testing situation swears that B tester is not telling the truth"

arjie2• 2 months ago

It certainly disproves a headline saying “Gmail now requires scanning a QR code”.

flumes_whims_• 2 months ago

Probably depends on how "trust worthy" you seem to Google for them to trigger this requirement. Things like using Linux, using Firefox, using a VPN, etc.

greentea23• 2 months ago

The irony is that no real scammer would use this setup because they know it would stand out.

Gigachad2• 2 months ago

Or it's just being A/B tested right now.

Gander5739• 2 months ago

When you create an account through google services on a phone, you don't even need a phone number.

sevenseacat• 2 months ago

Yeah I set one up a few weeks ago for testing, same process.

pier25• 2 months ago

Maybe it depends on the country?

prodigycorp• 2 months ago

I hit both a google QR captcha and traditional captcha today. They're phasing it in.

chrsstrm3• 2 months ago

You can reach a point where the phone number you used for 2FA has been "used too many times" and then you're stuck in the middle of registration. There doesn't seem to be any documented limit anywhere and the only solution people have been able to use is find someone else to help you verify with their phone number. What makes this more difficult is when you get logged out of one of your accounts, they ask for a phone number for 2FA to login, you provide the same phone number you used originally (even though it is not officially associated with your account, just to verify registration), but that fails because your number has apparently been used too often. So now you can't even log in to your valid account that already exists. Sure, should have added some other form of 2FA or a passkey to the account, but why can't I verify with the same number I used originally? And just to top things off, you can't use your Google Voice number for 2FA account verification when signing up for another Google service.

cube002• 2 months ago

find someone else to help you verify with their phone number

Very risky, either of you gets banned (it's a risk given now ban happy Google are) you'll both lose your accounts.

tardedmeme5• 2 months ago

IIRC the limit is 4 accounts and it's documented somewhere.

mikestew2• 2 months ago

Is this the reCAPTCHA crap I just ran into minutes ago? It’s the Cloudflare “verify your humanity” thing, and the checkbox isn’t good enough, so now there is a “mobile verification, the support page for which (that I briefly skimmed) talks about scanning a QR code.

(EDIT: TFA didn’t clear it up for me, but it sounds similar.)

everdrive• 2 months ago

Thanks for the update. I've been meaning to fully move away from gmail. It's clear that now is the time.

Imustaskforhelp• 2 months ago

Yes I had the same issue and wrote an hackernews comment[0] and was gonna write a blog post but laziness (but I am glad that privacyguides wrote an article!)

I also want to share a comment that someone (Velocifyer) added on my comment:

"If you make a blog post, make sure to also comment on how the audio reCAPTCHAs are nearly impossible and are blocked on public VPNs. The visual reCAPTCHAS have vauge instructions (they say “Select all squares with busses.” when they mean “Select all squares that have a bus or part of a bus and do not select any other squares.”. For 2 years I could not figure that out so I had to use the audio captchas but then Google blocked them on public VPNs and also made them almost impossible. I could only figure that out when Google Gemini clarified it for me."

Also another fact that I had discovered but to upload youtube vidoes more than 15 minutes you have to do this verification with sms and I found that its system of sending sms was quite finnicky and (too much limits is actually just one try)

Google and other tech giants's recent changes/lobbying are really impacting the open internet and it feels to me like we as people who have knowledge about these topics must do something to reform things as I simply cannot ask people who are technically unaware about these topics to fight for these changes unless we advocate and educate them about it

Most people just have simply way too much of other issues to fight for these things that they have almost taken for granted, but this to me means that the responsibility is on us people who are technically sound to fight against the attacks on open internet if we wish to preserve it.

I think my point is that we all might be waiting for other people to protest against these tech giants but I think that the world is looking at us people for such protests, Let's hope that we are able to educate more people and the open internet is preserved.

Our small steps might mean a lot in the future and so to not be dis-illusioned to make small steps thinking that they might be too small but we have to fight tech giants if we wish to preserve open internet. Every step is meaningful no matter how small

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48042596

vachina• 2 months ago

Google is trying to retain the value of their userbase, because many third party services use Gmail auth as a signal for low fraud risk.

traderj0e13• 2 months ago

Yep. In general I'm glad I have so many random accounts now that everyone is getting more protective, it's like a credit score.

tamimio• 2 months ago

This is not new, back I think in Feb when I registered a new one, it did ask to send an SMS instead

oldherl• 2 months ago

Wechat (Weixin; 微信) from Tencent has been doing this for years. Now Google is becoming the new Tencent and the US is becoming the new China

warkdarrior2• 2 months ago

Do we get cheap EVs and high-speed rail now?

sylos• 2 months ago

Tech first north korea

denkmoon3• 2 months ago

Nope you get Marvel Avengers :)

Retr0id• 2 months ago

fwiw I was able to set up a fresh google account without SMS via a used android device (with no SIM installed), 2 days ago. But I suppose on balance, having a second device is more onerous than having a second SIM.

saaaaaam• 2 months ago

I tried to create a new gmail address recently because my primary gmail address is my name, and it's quite common, so I get more email for other people than I get for me.

