161–170 of 1001 posts
Having core parts of your personal computing or business computing rely on Google or AWS infrastructure is a systematic risk. Unless you are are racking up a $50k bill every month, you are simply too small that anyone there would care.
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> They assumed it was issued accidentally That seems like a dangerous assumption to make.
Three days from initial warning to disabling their account is ridiculous though. What if the person behind that mailbox was off sick or on holiday?
This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replac…
I've been considering getting a new email address on a personal domain so it can be more portable and I can change providers. Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
I'm happy with Namecheap as my registrar and Mailbox.org for mail services, and have been for years (my Gmail account still exists and forwards the rare message it receives to the other one).
Mailbox.org offers ordinary IMAP and SMTP access + DKIM signing for your domain. Hosted in Germany. Prices vary, I pay about €2/month for several GB I think.
Their webmail interface is bad, but then again, I've never seen one that isn't. And I've never used it after logging in for the first time anyway.
> Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it for something as critical as email. It's not that the actual hosting is hard, it's that more and more of the big providers are refusing to handle email messages from certain networks.
This is the reason why I have offsite backups of my Google account as everyone has a chance of getting banned. It really feels like Russian roulette.
What method do you use? I want something automated, I don't have time to trigger google take out every so often and then manual click 100s of links and download them.
I need to find Photos alternative because that's the last Google service that gets any real use.
The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.
Google Cloud actually has pretty good and reachable support including by phone in case you have login issues.
From the comments:
> Because of a keyword monitor picked up by their auto-moderation bot our entire project was shut down immediately
This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replac…
Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product.
I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995.
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Yes, the good old Don't Be Evil days. I've asked so many people if they can remember Google's old slogan. Nobody does.
Their new slogan is hilarious. It's not even one slogan, it's three: * Respect the user * Respect the opportunity * Respect each other The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features. The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a slogan. Isn't it the baseline expec…
Including that doesn't help your argument much. And apart from "do not be an informer" and "don't rock the boat" the mafia code is pretty much unarguably good advice. Employees should be following it.
We'd all be better off if everyone was rational, honourable, independent and classy.
Hey Google here is a feature: account reputation, anyone doing business with you, has that flag enabled and human reviewers will be supporting them
> anyone doing business with you If they did this, how would you prevent people from saying that is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or something like that? Disclaimer: Work at Google (far from this space); opinions are my own.
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The implication here is that the fix for this problem is to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone who does business with Google, as if other people aren't important enough to concern yourself about. That is 1000% the wrong approach, and exactly the sort of thinking that gets tech businesses in to this sort of mess. The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can…
Two wrongs sometimes make a right. So 10 wrongs make 5 rights? There is no more than 100% wrong. Saying it is 1000% wrong implies that you are arguing emotionally, not rationally. Rationally, it doesn't matter how google reacts to their non-customers. There is no obligation to treat them well. The correct approach for non-customers is to either become a customer or to switch to another provider. If somebody is wrong…
It means I was employing the common rhetorical device of exaggeration.