Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you suggest free email provider with similar level of service which allows to use your own domain?
Fastmail [EDIT: Sorry, missed the 'free' in there. Guess you get what you pay for]
Fastmail isn’t free?
Google Is Eating Our Mail
201–210 of 720 posts
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#202In the article:
> I can't tell other people to go off Gmail
I disagree. There are reasons to switch off gmail. Not just Google eating mail but also for privacy reasons. Google knows all about your banking, eCommerce orders, your media subscriptions, health issues and many other dependencies.
A good alternative is protonmail. It is private, has a mobile app, is a free but you can also pay to support the service. I also consider protonmail much more secure than gmail.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Email deliverability has been a hassle for a long time. 15 years ago, AOL was the juggernaut that made sysadmin's lives difficult. I do agree that Google's outsize influence in so many markets is concerning.
It's interesting that you bring up AOL, because I remember dealing with this kind of crap with them. It was annoying, but didn't feel like it was as big of a deal. I guess the only real difference is that with AOL it was less insidious... You knew it was only for aol.com emails and that you weren't dealing with business info. Not that emails to personal addresses aren't important, but at least it wasn't suddenly Some…
AOL had a highly competent mail administration outfit, at least compared to other big shops at the time. It could be annoying to deal with them at times, but they had fair, mostly sane processes and I could always get in touch with a technical person with authority there. (They may still be this good, I just haven't had reason to deal with them for quite a while.)
Google - well, I haven't had to, but can get in touch with a competent person there, but not officially. Which is not the case with ATT, with whom I have had a mail issue for over a decade. At this point I'm thinking either their postmaster died in his closet office back in about 2006 and nobody noticed, or they simply don't give a damn.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
At >10 times I'd automate that process.
Form has captcha: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/supportrequestform/8ad56...
Is it illegal to pay for one of the captcha solvers? Ones like this are the easiest, captcha solves cost something like 4 cents each, and all you do is send the image to an API, which responds with the solved captcha.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#205Can someone explain in simple terms why, in 2019, anyone is running their own mail server? Unless you are the sysadmin, server guy/gal, whatever, this just sounds like signing up for a world of hurt doing it yourself.
Contrary to popular opinion, I don't think the technical aspects of operating a mail server are all that hard. Perhaps I'm underestimating the learning curve since I've been doing it for 27 years. (If you're running your own mail server, you are the sysadmin.) The frustration comes with scenarios such as the one outlined in this blog post, where small mail server operators get bullied even though they are doing every…
The biggest obstacle of course is dealing with deliverability problems. As most posters have commented here, getting people to accept your mail, and accepting mail from reputable sources isn't an easy problem to solve. At FastMail, a considerable amount of time is spent ensuring customers don't need to worry about deliverability problems or spammy inboxes.
To me, that's the biggest reason not to spend time running your own infrastructure for mail. Getting people to accept your mail reliably, is much harder than adjusting some postfix configuration.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#206Google? Any large organization. I help a small non-profit run their site in my free time, and Google's actually been the nicest about our oldschool forwarders and Mailman lists. Despite being on no public blacklists, AT&T domains drop us at the border, with the only appeal process being via email, and I've never heard back. AOL and Yahoo? Flip a coin. Of course, email forwarding turns out to suck, but we're just goin…
FYI Google offers free GSuite basic for nonprofits:
https://www.google.com/nonprofits/offerings/apps-for-nonprof...
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fastmail [EDIT: Sorry, missed the 'free' in there. Guess you get what you pay for]
I would love to pay FastMail for my family’s email. I have myself, my wife, my four children, one family address and one other generic address. 8 emails would cost me $240 a year at a minimum. If they could solve for my situation and not charge me that kind of money, I would switch from Gmail immediately.
I find it astonishing how much people devalue software and information services. The same people who have to have a $1500 phone and seem to think nothing of dropping $150 a month on Verizon or AT&T won't spend $5 on any cloud service.
This is why Google keeps winning and everyone else is losing, particularly the people who get the "free" services but don't have any say about those services.
The real numbers might be different, but I heard that Google gets about $100/yr in ad revenue per user. That is, they are getting $800 a year for all of those people. Everything you buy is $800 more expensive and there is no way you can say no to that!
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users. This is so deeply disingenuous and at odds with so many peoples experience it’s absurd. Or satire?
I think (some of them) may think that's true, but their internal reward structures and top-down priorities are clearly set up such that it's not, in practice. There's no other reason it could be so bad.
This seems to be common with the product teams I’ve interfaced with. Good intentions, but bad prioritization and little incentive to do anything other than cater to the big revenue drivers.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#209In the article: > I can't tell other people to go off Gmail I disagree. There are reasons to switch off gmail. Not just Google eating mail but also for privacy reasons. Google knows all about your banking, eCommerce orders, your media subscriptions, health issues and many other dependencies. A good alternative is protonmail. It is private, has a mobile app, is a free but you can also pay to support the service. I als…
Or, if you don't want to commit yourself to yet another walled garden, there are quite a few other email providers that to choose from.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#210I don't know that this is purposeful in all cases. I've had issues on a mail host where sending an email to a different box on the same domain would reject the message as spam, refusing to even deliver it. With respect to google, however, the fact that they offer a service of their own that conveniently can avoid this issue is more than a little shady.