My phone number - which I've had for about 15 years and have only ever used for personal purposes (minimal SMS, mainly just an iMessage/Whatsapp ID) - is apparently "not eligible" to create a new gmail account. Which is quite strange.

throwa356262• 2 months ago

If this is with a new android phone, return it and let the manufacturer know why you couldn't use the phone.

aboardRat45• 2 months ago

If he had this phone for 15 years, I bet it's not bound to a phone, it's bound to a sim card.

TimByte4• 2 months ago

For something as central as a Google account, it feels pretty unreasonable that a long-held personal number can be silently rejected with no appeal path or explanation

AstroBen5• 2 months ago

Register your own domain and use that for your email, and you'll no longer be held hostage by Google. Takes almost no effort and will cost you a few dollars a month.

lenerdenator4• 2 months ago

and will cost you a few dollars a month

Dead on arrival.

AstroBen5• 2 months ago

If you don't feel that's worth it you can use Gmail, yeah.

xp847• 2 months ago

I know this ^ seems unreasonable, but I know you’re right.

Mostly because of conditioning: it’s been 25 years now that free webmail is the way Gen-X, Y, Z, and future generations do email. Boomers and the older Gen-Xers may still be hanging onto an ISP address, if they haven’t moved too much since the 1990s.

After all that, plus with their email addresses being the opposite of portable, there is no limit to how much crap people will take, when the alternative is learning a little bit about domain registration and DNS, and paying $60 a year for Fastmail or whatever. Email, they believe, is supposed to be free as in beer.

Sad but true. Also, confession: I used to use first name @ full name . com and got tired of the confused looks and typos when I had to give it out, so now I use a six-character Gmail with numbers so that it’s just like people expect.

pavel_lishin• 2 months ago

But what do you actually use as the email host? If you just set up your own mail server, you're almost certainly going to have everything you send go straight to spam.

You still need to register with someone like google, or Proton, etc.

AstroBen5• 2 months ago

Yeah, but you're not beholden to them. There are 100 different hosts you can use if you own your own domain. If a host changes in a way you don't like, just move your domain elsewhere. If you're using Gmail, you're stuck with Google. Being independent of any one host is the important part to me.

Personally I have my own mail server and use smtp2go for sending which handles the deliverability issue. I'm not sure it's worth it going this way but I found it fun and its been 0 maintenance

tomjen35• 2 months ago

I have done as OP suggested and the main benefit is that I can move my email elsewhere.

For now my email is with Apple, since they offers email hosting as part of the icloud+ (or whatever its called). If they decide to die/enshittify, then I can move to another host without having to change any contacts.

One the other hand, since I did use my bare gmail for some years, I am still stuck with it, in case I have some service that depends on it.

grayhatter• 2 months ago

you're almost certainly going to have everything you send go straight to spam.

I run my own email server on DO, nothing I send goes to spam. (I normally follow up on nearly all emails in case you're assuming some flavors of sample bias.)

phyzome• 2 months ago

There are tons of hosts! Personally, I love Fastmail.

carlosjobim3• 2 months ago

So? Your email won't be held hostage.

citrusybread• 2 months ago

Runbox is great, and not that expensive.

Borealid• 2 months ago

Believe it or not, email service providers actually exist.

Rollernet.us is a good one. They have excellent deliverability, reasonable prices, and everything you could want related to email.

They have a few minor other services, like DNS management, but they are not a cloud compute provider.

Another option is to use a cloud compute provider like AWS. You don't need to run the VM yourself to use SES for email messages. The hard part is the webmail access: you have to choose between a poor interface (an S3 bucket) or running a managed VM to host something like Roundcube.

ColonelBlimp2• 2 months ago

While I agree with your suggestion (that's what I've doing for years), I'm not sure the "almost not effort" point is helpful or realistic when it comes to a huge majority of users.

Apart from people who are knowledgeable or at least curious enough to search for alternative options, I suspect many people don't even know what a domain is or that they could register one for them to use. The jump from "why pay for email if Gmail/Outlook is free?" to "register a personal domain and use it for your emails" is too big.

I don't have the ideal solution but what I've suggested to friends and relatives is they should consider paying for their personal email accounts. Most of them don't care but some do and, as a result, at least try to understand what they want or need and are willing to pay for.

rexthonyy• 2 months ago

How could they.

TimByte4• 2 months ago

This feels like one of those "security" changes that also happens to conveniently eliminate a lot of privacy-preserving workflows

webdoodle• 2 months ago

Because it is. Total surveillance only works if the people are forced to wear the tracking collar. The next steps are tying it to CBDC, that require a phone number to access your wallet, and tying it to realid/passport to restrict travel.

2FA has become the wedge to break privacy into a million shards.

catlikesshrimp4• 2 months ago

I prefer TOTP, but service providers seem to prefer their own apps or sms.

userbinator• 2 months ago

Total surveillance only works if the people are forced to wear the tracking collar

Better to call it a noose. Because you can also be entirely "unpersoned" online if you don't comply.

jeroenhd3• 2 months ago

There are services online dedicated to temporary account activation phone numbers to bypass Google's requirements, but most of them can only receive messages. Requiring the user to send an SMS seems like an excellent method to get rid of those services so that bots can no longer use them.

