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Don’t Mess with The Google

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Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#171

Post by majewsky »

> At a bare minimum Google should have allowed emails to be sent to their accounts and not bounce back to the sender as undeliverable during the appeal process.

I don't know. When an email is delivered to the destination mail server, that counts similarly to having a letter delivered to your physical mailbox. The time of delivery is important for any deadlines mentioned in the letter/email. If I'm locked out of my Gmail for 4 weeks, and then find a 3-week-old mail that had a 2-week objection period, I'm out of luck. (Unless I've got a good attorney and the willingness to defend my case in court.)

Also, when a mail is bounced as undeliverable, the sender will notice that I won't be able to react to the mail, which might prompt them to contact me on another mode of communication if the matter is urgent.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#172

Post by calcifer »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #120

Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google and don't have any real context into why this occurred. Speaking as myself, a private citizen. I work in Spam & Abuse and it's possible that this is the result of some clustering algorithm that was trying to take down sharders / phone buying rings. It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility (that legitimate customers would be used to shard purcha…

What does "FP" stand for?

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#173

Post by bluecmd »

throwaway98237 wrote: post #142
kajecounterhack wrote: post #120

Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google and don't have any real context into why this occurred. Speaking as myself, a private citizen. I work in Spam & Abuse and it's possible that this is the result of some clustering algorithm that was trying to take down sharders / phone buying rings. It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility (that legitimate customers would be used to shard purcha…

If you watch an old tech talk re: Google disaster recovery topic, the Googler explains that a user's info is never fully deleted because it's too expensive to do so given back-up duplication is processed multiple times in multiple locations and sometimes over multiple technologies. In other words, cancel your google account today and your data may be "deleted" but it's really, as in actually really , still on magneti…

Things change

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#174

Post by tempestn »

matt4077 wrote: post #161
tempestn wrote: post #109

I'm mildly uncomfortable with my primary address being outside my control. (Like most, I use gmail too.) A year or two back I registered stretch.email, as Stretch is, in fact, my last name. Obviously most of the more common 'stretch' domains are taken, but this one was available and seemed appropriate. I have since discovered that enough services don't support newer tlds as to make it basically unusable for authentic…

Strange – I've been using a .coffee domain and haven't run into a problem yet (although I've only used it maybe 30 times, not adding too many new accounts these days)

Many things support it, but many don't. I'd say something like 1/4 of the time I have problems. And often stupid problems, like sign-up works, but unsubscribe doesn't. That's frustrating.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#175

Post by majewsky »

ivm wrote: post #116
djsumdog wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And with e-mail, that's often a means of authentication. Many services won't change your e-mail without sending an e-mail to your prior service. You can essentially get locked out of your Steam account.

I recently got locked out of my old bank account because I didn't use the SIM from my country of origin for 5 months. My mobile operator disabled my ~15yo phone number and I can't recover it without flying there and visiting their office with my ID. That's why I also feel uneasy towards all these number-based messengers. They're targeted at users who rarely leave their countries.

Or at least get a mail address or similar from everyone whom you're talking to on a number-based messenger, so that you can recover from a lost messenger account.

(Doesn't help, though, if you lose the phone number and your mail account at the same time.)

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#176

Post by kkarakk »

ryandrake wrote: post #152
cmoscoso wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry, I was being sarcastic.

I picked up the sarcasm immediately but it's scary how many times I've been told (HERE, on HN of all places) that it's impossible to live a normal life without Facebook. As in: literally, with a straight face someone would claim they would have no contact with friends if not for Facebook and be totally serious about it. Kind of unbelievable but I've heard it multiple times.

i mean facebook gives you the means to provide alternate contact points(phone numbers) to your friends. people don't choose to use it coz of whatever reason deserve to be cut off-why wouldn't you want your friends phone numbers in your phone?

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#177

Post by x0x0 »

a3n wrote: post #64
vilhelm_s wrote: post #8

This really seems like it needs to be regulated in law. For telephone companies, there are rules about when they may disconnect you, e.g. the Arizona Utilities Division write > f I am unable to pay my entire bill, what can I do to maintain local dial tone? > The Arizona Administrative Code specifically states that a telephone company may not disconnect a customer for failure to pay an unregulated portion of their bil…

Fastmail. I'm just a regular (paying) customer, not a business or anything. I've opened a small number of tickets, one or two of the RTFM variety. I've always got a human response and satisfaction, even a "here, let me RTFM that for you." I can't imagine being locked out of my fastmail account for anything other than abuse of my fastmail account . Or not paying my bill.

