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Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

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Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#101

Post by upofadown »

zivkovicp wrote: post #25

> what is an identity? PGP is a good solution, and in general the crypto space has the right idea in my opinion. I like the idea of using cryptographic key pairs to sign messages and prove identity, but the learning curve makes it impractical for general use. The best place to start is owning a domain you control, at least that way you can manage your own facade.

In general, if you want people to be able to use cryptographic signatures to prove their identity, they are going to have to know what those things are and how they work. Since this is an entirely new thing in the world there is no existing culture to map it to. The problem is not specific to any particular technology.

This would be an excellent topic for new curriculum for the schools. Some ideas need to be generally known to be beneficial.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#102

Post by chrismorgan »

KMnO4 wrote: post #93
chrismorgan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, IMAP rather than POP3. I don’t think there’s a single legitimate reason to use POP3 any more (or has been for at least a decade). The fetch approach has some significant caveats. Firstly, it introduces something like 5–10 minutes of latency before you receive messages compared with forwarding, so it’s not suitable for every purpose. If you’re accessing via the webmail, forcing a refresh may trigger remote fetch…

> and on investigation, it told me that it refused to fetch from a mailbox containing more than 50,000 messages. Ironically, you would not have this problem with POP3.

… because POP3 isn’t able to leave messages on the server, it’s such a coarse instrument.

You can instruct IMAP fetches to delete too, and that’ll avoid this problem. Better would be to move emails into a new mailbox after fetching them, so that you don’t need to see them again but they’re still there, but I don’t know if anything supports that concept.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#103

Post by rubenbe »

moreira wrote: post #51

> lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login I signed up to Quora with my Facebook account, back in the day. Deleted Facebook in 2013 and lost access to my Quora account, with no possible way to recover it. I haven't used a social login since. In my case, it was fairly harmless, but it made me realise how dangerous social login is. Every time there's a signup, I look for "signup with email". It'…

A friend of mine had a similar problem with her Spotify account after she canceled her facebook account. Self-made Spotify playlists usually can have quite a bit of a sentimental value. I can only image what services the OP would have lost access to in case he/she used social login for all signups.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#104

Post by magusd »

p0d wrote: post #44

A lot of us have also been caught out by Google announcing they are forcing free G-Suite Legacy users to upgrade. Here is where I am heading (having given the matter much thought and some testing, trial and error) Free Gmail/Cal account as I enjoy the software My own custom domains with any registrar Paid Fastmail account storing all my emails to all my domains/aliases at Fastmail All Fastmail messages forwarded to G…

Damn, I've been through this too and I have even forgotten about it. 5 users, no cost, gone. I've even used zoho for a while after that, but that's gone too. My current solution is to use custom domain with icloud and forwarding emails around.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#105

Post by jmyeet »

This was an issue 10+ years ago and I'm shocked it still exists. In the early days of Google+, some people lost their accounts for not having "real names". Whether or not you agree with a real names policy (I don't), you should never lose access to your Gmail or Google Photos or Youtube channel because of it.

Even though this didn't happen to me I learned that my Gmail is too important to lose so I can't use that account for anything else and that's dumb and shortsighted of Google.

It says a lot that this hasn't been fixed in 10+ years to safeguard your Gmail account in particular. Uploading an offending image (which could be an ccident) to Google Photos shouldn't terminate your AdWords account.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#106

Post by knorker »

chrismorgan wrote: post #64
dlowe-net wrote: post #37

An important tip if you intend to send everything to gmail. Do NOT send everything to gmail via forward. Every bit of spam you forward is going to count against your domain name. I had someone who did this on a community server and it wrecked our rating for a while. Instead, have gmail pick up your email via pop3. This will avoid the "spam origin/relay" problem of forwarding.

Well, IMAP rather than POP3. I don’t think there’s a single legitimate reason to use POP3 any more (or has been for at least a decade). The fetch approach has some significant caveats. Firstly, it introduces something like 5–10 minutes of latency before you receive messages compared with forwarding, so it’s not suitable for every purpose. If you’re accessing via the webmail, forcing a refresh may trigger remote fetch…

> Well, IMAP rather than POP3.

I set this up a couple of weeks ago. I think Gmail only allows pop3 for email fetching, because I just couldn't get it to even try connecting to my IMAP. pop worked great though.