I don't really see the point of a privacy-preserving workflow when it comes to a Google account. It's not like they need to know your phone number to track you.

catlikesshrimp4• 2 months ago

They might adapt and support sending sms (hopefully) in addition to receiving them. I guess all other services which send sms verification code will switch to ask the user to send the sms, like google.

>don't really see the point of a privacy-preserving workflow when it comes to a Google account. It's not like they need to know your phone number to track you.

More information is always better.

konstantian• 2 months ago

I can say that this QR code could be requested if IP is suspicious and/or associated with unusual activity. Recently I did register a new google account from my own residential IP and it did not request any additional confirmations, not even SMS verification.

Daedren• 2 months ago

Reminds me of Telegram that forces you to pay premium to login to a new device depending on the country. Login, not registration. This is all due to the cost of SMSes of course.

You can bypass this if you have a passkey, but phone and password isn't enough. No idea why they opted to do that, it's not like passkeys are indicative of any device binding.

sumanep2• 2 months ago

sms are free, at least rcs

jeroenhd3• 2 months ago

RCS is not SMS. RCS does have a fallback to SMS in some rare inter-carrier cases, but it won't fall back if you're stuck on 2G or anything.

SMS also isn't free. Many contracts contain "free" texting, but that's just SMS being packaged into the subscription price.

Carriers charge each other for (excess) SMS exchanges, so SMS simply cannot be entirely free.

FireBeyond2• 2 months ago

They do all this and meanwhile, in between startups and a few personal accounts, when I try to register a new Gmail account and do the text message verification (the old/current TOTP style) I get "This phone number has been used too many times."

Meanwhile the amount of spam from Gmail I'm getting goes up and up and up.

Night_Thastus3• 2 months ago

People complain a lot about Gmail, but honestly I kind of understand Google's plight here.

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.

But it's expensive, complicated and time-consuming to maintain - and both a source of and recipient of endless waves of spam and scams. It's an endless pile of data to hold onto, FOREVER, as well.

I enjoy hating on Google when appropriate. But when it comes to Gmail, I understand what they're dealing with.

It's honestly why I believe the idea of free e-mail is just bad, fundamentally. You can't expect a free e-mail service to be good or have any kind of support. The fact that it still exists is more out of shear fear of the repercussions than any good will on the owner's part.

Just get a paid e-mail service. They're better, and offer a lot more peace of mind.

nzeid2• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.

Not even remotely true. They regularly shut down products and services with impunity. If Gmail cost more than the data they directly or indirectly mine and sell from their users, Gmail wouldn't exist either.

traderj0e13• 2 months ago

The stuff they've shut down has been nowhere near as important as Gmail.

eatsyourtacos• 2 months ago

Yes it is remotely true. Name one thing they have shut off that a large number of people actually used and it was important. We all joke about Google dropping things and yes they have, but saying they can just drop Gmail is.. well, insane.

negura4• 2 months ago

it's insane to frame anything a company like Google does as some kind of goodwill. rather than an amoral profit optimization. contrary to OP, what people often overlook about GMail is not their "plight". but the powerful brand awareness it creates

tyre• 2 months ago

I don’t think it’s for free. There are ads in (free) Gmail, they harvest your data, and then the paid accounts are, well, paid.

Pooge• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

Lol, what? One of the biggest company on Earth is being pictured as a victim for creating services that siphon data out of half the planet's people? Don't take it personally but I can't fathom how you think this is FREE. It's literally the most lucrative business there is and it's only going to get worse—and not for them.

tomjen35• 2 months ago

I am not sure the backslash would be big if Gmail said that a year from now you would have to pay $9.99 per month to use your Gmail ($12.99 ad-free). I mean people would complain, but would that actually give a backslash? Especially if they made it easy for people to move their account elsewhere? People are used to paying a lot more for things outside of tech.

I suspect what is really holding them back is the loss of data, and the loss of the assumption that ~everyone has a Google account that they are logged into, which means they can be traced around the web. Google also benefits from this, since its anti-bot tool will be more accurate and less fustrating to users.

rootusrootus• 2 months ago

I am not sure the backslash would be big if Gmail said that a year from now you would have to pay $9.99 per month

I think approximately 95% of all Gmail users would leave. Regular people are accustomed to paying nothing for things like email. And if I have to pay for email, I am not paying Google for it, especially not twice the cost of Fastmail.

Dylan16807• 2 months ago

Their existing premium plans start at $17 per year. Even pushing people to that level would be a serious upset. $10-13 per month would make everyone hate them.

Especially if they made it easy for people to move their account elsewhere?

Sounds mostly impossible.

People are used to paying a lot more for things outside of tech.

They're not used to paying for an email account.

traderj0e13• 2 months ago

I get the difficulty of fighting spam, just wanted to say that Gmail is probably making them money too. It's still free to make an account, which means they have to be careful who they give it to.

raizer88• 2 months ago

Do you have any idea of how much they can datamine from an email service? Just making a special parser for amazon emails can give google a realtime insight on the ecommerce space.

tredre3• 2 months ago

For a while Amazon stopped giving detail about the purchased items in their emails, to prevent Google from doing exactly that.

A year or two ago they returned to full detail. I've always wondered if it was customer pressure or a backroom deal with Amazon was reached.

