What are the best alternatives to Gmail?
Dumped by Google
21–30 of 201 posts
Re: Dumped by Google
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about sensitive data. It's about email, calendar, drive and other google services you use and rely on for your daily work.
You should not rely on services you're not paying for and don't own for your daily work. :-/ My point isn't about the nature of the data that was stored, my point was the economic reliability of the tool being used to store it. In other words, you want the provider to have some significant incentive not to screw you if your livelihood depends on it.
It's a calculated risk. Chances of this happening to any given person so far has proven to be almost infinitesimal, so people (rationally) don't care and treat GMail like they treat electricity.
But yes, if this indeed happens to you and you were depending on Google services for your work and life, you're completely screwed.
Sometimes I feel afraid of this happening to me, but I don't know where to move some of my data to, as every other mail/calendar service I know sucks hard in comparison to GMail and Google Calendar.
Re: Dumped by Google
#23Reading this was like reading a nightmare. I have all my life on my Gmail account. All my plans on my Calendar. Important documents on Driver etc... I'm way too dependent of Google. Same thing if iTunes Match or Dropbox dump me tomorrow.
Re: Dumped by Google
#24People have been warned about relying on web services already: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
Alright but then how do you safely store your important data? Imagine if the same thing happened with Dropbox (if you're using it).
Re: Dumped by Google
#25What are the best alternatives to Gmail?
Paying for managed Webspace that includes email functionality.
Re: Dumped by Google
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should not rely on services you're not paying for and don't own for your daily work. :-/ My point isn't about the nature of the data that was stored, my point was the economic reliability of the tool being used to store it. In other words, you want the provider to have some significant incentive not to screw you if your livelihood depends on it.
It's a calculated risk. Chances of this happening to any given person so far has proven to be almost infinitesimal, so people (rationally) don't care and treat GMail like they treat electricity. But yes, if this indeed happens to you and you were depending on Google services for your work and life, you're completely screwed. Sometimes I feel afraid of this happening to me, but I don't know where to move some of my da…
Enterprise apps accounts are pretty cheap compared to your average business expense. Not speaking as a googler, just a concerned fellow hacker. That might not perfectly insulate you from risk, but I guess (again, without any internal knowledge, I don't work on this stuff) that it cuts it by another factor of ten or more.
Re: Dumped by Google
#27I think what's even more horrifying that isn't mentioned in the article is how many services use email as a form of user authentication. If you lose access to your gmail account, you also lose access to changing your password on any service that makes you do so through an email link - I know of some services that don't even let you change your account email without clicking on an email authentication link. So not onl…
Unfortunately though, it's poor practice to let a user change their email address without first sending a confirmation email. If you don't confirm the action before making the change then bad people can lock out the true owner of an account simply by being logged-in.
Re: Dumped by Google
#28Looks like we may start needing cloud services to backup cloud services. That'd be an interesting service, particularly if it worked seamlessly in the background.
Re: Dumped by Google
#29I can't access the article. Can anyone tell shortly, what the author is complaining about?
Google closed his Google Account including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calender etc. without notice and without explanation. After 6 days he got it back after a google employee he knows personally escalated the case internally.
And now that employee is paying the price with an embarrassing hacker news article?
Re: Dumped by Google
#30Of course the author preformed daily backups to removable media and other cloud based services? Let this be a lesson. Data redundancy is important!
Is there a tool to backup your google everything? If there isn't then what you're doing is called "taunting".
I use CloudPull from http://goldenhillsoftware.com and it's fantastic.
It supports Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Drive (formerly Docs), and Google Reader. By default, the app backs up your accounts every hour and maintains old point-in-time snapshots of your accounts for 90 days. All the data is available in standard file formats.