The settings even lists "POP Server", not "Server", even if you choose port 143 or 993

> I don’t think there’s a single legitimate reason to use POP3 any more

Well, pop was designed as a "download the messages" protocol, IMAP as a "keep messages on the server" protocol, right?

So while it doesn't prevent IMAP, pop is actually a better mapping in intent.

Pop is clear about what "the email" is. IMAP opens questions like "so… all email? Or just INBOX, or what?". And while it's not mandatory to delete the emails from the server with pop, it becomes even more of a complex question with IMAP.

The choice of pop3 very strongly implies answers to all of these questions, with no surprises.

Are there downsides to pop here that I'm not considering?

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#107

Post by profmonocle »

EnKopVand wrote: post #77

Google is simply not a very reliable business partner for tech. I have a decade worth of experience in the Danish public sector, where I’ve had plenty of great experiences with both Amazon and Microsoft. I know that a lot of people would prefer things to be open source, but part of what you pay for in an Enterprise Organisation is availability of support. When AWS first entered the European market, most of what they…

> Google mean while has the same business-to-business support that it does for private customers like the author here. For some services it’s because Google doesn’t care, but they do care about Education and they still can’t figure out how to readjust to be a valuable business partner even when they actually want to sell you something.

My experience with Google's business support is that instead of talking to a brick wall, there's now someone between you and the brick wall. Support is very responsive, and the response is always "I've filed an internal support ticket". When you ask for an update after weeks/months, the response is basically "there has been no update on the support ticket". As a bonus, your support ticket with them will sometimes auto-close because there hasn't been any activity - I had to ask Google Cloud support to re-open an unresolved issue three times once.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#108

Post by foxfluff »

thfuran wrote: post #91
hvdijk wrote: post #71

Are you overreacting? In my opinion, depending on how long the suspension lasts, you may be, though not necessarily. You sent unsolicited bulk e-mail. That is spam. It is possible that your mail helped some people, but anyone who had set up their own filtering to prevent the original mail from coming through would then only see it because of your followup, and additionally the "To" list may well have been spoofed as…

If their obligation is to stop the sending of spam, then why is it right that they also block all other uses of the account and all access to all linked accounts? How could it possibly be the case that that is the minimal restriction they could place to prevent sending emails? Surely they could just...not allow the sending of emails from an account.

Indeed, there are a million things they could do other than suspend the entire account.

It's just lazy admins on a power trip retaliating, doing the easiest & cheapest thing they can think of. Hardly different from blocking an entire /24 because a hacked wordpress install on some VPS started sending spam. Big overreach, but nobody holds them accountable. It reminds me of mafia & gangster movies where the revenge is extended to an entire family/business/building because one bad actor offended one of the mobs.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#109

Post by lbriner »

There is a general problem with poor customer service. In the past, I think most people had the belief that you had to have good service to keep customers and if you didn't, you lost work and possibly eventually the business.

Nowadays, so many services are so sticky that it is not the case that a business has to give good service and also unrealistic to expect people just to go somewhere else if they don't like it.

In a different but related example, I am remortgaging. The new lender has their own conveyancer who should be handling things. The conveyancer is really slow, doesn't respond to emails or phone calls for an update and if they don't sort things by the end of this month, I will need to pay another $500 on my mortgage payment. What can I do? Go elsewhere? Not at this rate, I cannot afford to wait another 2 months to apply for another mortgage and I could even end up with the same conveyancer. The Lender isn't interested because it is waiting for the conveyancer and the only person who will be out of pocket will be me. Others have had entire sales fall through because the same conveyancer took so long.

So what I was thinking was a new law that you are not allowed to advertise or take on any new customers unless your TrustPilot score is above 4. A bit Black Mirror but it might just work ;-)

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#110

Post by knorker »

chrismorgan wrote: post #102
KMnO4 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and on investigation, it told me that it refused to fetch from a mailbox containing more than 50,000 messages. Ironically, you would not have this problem with POP3.

… because POP3 isn’t able to leave messages on the server, it’s such a coarse instrument. You can instruct IMAP fetches to delete too, and that’ll avoid this problem. Better would be to move emails into a new mailbox after fetching them, so that you don’t need to see them again but they’re still there, but I don’t know if anything supports that concept.

> Better would be to move emails into a new mailbox after fetching them, so that you don’t need to see them again but they’re still there, but I don’t know if anything supports that concept.

The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to tee the emails to another mailbox as they come in, not as they get pulled from the inbox.

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