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 well and not reflect who the original mail was actually sent to. Google have a responsibility to prevent spam from being sent through their systems, and if this suspension is the minimal they can do to stop your spam, it was the right thing for Google to do, and you would see the same with a lot of other e-mail providers as well. However, if this suspension lasts beyond the point where you are clearly aware of it and can make sure you do not repeat that, then no, as far as I am concerned you will no longer be overreacting and should look to avoid Google in the future.
Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
71–80 of 309 posts
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
There really needs to be a zero cost custom-domain email hosting solution. I'd love to have webmail on my own domain, hosted by someone else, and with ads on the side. Those ads should generate ~$20 per user per year (after all, they can be targeted based on emails I'm sending and receiving, and I'll be looking at them many minutes every day - the perfect combination for high revenue ads). With $20/user/year, there s…
Why can't you just go around selling your data to the highest bidders and use the money to pay for the myriad of already-existing hosting providers? I'll tell you why: because you are not worth that much to advertisers. If you are so cheap to the point of asking to get your data harvested, chances are you never going to be a high-value customer.
Sure, let’s do that. Where can I sell my data?
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#73An 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.
I've had that happen. I have my own domain, but some of my family just have it set to forward to gmail and they've had mail service disabled intermittently because of spam coming from the domain account.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can't you just go around selling your data to the highest bidders and use the money to pay for the myriad of already-existing hosting providers? I'll tell you why: because you are not worth that much to advertisers. If you are so cheap to the point of asking to get your data harvested, chances are you never going to be a high-value customer.
Sure, let’s do that. Where can I sell my data?
No one wants to buy the data from cheapskates.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#75Phone number porting is a thing due to regulation. I'm looking forward to having email address porting legislation, one day. For full porting, there's a long road ahead, starting with regulating domain names, which email addresses depend on. However, as long as the domain name _de facto_ remains in the possession of the original provider, this is technically possible, already. Email address porting might even be poss…
I would imagine it takes the form of a government "porting server", where anyone can query an email address and receive back a different target email address.
All people sending email will be required by law to first consult the porting server to determine where to send email. It could be as simple as an http endpoint. Total development costs and running costs could be pretty low - low enough that the government can argue it is more than paid for from increased tax revenue from mail providers.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> even something as crucial as a banking service Interestingly the problem of people excluded from the banking system has been addressed by statutory regulation in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/basic-bank-account... ; see also discussion at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201617/ldselect/ldfi... which covers the question of people with inadequate ID. Getting your email account wrongly bann…
Good to hear that you have protections around this in the UK. I know that in Sweden several political, and even ideological organisations have had their accounts frozen because of things they said or held true. Entirely legal things I should add.
Could you provide links? We have similar rules so I'm a bit surprised...
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#77Google 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 sold in the support side was rather automated. Which just couldn’t compete with what Microsoft sells, where Seattle will call you with updates every hour on the hour if you’re a big enough customer. This is a big part of why Azure managed to capture the market share it did under the nose of AWS, the other part being that once you buy Office365 well… Anyway, I’ve never seen a huge tech company change their ways as quick as Amazon did, and today they’re actually ahead of Microsoft in terms of compliance with EU legislation and Enterprise support.
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.
So my best advice to anyone using Google services would be to find a better vendor as quick as possible. It’s completely ridiculous that you can lose your business account over someone replying to a spam mail.
Just imagine if Microsoft kicked the Danish government out of Office365 every time one of our employees did something silly in their emails. I know there is a difference between us as individuals and the Danish governed, but the point in trying to make is that there isn’t, not to Google at least. So maybe they are just a terrible vendor?
This is all anecdotal by the way. I haven’t seen anyone complain about getting locked out of their azure essential subscription, so in my eyes that is simply a safer way to pay for g-suite type services than g-suite. That being said, I do personally host my domain and DNS stuff on their own separate accounts at their own separate vendors, both privately and professionally, exactly because you want that stuff to remain unaffected by everything else.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
And as always it will backfire on users! Now it is impossible to find unlimited rentals, every contract has yearly extensions! In some countries landlords even rotate tenants every two years, else they would get extra rights from long stay.
Seems to work well in Germany, though.
Because limited rentals are mostly banned, and being caught on a violation is quite bad.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#79When you put it this way, it's really quite remarkable how tenuous our hold is on even paid for digital services. There is really nothing you could do with a car to prompt the car maker to take it from you. And the state will only take it if you break the law in particularly dangerous ways. When it comes to other possessions it's even harder for anyone to take them away from you. If I take a kitchen knife and stab so…
There's no way for them to take your car away... Yet. Maybe one day your Tesla will simply drive off if you don't pay the bills, or worse work for the SEC
Tesla's (and increasingly all cars) are software with attached motors and they don't need to seize them physically to take them. Or disable supercharging, etc.
Just like your fridge may not dispense water if you buy the wrong filter. Or your random IOT enabled device will refuse to work if you don't let it phone home with surveillance data.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#80> Should we own the free stuff we pay for? We should own our own stuff. Your email is your own data. No company should have the right to arbitrarily destroy or block your access to your data. Whether that service is free or paid for is irrelevant; offering a service for free isn't a license to rob and destroy. I've argued this point multiple times (e.g [0]). Business who host your data should treat your data as your…
I’ve never heard of someone being their own registrar. Was this hard to set up?