I kind of doubt that Google would cave to the former, right?

ekjhgkejhgk• 2 months ago

You think goole is the victim here? Poor google, owning gmail.

You know, if it's such a bad deal they can stop owning it any time they want. They already lied about it - I was told I would never have to delete email, and turns out I had to.

I don't care either way, I moved to tuta last year.

quaintdev• 2 months ago

But it's expensive, complicated and time-consuming to maintain - and both a source of and recipient of endless waves of spam and scams. It's an endless pile of data to hold onto, FOREVER, as well.

They should let others do email. The more email service providers we have the better it is for everyone

ninalanyon2• 2 months ago

No one is stopping anyone offering an email service, surely every IS does that?

pishpash• 2 months ago

You assume there will be no takers to replace Gmail, whereas there probably will be hundreds waiting to do it.

Night_Thastus3• 2 months ago

There are plenty of e-mail providers out there. None of them have even come close to toppling gmail. Gmail is free and good enough for most people. Gmail is to e-mail what kleenex is to tissue. It's almost synonymous.

redserk2• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

I’ll stop you here. Google offered it for free and, at the time, offered such an high amount of mail storage for free it sounded insane. At the time, my ISP gave me a 25MB or 50MB inbox and that was considered pretty decent, when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB.

They absolutely have a right to take ant steps they deem necessary to prevent malicious use of their product, and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free, but Google wasn’t forced to provide a free email service, much less one that went so far above and beyond their competition.

benoliver9992• 2 months ago

I remember in the early days you could watch your storage quota go up in real time.

bachmeier• 2 months ago

and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free

And I'll stop you here. It's less than obvious that there's no obligation. If you provide a critical service that folks rely on at a price less than your cost, you drive out competition, and it's a critical part of your own business model, dropping the service without warning is IMO on the border of what Google should be allowed to do.

axegon_• 2 months ago

Not only that. I was probably not even a teenager or barely a teenager when registering a gmail was not as simple as clicking "sign up". You needed someone to refer you and upon registration you got 25 referrals in return. Needless to say, entirely ditched gmail forever ago and use it as a spam mail. They can have all the fun they want training slop on that.

ccppurcell• 2 months ago

Also they make it really difficult to mass delete stuff. I'm basically stuck paying for their storage because I don't really have the skills to self host (but I'm working on it!)

MichaelRo2• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

This argument would have flown 30 years ago with Yahoo.

Since then we had Uber pumping so much money into a losing business until it drew the competition bankrupt.

And now we have AI pumping so much money into a losing business until they hopefully replicate Uber, only won't work and signs are all over the wall that they just burned a trillion dollars.

Which opens great prospectives for incumbents WHO LEARN FROM THE MISTAKES of the powers be at the time.

About time to start a "Don't be evil. FOR REAL." This time.

If in 30 years it's necessary to start "Don't be evil. REALLY, REALLY, REALLY this time" then so be it.

I'm starting the 2.0 version. Fuck AI. Fuck incumbents. Long live long life and freedom of choice!

gerdesj• 2 months ago

"when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB."

The G in Gmail was for a gigabyte and that was what I got in the noughties for "free", when as you say my ISP offered something like 5MB on the end of a POP connection.

To be fair you can cram a lot of ASCII into 5MB. However you can email piccies to a mailbox with a 1GB limit if your modem doesn't melt first.

Obviously, this was during the "don't be evil" days.

anjel• 2 months ago

Try signing up for a Google Gemini Paid account with a third party email... Better still, try signing up for a Gemini Paid account with a registered android phone that isn't triangulated to a desktop. If they can't own you, they don't want you at all.

bmitc2• 2 months ago

Google's annual revenue is $350 billion. I can't believe someone would feel bad for such a company, because as you pointed out, this entire Gmail thing is part of the reason they have that revenue.

Google has done nothing but be a wolf in sheep's clothing. I'm not going to shed a tear because they have to maintain an email service.

benoau3• 2 months ago

Their ecosystem netted them over $130 billion profit last year, I don't feel sorry for them at all...

0x262d• 2 months ago

right, that comment reads as if they're victims for intentionally putting themselves in the position of holding and reading the maximum amount of information about everyone they can. bizarre

ntoskrnl_exe• 2 months ago

While I get your point, I can't think of a free email service that wouldn't also be a gate to other products. Whether it's Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail etc. you always get an "account" as well, something that connects other services from the provider in an easily accessible place where the user actually gets monetized. The email is there just to make sure the user comes back.

b00ty4breakfast• 2 months ago

This is their entire MO though; they offer a free product to build a customer base then they figure out how to get to know them biblically in an attempt to extract a profit and it doesn't matter how underhanded or unsavory it is.

Maybe at some point in the mists of time, someone just wanted to offer people a good email service but at this point it's a pattern of behavior across every Google consumer product so I can't give them the benefit of the doubt.

soraminazuki2• 2 months ago

Yeah, this often repeated narrative about poor Google being a charity losing tons of money is bonkers. They're a trillion dollar company for heaven's sake and no private entity amasses that much wealth by asking nicely. I can't roll my eyes any harder.

trhway2• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

Not for free. Being monopoly is a huge reward. It isn't possible today to have a small email provider. While probably not having that intention from the start, Gmail played a huge role here as its existence allowed everybody to just ignore/block small providers.

basisword• 2 months ago

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free

They CHOSE to offer it for free so they could monopolise the market. They got roped into absolutely nothing.

intended3• 2 months ago

I have no issue with firms making money, and I am sympathetic to the people who work on these problems.

