Last time I saw this on HN it was something like an art professor who'd been storing pictures of cherubs or something and it had tripped Google's child-porn detector.
Stop using gmail.com for things you care about
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: Stop using gmail.com for things you care about
#12I doubt Google is just closing accounts without a good reason.
It's a good point thought. I use Gmail as my primary email for quite a few things, and my other email is also a free service. What am I to do if I need support for either of these? What email provider should I use?
You could try FastMail. I've been very happy with their service, and have even had good experiences with their customer support.
Re: Stop using gmail.com for things you care about
#13I doubt Google is just closing accounts without a good reason.
At this point, that's a well-known psychological bias.
Gmail is a large-scale impersonal system / organization. In every other walk of life, we see such large organizations making mistakes, for essentially inscrutable reasons.
Why would Gmail / Google be any different? The onus is on you to show that, rather than the OP to prove he's above reproach / faultless.
Re: Stop using gmail.com for things you care about
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whatever provider you choose, use your own domain. Then you can always switch.
Thats the easy part. But if there are no good providers, it doesnt matter that you can switch to the next bad one.
I hear nothing but good things about Fastmail.
I'm pretty sure Gmail is the best free provider, but Fastmail is probably the best paid one.
Re: Stop using gmail.com for things you care about
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whatever provider you choose, use your own domain. Then you can always switch.
Thats the easy part. But if there are no good providers, it doesnt matter that you can switch to the next bad one.
Fastmail seems to be getting a lot of love. I like mailbox.org (from Germany, so maybe not the fastest in US). There are many providers of hosted Exchange or other Groupware, at least some of them have to be good.
Re: Stop using gmail.com for things you care about
#16I use fastmail.com for electronic mail, and I gladly pay for it.
Marvel at the simplicity: you pay for a service, and the provider's incentive is to serve you!
This versus the alternative where you use a "service" provided free of cost, and the "provider" makes money by selling data they have harvested from your interactions. You give away your privacy; you have no reason to expect support; you are not actually the customer.
Re: Stop using gmail.com for things you care about
#17I hate to be obvious, but you get what you pay for :P I dumped gmail for Exchange and now use Office 365. Reasonable price, great support.
Re: Stop using gmail.com for things you care about
#18The absolute lack of customer support for Gmail made me switch to Fastmail a couple of years ago. I use my own domain now, so if I ever become unhappy with Fastmail I'm not locked in. Email is so vital to my personal life and my business that it is worth paying 50 bucks a year.
I have my own domain but some old things were still on gmail.com address.
Re: Stop using gmail.com for things you care about
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whatever provider you choose, use your own domain. Then you can always switch.
Thats the easy part. But if there are no good providers, it doesnt matter that you can switch to the next bad one.
But if there are no good providers
Mail is the lingua franca of the Internet. There are many, many alternatives to just getting an account with one of the handful of well-known huge providers and being locked in to whatever they want to do to you afterwards.
Just about any ISP will provide the necessary servers to send and receive electronic mail.
Plenty of hosting services will let you keep your own mail store in a remote, always-on location.
Either of these also works fine with your own domain with any decent provider, and either costs a modest amount to run for something so important and useful.
If you are limiting your options to a specific type of webmail service then of course you're going to be stuck with whatever downsides that comes with, but that's far from your only option.
Re: Stop using gmail.com for things you care about
#20I hate to be obvious, but you get what you pay for :P I dumped gmail for Exchange and now use Office 365. Reasonable price, great support.
I was paying Google Drive to get extra space for emails too :(