If you haven't created a Gmail or an Instagram account in a while you might be surprised how aggressive it is. For instance, try doing this without verifying your phone. Both can ban you right away because they had to ramp up their anti-spam protections. Pretty much everyone already have an account, so most people creating new ones are just that, spammers.
Or they are kids / young people, who didn't need email before, and now need it for school / college.
Yes but they're almost surely in the minority by now.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used. Not even remotely true. They regularly shut down products and services with impunity. If Gmail cost more than the data they directly or indirectly mine and sell from their users, Gmail wouldn't exist either.
The stuff they've shut down has been nowhere near as important as Gmail.
People complain a lot about Gmail, but honestly I kind of understand Google's plight here. They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free . If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used. But it's expensive, complicated and time-consuming to maintain - and both a source of and recipient of endless waves of spam and scams.…
the googles of the world are real-life analogs of lovecraftian gods, spending sympathy or defense on them is a category error. they do not know about you nor care about you, and would be just as happy dissolving you in their path as not.
I’m considering self hosted. I’m so tired of the major providers not even trying. And I have no serious control over blocklists.
What about fastmail.com or hey.com or proton.me? I have heard good things about all of them.
I use fastmail, I love it. I have a catchall and thus can use a different address per service. Leads to sometimes awkward conversations as to why the email address contains the company name in it, but can also be a life saver. For instance, free recently got hacked and all their email db was online. I can just block this email address and not receive the spam.
Fastmail itself is reliable and fast on the web, but I only use it through IMAP anyways. It works perfectly.
Not without some kind of delay function and probably filtering/evaluation of which new accounts get this capability... Everyone here should be familiar with exponential growth of n-ary trees. If you can get one of these accounts and each new invitee gets to invite 2 more, you can already have accounts gone wild.
If it's a tree, it's easier to prune an entire branch that's gone bad.
So, the scammer should send an invite to a real person from one percent of the accounts in the tree, wait a few months, then flip the evil bit on 90-95% of the accounts they registered. If the whole tree is cut off the reputational damage is really high (10,000 valid users nuked because of actions other accounts took...)
Any Gmail person can tell me why Gmail is tolerating Gmail phishing emails that use Google's own services (e.g. https://storage.googleapis.com/savelinge/ ... ? More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665414
That page looks phishing-related but doesn't appear to directly serving abusive content? Does that XML get processed by a mailreader? http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01 "> savelinge false winbridge.html 1775478745793193 2 2026-04-06T12:32:25.871Z "3616712a8e68db66062a3f514b5fb7c8" 626
I am guessing that service returns the XML file as a directory listing; the file called winbridge.html does exist in that directory (and contains a JavaScript code to redirect to a different URL). (Another comment said they shortened the URL to remove PII (which I am guessing was in the fragment part of the original URL; the JavaScript code makes a new URL from randomly selecting a domain name (even though the list has only one) and appending the fragment part as the path), so I suppose the file name was removed and then this directory listing is the result.)
In a better time I would expect the government to step in a acquire this fundamental service and fund it with tax money. Right now? The only intervention I would expect is a massive subsidy to pay Google to keep providing it, while also letting them continue to spy on everyone's mail (which is a crime, but not if the mail is on a computer, I guess).
Do you believe that if the government provided email, that the government wouldn't keep track of everything you did on it?
Depends on the health of our institutions. In the US at least they're legally obligated not to by the highest law in the land. It gets ignored now, but it's a more promising path to privacy-preserving digital infrastructure than letting the private market handle it.
Spam is getting horrible lately. I get all sorts of new techniques including: - using legitimate sites to bypass filters, like sending you a bill through a legitimate bill-creation site - pretending to be a tracking service for something you supposedly ordered, then over the course of days pretending the package got lost on the way and offering a discount code for the 'purchased' amount, expecting you to use it on th…
I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable, so the number of spammers/scammers has increased dramatically. The number of spam calls, texts, emails, iCloud account unlock requests, etc I’ve received in the last year is insane.
> I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable
In the US, we elected a well-known scammer ... twice!
There are services online dedicated to temporary account activation phone numbers to bypass Google's requirements, but most of them can only receive messages. Requiring the user to send an SMS seems like an excellent method to get rid of those services so that bots can no longer use them. I don't really see the point of a privacy-preserving workflow when it comes to a Google account. It's not like they need to know y…
They might adapt and support sending sms (hopefully) in addition to receiving them. I guess all other services which send sms verification code will switch to ask the user to send the sms, like google. >>don't really see the point of a privacy-preserving workflow when it comes to a Google account. It's not like they need to know your phone number to track you. More information is always better.
Also, if you can get a Google account, it's like a magic ticket to use services that want to violate your privacy. So, if you can get an anonymous gmail account, then you can use it for all the enshittified sites, and reserve your actual email for sending and receiving messages to humans.