Not for one second, am I sympathetic to the firm, because it is simply a business acting on its incentives to minimize costs and maximize profits.

Google keeps it running because they make money off of it. Tech firms have profit margins unlike any prior industry; maybe feudal kings come close.

They make money off of it because they (like all tech) avoid investing in human heavy services like customer support / trust and safety. I have had google safety members vent about how they can’t get engineer attention. That when they do get it, engineers don’t want to help the moderators or the moderation software. Their incentives drive them to find a way to obviate the moderation process entirely.

People working to fix things and make it better for users are great. The firm? Heck no.

Xelbair• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free

Just because they don't charge you directly, doesn’t matter it's not profitable for them.

Bender2• 2 months ago

Gmail is not now nor has it ever been free. Everyone pays for it. To your point many people use it and for businesses to contact their customers they have to pay into whitelists for high volume delivery. The costs are passed onto the customers, including those that have never used Gmail. Companies that do not pay into such lists and that have many customers using gmail have to set up careful rate limits which means the emails will not be delivered the same day.

Email marketing and campaign companies pay into these lists and they pass that cost onto their customers as well.

There has never been a email provider that accepts mass email delivery to millions of recipients for free.

sebmellen• 2 months ago

Is this really true? Where are these lists? I’ve never heard of this so I’m quite intrigued.

motbus33• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free

What you mean for free? First, they have all the data they get from you. They now track you even when you are not using your phone. They can/could know if you are doing your number 2 regularly or not only.

They control how the internet moves. Https? Sure can enforce. Trackers, etags ? Why not.

They sell every single bit of information on you for a good price. And now they are even more friends with a very good orange buyer. They have a TOS on you that they can chop and sell you whenever they want and you can't complain.

What you mean for free? Maybe for you it seems free, but people are paying them premium for lots of stuff.

Google used to be admired by the innovation and good ideas that shaped the world to a better world. Now they are still shaping the world, but not for everyone

munk-a• 2 months ago

You're correct that it absolutely isn't free but the gall of Google to, once they have all the data, to turn around and demand additional payment for continuing to store all the data they sought out and that they've resold many times over - it's shameless greed at this point.

And it's isn't even like they're struggling with profitability, either. It'll be hilarious if this forces common folks to switch back to IMAP since once a user has been burned into spending the trivial cost to set up a local mailbox sync they're unlikely to go back into Google's arms (especially given how cheap (in money and time) disk space and cloud backups are these days).

drnick12• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

In exchange, Google gets to surveil half of the world's population, extract personal information from their email, and resell that information to governments and ad companies.

pmontra• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

No way they are doing it for free.

Basically they tied Gmail 1:1 to Android accounts. I have a Gmail mailbox for a few reasons: 1) self-squatting my usual handle, because they are a large email provider 2) it's my Android account and it's where I get documents shared on Drive 3) maybe it's the way I login to Google cloud but I don't remember. I used to have a customer with servers in there but it's long gone.

Anyway, gmail is their way to manage a part of the Android infrastructure and it seems they like running Android.

cube002• 2 months ago

Basically they tied Gmail 1:1 to Android accounts.
Anyway, gmail is their way to manage a part of the Android infrastructure and it seems they like running Android.

I've deleted my Gmail mailbox and Android works fine, any document share notifications go to the email address on the Google account.

If anything it's better without a Gmail mailbox because those notifications used to only go to my Gmail no matter what alternative email addresses I set, now they all go to my actual email address.

Only problem is I can never reopen the mailbox because the "Add Gmail to your Google account" screen has decided I've already used my mobile number before.

toasty228• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

yeah ok, google maps is free, youtube also...

And you know why? Because every single one of their product is either a data harvesting tool or an ad delivery mechanism, sometimes both. Let's not pretend they do it for free, it's their entire business model lmao

hashmap• 2 months ago

the googles of the world are real-life analogs of lovecraftian gods, spending sympathy or defense on them is a category error. they do not know about you nor care about you, and would be just as happy dissolving you in their path as not.

GreenVulpine• 2 months ago

Google syphons all your email data and uses it for their very profitable ad targeting business. The cost of providing email service is miniscule, especially nowadays. Ad profits are at record highs. They've done their math for sure. Saying that they somehow got roped into subsidizing a public service is not even close to reality.

zeptonix• 2 months ago

What a lame first comment. They're making tons of money. Sounds hard. Let's give up all our freedom.

siren2026• 2 months ago

A lot of people here work for Google. Tough to understand something when your salary depends on it.

applfanboysbgon2• 2 months ago

The highest comment in the thread is somebody defending Google, a trillion dollar company that profits hundreds of billions of dollars per year, with a wide-ranging monopoly on tech services, as being a victim providing a free service for the public good. While stating that holding onto data is a liability. As though the data was not the point. As though the data was not the payment.

I need to get off of this fucking website.