Yeah, fastmail has some issues (see below), but they offer human tech support that ime knew what they were doing, even at the $40/year price point. And they seem to have slightly raised prices while I've been a customer, but automatically grandfathered me into the previous deal. Which is kind of them / a stand up thing to do.

Issues: they've fixed many of them -- in particular, charging for 2fa at $0.1/sms and the settings area in the web client used to feel like a bad programmer's first js project ever -- but mostly it comes down to, across almost all experiences, they're slightly to mildly inferior to gmail. Google's apps are just best of breed. Fastmail is the best non-google I've found, and I looked pretty hard a couple years ago.

Things I miss from gmail are things like: fastmail is a hybrid conversation based email with folders rather than tags. I miss tags; some folder weirdness occasionally peeks through. Fit and finish like after a message is selected, choosing add rule from message doesn't offer to filter other messages in your inbox that match the new rule. Etc.

Paying $40-ish/year to have email that isn't used for ads and that is run by a company with actual support seems like a good deal to me. Particularly if you don't have a friend inside google or the ability to hit the front page of HN to get customer service.

You can see the improvements in fastmail even over the 3 years. So that's really promising.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#178

Post by x0x0 »

rdtsc wrote: post #100
a3n wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail. I'm just a regular (paying) customer, not a business or anything. I've opened a small number of tickets, one or two of the RTFM variety. I've always got a human response and satisfaction, even a "here, let me RTFM that for you." I can't imagine being locked out of my fastmail account for anything other than abuse of my fastmail account . Or not paying my bill.

I might have to switch at some point. It is stories like these that are freaking me out. Were there any instances of them being DoS-ed or you not getting emails from others? I would also be afraid one day if Google sees people fleeing to them, they'd come in and buy them. I'd almost whish there was a public trust or non-profit who would run an email server. Post office is a government service (for better or for worse…

ime: their spam detection is definitely inferior to gmail; I've had 2-5 false negatives per month (spam not detected) and a handful of false positives over 3+ years. Plus a payment notice from my student loan that fastmail absolutely positively refuses to believe is not spam not matter how many times I so mark it.

I've had zero deliverability issues.

edit: to be clear, the spam detection works well, and if you're going to make an error, it's far less annoying to bias (as they do) towards a few spam showing up in your inbox rather than actual messages getting lost in spam. Also, they show the spam score, and you can hand adjust your spam threshold if you want.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#179

Post by majewsky »

throwaway98237 wrote: post #142
kajecounterhack wrote: post #120

Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google and don't have any real context into why this occurred. Speaking as myself, a private citizen. I work in Spam & Abuse and it's possible that this is the result of some clustering algorithm that was trying to take down sharders / phone buying rings. It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility (that legitimate customers would be used to shard purcha…

If you watch an old tech talk re: Google disaster recovery topic, the Googler explains that a user's info is never fully deleted because it's too expensive to do so given back-up duplication is processed multiple times in multiple locations and sometimes over multiple technologies. In other words, cancel your google account today and your data may be "deleted" but it's really, as in actually really , still on magneti…

How is that compatible with legal requirements for deletion? I think that, at least in Germany, you can demand that a company delete all data associated with you, and the company has to comply with it.

(Whether German data protection law applies in Google's datacenters is a wholy different story though.)

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#180

Post by x0x0 »

brongondwana wrote: post #128
exolymph wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just chiming in to say I also use FastMail and love it. The only thing I wish they did differently is offer SMS 2FA. (Yeah, I know about the downsides. I am a normal person who doesn't need extreme security.)

Any modern phone should be able to run a TOTP client. For my own FastMail account I have a TOTP client on my phone plus two Yubikeys, one I carry with me and one that I keep at home. We require all our staff use 2FA because emails from us get the magic green tick :) So yeah, if I have my phone, I have a 2FA option already without SMS. I normally use the Yubikey because it's super easy.

How do you use a yubikey on your phone? Or did you mean in lieu of totp on your phone?
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