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What happened, Gmail?

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Re: What happened, Gmail?

#101

Post by toomuchtodo »

StavrosK wrote: post #93
Waterluvian wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I want to take my 20GB of email out of Gmail and put it elsewhere for the next 15 years without having to think about it, where do I go?

I second Fastmail. Great company, great service, super fast (much faster than Gmail), and the import process is trivial. I've been a happy user for years and recommend them to everyone. Seriously, migration is as easy as pointing your MX records to them and running their import tool. It takes ten minutes (I thought switching off Gmail would take ages, but no, literal ten minutes).

This is phenomenal to hear (import process ease). Can’t wait for them to support multiple labels.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#103

Post by Waterluvian »

peatmoss wrote: post #96
Waterluvian wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I want to take my 20GB of email out of Gmail and put it elsewhere for the next 15 years without having to think about it, where do I go?

You might also consider registering a vanity domain to go with your Fastmail (or other) subscription. It’ll allow you to keep your email address even if Fastmail gets evil / bad in the future. When I bought my domain, it was before Gmail was as ubiquitous as it is today. My email was hosted by a mom and pop ISP. Then I moved to Gmail and later to Fastmail. Having my own domain is inexpensive, fun, and lets me maintai…

Good advice. I assume I can forward my Gmail because that address has been my address for as long as gmail has existed. This is just like cell numbers. You attach one to everything in your life and transitioning is near impossible. Glad the government forced free number transfer. If only emails worked the same way.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#104

Post by potatoyogurt »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #49
pmlnr wrote: post #32

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email. The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promoti…

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security. It also fundamentally breaks with what the user expects. The user expects their email to be theirs, to do with what they will. I know of no situation in which I would like an email which I specifically cannot print; I have no idea how I would explain it to my Grandfather.

It's not really about ordinary users like you. Google is shifting their strategy for Google Drive more towards enterprise, and this is a useful feature for enterprise users. Have you ever seen one of those email signatures stating "this email is property of XXX corporation, etc. etc." or seen an email sent to a large group of people in a company with strong exhortations not to send it anywhere else? This is a strict improvement over that. Yes, people can actively work around the printing restriction, so it's not 100% secure. But people were already using email for sensitive information, and this decreases the ways the information can get leaked from negligence or active subversion to just subversion.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#105

Post by 0x00000000 »

pmlnr wrote: post #32

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email. The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promoti…

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security

Funny when you look at Chrome where they don't protect saved passwords to avoid giving users a "false sense of security and encouraging dangerous behavior"[1], which seems to be a valid argument here too

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6166886

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#106

Post by zwkrt »

Waterluvian wrote: post #103
peatmoss wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might also consider registering a vanity domain to go with your Fastmail (or other) subscription. It’ll allow you to keep your email address even if Fastmail gets evil / bad in the future. When I bought my domain, it was before Gmail was as ubiquitous as it is today. My email was hosted by a mom and pop ISP. Then I moved to Gmail and later to Fastmail. Having my own domain is inexpensive, fun, and lets me maintai…

Good advice. I assume I can forward my Gmail because that address has been my address for as long as gmail has existed. This is just like cell numbers. You attach one to everything in your life and transitioning is near impossible. Glad the government forced free number transfer. If only emails worked the same way.

I recently moved email out of Google and it was surprisingly easy to migrate most services to the new address. The tricky ones are the email-as-username services.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#107

Post by StavrosK »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #101
StavrosK wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second Fastmail. Great company, great service, super fast (much faster than Gmail), and the import process is trivial. I've been a happy user for years and recommend them to everyone. Seriously, migration is as easy as pointing your MX records to them and running their import tool. It takes ten minutes (I thought switching off Gmail would take ages, but no, literal ten minutes).

This is phenomenal to hear (import process ease). Can’t wait for them to support multiple labels.

Yeah, it was really easy. You basically give them IMAP credentials and that's it. They even do some clever stuff about putting your mail in the folders it should be when importing from Gmail, although now I forget exactly what.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#108

Post by rayiner »

While we are griping, the mobile website is complete crap on iOS, constantly mistaking the initial touch to start a swipe motion. So you accidentally open emails while trying to scroll through them. I’ve never seen any other website do this, so I’m assuming someone got too clever.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#109

Post by bitL »

nukeop wrote: post #7

Material Design is one of the worst things that ever happened to the design of websites, not only Google's but everyone's, since now so many are trying to copy it. I have no idea why anyone would want to see it anywhere.

Yeah, it hurts my eyes every time I see it; can't even force myself to use Android anymore. It's like taking various design styles, putting them into a blender, adding bleacher, and serving it with white gloves in dust-free environment. Totally sterile, without a soul. I guess that's the way a large algorithmic company operates, leaking to everything they do, including domains they have no clue about, like aesthetics.
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