Night_Thastus3• 2 months ago

I hate Google when they pull anti-consumer crap. I believe they're too big, too unaccountable, and something needs to be done about them. Their power rivals that of a country and that shouldn't be considered acceptable.

But man, I would hate to be the one dealing with Gmail. It's a nightmare for the reasons I listed above.

Someone can in fact hold both of those opinions.

I was also actively telling people to de-Google and go elsewhere for a mail service.

Does everything need to be black and white?

huijzer• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

And now they have a treasure trove of AI training data, for free.

miohtama• 2 months ago

Google Ad's revenue per user is ~$50/year

giancarlostoro• 2 months ago

They could always just pause all new registrations for non-paying users. They set themselves up for this failure by merging YouTube into everything gmail and Google.

r0fl• 2 months ago

Gmail makes 10s of billions annually based on best estimates

They aren’t doing this for free

swat535• 2 months ago

Why do people keep saying google is free ?

People pay for it dearly with their data for advertisement.

In fact, even when you _do_ pay, you still get ads!

ekianjo• 2 months ago

huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free

for free? I guess tracking you to death and shoving ads down your throat does not count as monetizing anymore then?

walrus01• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.

You have a point, but if you've ever seen how a gmail account behaves for the ordinary person once it reaches 80-90% storage capacity used (15GB free, some cumulative total of all emails and google drive content, google photos content), all of these free services exist to sell a perpetual monthly recurring subscription to users. And many people do pay. The default gmail web interface starts to have a big banner across the top warning about storage reaching maximum capacity with a link to the payment page.

Look at the workflow for a standard out of box android phone now that defaults to backing up all your photos to 'the cloud', which will almost immediately fill the 15GB free. Once your 15GB is full, then you're run through the payment/checkout workflow to enter your card and set up monthly recurring billing for some premium google service.

In general having a gmail account is the initial stage in the pipeline of getting someone to be a monthly-paid google customer for life. Whether it's just for more storage to hold all their google drive and photo content, or google workspace individual, etc.

Additionally, tying a gmail account to the primary-user android on-device account on any android 4.x+ device means revenue from google play store paid app sales. And then all those 'free' apps that the user installs where the app developer has implemented embedded small ad banners for google's ad network? More venue.

protocolture• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.

Google used to literally have a counter inside Gmail showing how your account had a super huge and always increasing amount of storage. The courted their current market position. This isnt "Oh how did we get here with our big bleeding hearts" its just enshittification.

gloosx• 2 months ago

This comment somohow makes it look like google is a non-profit charity organisation.

Isn't it the corporation which makes super-profits and gmail is just part of the equation?

I highly doubt that anyone would ever riot over loss of access to email, nor that it's some critical piece of infrastructure, there are dozens of other communication methods online today.

raz32dust• 2 months ago

Google isn't doing this out of kindness. Sure charging for mail would give some bad press but Google can handle it in many different ways and they have in the past. They provide the service because it's valuable to the business. They know that the void will be filled by another service. And that's bad for Google.

lucb1e2• 2 months ago

You can't legitimately believe Google is a charity and maintains 'huge chunks of the internet' with nothing to show for it. Is it for free if they get non-monetary benefits? Like, my employer doesn't give me "free" money either; they get something out of the arrangement

lofaszvanitt• 2 months ago

Just watch when they squeezed everything out of the users they are going to slap a fee on them and tell them to fuck off otherwise. It's the same pattern repeated over and over with big tech.

ulfw• 2 months ago

They have gotten ROPED INTO? seriously?

The company that wilfully monopolised email somehow got involuntarily roped into running said email?

Do people love revising history like this?

PieTime• 2 months ago

Free? They serve ads on their clients. The best solution that solved this terrible issue was Inbox, which they purchased and then destroyed. Google also makes monthly cloud storage fees for anyone who has large files or photos. Also, it keeps people in Googles ecosystem. It’s a beneficial monopoly for Google.

zx8080• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

Don't bullshit to us here, please.

Google scan billions people's emails (including very sensitive ones like medical record letters) to then show relevant ads AND sell the data to some partners (hundreds of them).

It's not called "public infra for free". It's the serious for-profit business. The surveillance capitalism on the march.

rc_kas• 2 months ago

I use proton, but it is not better than gmail. The user interface is explicitly inferior, and that is the main thing I care about.

platevoltage• 2 months ago

I would totally use it if they didn't charge for IMAP.

d3vmax• 2 months ago

They charge for google workspace and many companies use workspace and expand on the services they use provided by workspace. The trojon was gmail and gmail interface / app on android and iphone.

eviks2• 2 months ago

But it's expensive, complicated and time-consuming to maintain

But it's also a valuable pot of data honey you can boost your wonder AI with, so where is the plight?

For free

And without revenue sharing

have any kind of support.

Check, not having support is what Google is famous for

nashadelic• 2 months ago

I pay upwards of 200/yr for storage, the free Gmail is a funnel to revenue for them and I reckon it’s very profitable

watwut• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.

