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Gmail was down

google.com

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Re: Gmail was down

#471

Post by foldr »

scholia wrote: post #469
foldr wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like an unusual experience. I just checked through a few days of my spam folder and didn't find a single legitimate email.

That sounds like an unusual experience ;-) To be fair, I get a lot of press releases, newsletters and bulk mailings. But there's really no excuse for Gmail to keep putting emails from, say, EE Press Office in spam when I take them out every time. (My account was an early beta.)

I don't think so, there are multiple posters here who mention how good the spam filtering is. I don't know anyone else who has any issues with it. 30% seems an implausibly high figure.

Re: Gmail was down

#472

Post by josephlord »

scholia wrote: post #441
josephlord wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a trade off between availability (spread it around) and privacy/confidentiality (the more places it is spread the more you are exposed to risks of hacking or insiders at any of the companies). There is no right answer but it depends on the person and the content.

I think you greatly reduce your risk by spreading it around. There cases where people have had a single Google or Apple account compromised and lost everything. That wouldn't have happened if their stuff had been distributed... though you'd still be in trouble with an email account hack, because of password resets and passwords sent in plain text emails.

> I think you greatly reduce your risk by spreading it around.

That only applies if loss of data/access to data is a greater problem for you than exposure of the data. Spreading it into multiple locations/services gives more choices for an attacker to breach to expose it and they only need to get into one of them.

Re: Gmail was down

#473

Post by scholia »

foldr wrote: post #471
scholia wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like an unusual experience ;-) To be fair, I get a lot of press releases, newsletters and bulk mailings. But there's really no excuse for Gmail to keep putting emails from, say, EE Press Office in spam when I take them out every time. (My account was an early beta.)

I don't think so, there are multiple posters here who mention how good the spam filtering is. I don't know anyone else who has any issues with it. 30% seems an implausibly high figure.

I have screen grabs that prove it, though they probably contain other sensitive information. Not sure of a good way round that....

Re: Gmail was down

#474

Post by nfoz »

schrodinger wrote: post #430
andrewem wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now they're caching each image once for all users, which pretty much defeats that.

Not really, now you just have to have a unique image URL for each email you send. How could they possibly tell they are the same image before downloading them?

Exactly; their behaviour is still extremely friendly to the spammers/trackers.

Re: Gmail was down

#475

Post by JohnBooty »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #244
JohnBooty wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is there no alternative webmail of the caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? Are you serious?

I'm old enough to remember that gmail was largely the creation of one person; a person who was neither a programming god nor business guru. It's tempting to think that we could sit down and make an open source gmail clone.

Mentioning the original Gmail seems a bit of a red herring.

Surely the community would expect something closer to 2014's Gmail (which is the product of tens of millions of dollars of engineer-hours, even if you skip all of the advertising-enabling gunk that an open-source clone would surely skip) before a theoretical Gmail clone got any kind of traction.

A clone that approaches "modern" Gmail is absolutely possible, of course. My original "Are you serious?" was just a bit of incredulity aimed at the person who asked "Hey, why isn't anybody on this yet? Is it hard?"

Possible? Yes. Hard? Yes.

Re: Gmail was down

#476

Post by scholia »

josephlord wrote: post #472
scholia wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you greatly reduce your risk by spreading it around. There cases where people have had a single Google or Apple account compromised and lost everything. That wouldn't have happened if their stuff had been distributed... though you'd still be in trouble with an email account hack, because of password resets and passwords sent in plain text emails.

> I think you greatly reduce your risk by spreading it around. That only applies if loss of data/access to data is a greater problem for you than exposure of the data. Spreading it into multiple locations/services gives more choices for an attacker to breach to expose it and they only need to get into one of them.

No. It's not the same data, it's about using different sites for different services.

If you have six and one gets hacked, the other five are still secure. If you use the same site for everything, that probably increases the risk of being hacked (because a single site gives your activity more exposure), and when you are hacked, you lose all your data, not just 1/6th.

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