Google did it intentionally and pushed to make it happen. It killed whole lot of businesses who were selling email hosting in the process.

sdevonoes• 2 months ago

But gmail is not free. Google benefits from our email data, way more than charging a mere 9.99$/month

dosncienxjwnxj2• 2 months ago

Fuck Google. I wish they pissed off users by completely paywalling or, better yet, EOSing Gmail. The more people leaving Google, the better.

wunderlotus• 2 months ago

Plight? Free? They have gotten billions (trillions?) worth of monetizable data. It's hardly a plight.

hulitu• 2 months ago

They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free

My tears started flowing when I saw this. Shouldn't we pay Google for using _our_ data that it shameless steals ? And I also think that 3 letter agencies do not get the data for free.

dotcoma• 2 months ago

Time to leave the sinking ship.

Try Tuta, or Proton, or Fastmail, or Zoho.

superkuh• 2 months ago

There is one way to sign up for a gmail account that does not require this: get an old chromebook out of the trash or for $20, then go through the account setup process on ChromeOS. It will create a google/gmail account that does not require use of a smartphone.

flibble• 2 months ago

This could well be to help prevent sms pumping — where someone makes money by receiving smss to a particular set of numbers. Requiring the user to first send an sms breaks the economics that type of fraud.

shevy-java• 2 months ago

Now people only need to connect this to age sniffing and the global corporate-driven movement to destroy and abolish VPNs. Politicians are no longer working for the people but their own money - aka by definition these are lobbyists.

Note that "scanning a QR code and sending a text message" means, for the most part, a smartphone. One could do so via a tablet too, I suppose, but most who register will do so via their smartphone device. For some reason accessing the www is increasingly tied to "identify now!". This is a huge contrast to the freedom of the 1990s. I don't think we should accept that.

n64controller• 2 months ago

Have you got something to hide ?

hamilyon2• 2 months ago

The latest moves from google are the damning smoking gun evidence that anti monopoly court ever needs. "Do this or else". Recaptcha, gmail, google suite, android, chrome, colab and even google play must be viable businesses on their own, separate from google ads machine. Gmail must start competing for users with other email providers. And, yes, recaptcha must pay its infrastructure cost in full only from recaptcha revenue. This is the good way to level playing field, silence all the critics and let air into the room.

benoau3• 2 months ago

I like how they argued AI was a massive threat to their search empire and subsequently advertising empire ... and then a few weeks after the judge issued their astonishingly light measures to address Google's monopoly abuse, they partnered with Apple and achieved ~100% of default AI agents on smartphones being powered by Google!

ymolodtsov3• 2 months ago

Google is a such a monopoly in email you can just go online a get any other free or paid email service.

kstrauser3• 2 months ago

Oh, excellent! Having been on the end of someone flooding a service with tens of thousands of autogenerated Gmail accounts.

And if you don’t want to share your phone number with Google, which I totally respect, there are a zillion other email providers. Contrary to popular perception, Gmail != email.

negura4• 2 months ago

most major platforms reject email addresses that are not from major providers. for example creating a deepseek account asks to use a "global provider" and gives GMail as an example. github recently rejected @proton.me. discord does this as well etc

kstrauser3• 2 months ago

I’ve never, ever, not once, been blocked from registering because I was using a self-hosted domain. I’ve seen plenty of services that block anonymizers, typically with the explanation that they were getting too much spam from there.

eth0up• 2 months ago

A couple years after a hurricane left me without power for a week two, I fired up a generator, configured my phone as an AP, and went to do some important things in my Gmail account.

We need to prove it's really you, they posited. Simple enough I thought. I'll just use the same password I've used since 2001.

Oh, I must authenticate with a text, you say? Certainly not a configuration I've made myself, but they're holding the cards on this one, so be it.

I enter the confirmation code.

We still need to prove it's really you, again.

Shucks. I try again. And again. And again.

Sorry, but you'll now have to fuck off. Why? Because we've locked your account for complying with our security theater.

Fuck. I'm in a disaster zone. I need to get things done!

Google cares.

But thankfully, so did the FCC, which I registered a complaint with, arguing from the perspective of interference with emergency communications.

The FCC actually sent the rascals a letter. The leviathan complied and unlocked my account, and suddenly my password was secure again.

Thank you FCC. Although I doubt I'd get the same results with current adm...

dirkc• 2 months ago

I recently had to do google takeout on an old google apps account. The account didn't have 2 factor auth and while enabling it I got stuck in a loop scanning the QR and getting a code via text message. I can't remember how I eventually broke out of the loop?

I wonder if there is a single engineer at Google who actually understands the whole registration/verification flow and all the edge cases?

everyone• 2 months ago

There are defo still some workarounds to make new google / gmail accounts without giving a phone number or any info.

nicce• 2 months ago

Most people don’t understand how QR code works. So right now it may just send a SMS or prepare for it. But some day, it will do the remote attestation under the hood and the end user does not see the difference. I would bet a lot for this preparation.

zamalek• 2 months ago

Obviously this is bad in general, but what's the threat profile here? Google already has the content of your emails and I guarantee they have pinned down your fingerprint unless you're using Snowden-level counter-int.

Protest this by using a paid email provider. My $60 yearly payment just went through today, is that honestly too much for the typical person around here?

hd4• 2 months ago

the most nefarious thing about Gmail/Google Accounts is how it's not only the default SSO option, but for many AI services, notably even Chinese-owned ones like Deepseek and Kimi, it's often one of the only ones (the other being Apple ID).

doctor_radium• 2 months ago

Gmail turned me off way back when it became obvious that they scanned your email to present relevant advertising.

I've paid for email nearly forever (Earthlink, not the most high tech provider but good enough) and get nearly zero spam. Their price went up again recently, but apparently if you mention Fastmail they'll match the cost.

I was listening to the local TV news a few weeks ago and the reporter talked about an SMS scam insisting that you owe unpaid turnpike charges. He said "most of us have seen them". I'm thinking, I've never received anything like that!" and then realized it could be because I don't give out my phone number to just anybody who asks. And tend to push back when they do.

ninalanyon2• 2 months ago

I use GMail and Hotmail/Outlook but via Thunderbird or the Android app, I almost never use the Webmail interface.

What happens if Google pulls the plug on your account and you have no offline archive?

thedangler• 2 months ago

How do you scan QR codes on the device that is showing the QR code?

hedora7• 2 months ago

Didn't come up in testing. What sort of user wouldn't have a google-issued corporate laptop and phone?

ymolodtsov3• 2 months ago

If you haven't created a Gmail or an Instagram account in a while you might be surprised how aggressive it is. For instance, try doing this without verifying your phone.

Both can ban you right away because they had to ramp up their anti-spam protections. Pretty much everyone already have an account, so most people creating new ones are just that, spammers.

tintor• 2 months ago

Or they are kids / young people, who didn't need email before, and now need it for school / college.

ymolodtsov3• 2 months ago

Yes but they're almost surely in the minority by now.

v20• 2 months ago

I found it curious how hard it is to create a Facebook account now, especially after struggling so much to get an old account deleted years ago.

These large companies seem to be at the point where they don't want any new users anymore. Or at least they can afford to lock some people out.

We should be way more vocal about this so the idea that "everyone has / can make a (google|microsoft|facebook|whatever) account" dies out.

Fando• 2 months ago

I recommend people switch to Tuta mail - the most privacy focused, email service. Read about it.

fortran77• 2 months ago

Wow! My 93 year old mom will not be able to use Gmail.

drchaim• 2 months ago

It was easy to see coming, and it’ll spread further and to more services. In fact, recently they even forced old accounts to log in or they would delete them.

It’ll happen with social media accounts and other things too. The account creation date is going to become an even bigger heuristic in their spam models.

GaryBluto• 2 months ago

I wonder how long it will be until those without smartphones will be completely forced out of the mainstream internet.

rixed• 2 months ago

The days of my old google account that predates real identity policies are numbered...

People already assume that your "google name" is your official name, so much so that I had to patiently explain a delivery man once that the funny nickname he had for some reason in the delivery notice did not match my ID because that was an old google account from a time when it was usual to use any funny handle for your account.

chatmasta• 2 months ago

Is this for GMail only or just Google accounts? A while ago I was able to signup for a Google account with an iCloud relay email, and it _seemed_ like I had to give my phone number or use Google Authenticator… but I worked around it by using Chrome Devtools to create a virtual WebAuthN device, after which I was able to scan a QR code for 2FA with 1Password.

josefritzishere• 2 months ago

This is a hard no for me. Google is out of control.

sneak• 2 months ago

Google has requried a phone number for registration for a long while now, and blocks many types of phone numbers, including almost all easily-created ones, making creating new Gmail accounts rather difficult without a trip to the store to buy a prepaid SIM.

(In many countries, including soon the USA[1], you can't get a phone number+sim without showing ID, also.)

[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/the-fcc-wants-your-id-before-you-g...

tardedmeme5• 2 months ago

It's important to note that even if you have to provide ID to get a SIM, Google still doesn't see your ID (yet).

aetherspawn• 2 months ago

I get like 33 and a half million spam messages per day to my Shopify store, all bots using Gmail addresses.

Google really need to get it together. Their sender reputation bypasses all the normal spam filters, but if it was up to me…

lucb1e2• 2 months ago

requires scanning a QR code

That's like saying you need to "scan a QR code" to open a train door, not mentioning that the real requirement is linking your phone to your payment data so they can bill you. It's not the ability to turn a data matrix into bytes that Google is verifying here...

hardwaresofton• 2 months ago

It seems we're at a bit of a crossroads. It seems like the world both needs:

- Permissionless email (i.e. for agents, empowered users who can program now)

- Pervasive email allow listing

Wonder if these can both exist at the same time, i.e. having a "public" email that is read first by AI (let's imagine we're in a world where prompt injections weren't so possible) and heavily filtered, along with one that is private and allow-list gated (via some easier-than-gpg-to-use identity marker).

hilariously• 2 months ago

Soundcloud now needs a login for you to do anything. Instagram is not showing even previews anymore, the web's velvet glove is tightening.

rldjbpin• 2 months ago

to be more precise, it is just replacing the step where instead of entering a 2FA code from your (registered) phone no., it is you who has to send google a text.

had this happen several months ago already when trying to log into my google account (at their local hq!). it is a damn shame that they are happy to use special, 5-6 digit numbers, to send this message. it might incur additional charges, and may not even go through if traveling.

from this and asking to "verify" my age when the google account itself is 20 years old for antigravity, it has been horrible using their accounts.

Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

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