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Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

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Re: Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

#421

Post by PieTime »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #177

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.…

Free? They serve ads on their clients. The best solution that solved this terrible issue was Inbox, which they purchased and then destroyed. Google also makes monthly cloud storage fees for anyone who has large files or photos. Also, it keeps people in Googles ecosystem. It’s a beneficial monopoly for Google.

Re: Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

#422

Post by kstrauser »

negura wrote: post #378
kstrauser wrote: post #226

Oh, excellent! Having been on the end of someone flooding a service with tens of thousands of autogenerated Gmail accounts. And if you don’t want to share your phone number with Google, which I totally respect, there are a zillion other email providers. Contrary to popular perception, Gmail != email.

most major platforms reject email addresses that are not from major providers. for example creating a deepseek account asks to use a "global provider" and gives GMail as an example. github recently rejected @proton.me. discord does this as well etc

I’ve never, ever, not once, been blocked from registering because I was using a self-hosted domain. I’ve seen plenty of services that block anonymizers, typically with the explanation that they were getting too much spam from there.

Re: Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

#423

Post by AnthonyMouse »

idle_zealot wrote: post #364
vlan0 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Systems are designed for humans, if they fail to account for human nature then they're bad systems. Systems will always be bad. It's why corporations will always be bad. The complexities are too much for humans. You will never account for all variables. Account for one, with that you are exposed to another. This becomes clear to me when you look at government and the systems it tries to use, since forever. Climate c…

A terribly defeatist attitude. The same could be said about, say, death during childbirth. For hundreds of thousands of years people tried methods of midwifery to ease that process and reduce deaths to little effect. People considered that to be women's lot, an immutable fact of human nature. Then we figured out how to reduce deaths during childbirth to a relatively tiny fraction of all-cause mortality, and that leve…

We have a system for improving organizations. Competition.

The actual problem is that our system for preserving competition is insufficiently effective.

Re: Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

#424

Post by denkmoon »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #416
bachmeier wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free And I'll stop you here. It's less than obvious that there's no obligation. If you provide a critical service that folks rely on at a price less than your cost, you drive out competition, and it's a critical part of your own business model, dropping the service without warning is IMO on the border of what Google should be allowed to do.

There were plenty of free email services before gmail. Google isn't at fault here because they provided a better experience.

There are plenty of free email services _after_ Gmail too. If Google want to destroy their product, have at it.

Re: Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

#425

Post by Dylan16807 »

tomjen3 wrote: post #189
Night_Thastus wrote: post #177

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.…

I am not sure the backslash would be big if Gmail said that a year from now you would have to pay $9.99 per month to use your Gmail ($12.99 ad-free). I mean people would complain, but would that actually give a backslash? Especially if they made it easy for people to move their account elsewhere? People are used to paying a lot more for things outside of tech. I suspect what is really holding them back is the loss of…

Their existing premium plans start at $17 per year. Even pushing people to that level would be a serious upset. $10-13 per month would make everyone hate them.

> Especially if they made it easy for people to move their account elsewhere?

Sounds mostly impossible.

> People are used to paying a lot more for things outside of tech.

They're not used to paying for an email account.

Re: Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

#426

Post by tardedmeme »

jen20 wrote: post #293
ninalanyon wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is stopping anyone offering an email service, surely every IS does that?

The pain in the ass around deliverability to gmail is the reason I don't run my own anymore.

I haven't had any significant issues, but I think it depends on the luck the draw of your IP address.

Re: Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

#427

Post by autoexec »

gerdesj wrote: post #404
redserk wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. I’ll stop you here. Google offered it for free and, at the time, offered such an high amount of mail storage for free it sounded insane. At the time, my ISP gave me a 25MB or 50MB inbox and that was considered pretty decent, when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB. They absolutely have a right to take ant…

"when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB." The G in Gmail was for a gigabyte and that was what I got in the noughties for "free", when as you say my ISP offered something like 5MB on the end of a POP connection. To be fair you can cram a lot of ASCII into 5MB. However you can email piccies to a mailbox with a 1GB limit if your modem doesn't melt first. Obviously, this was during the "don't be evil" days.

Even then the reason they were giving people so much storage space was because they wanted people to get in the habit of keeping their private data on Google's servers so that Google could mine it whenever they felt like it. Giving users effectively unlimited space was a selfish move on Google's part, not a gift.

Re: Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

#428

Post by autoexec »

duskwuff wrote: post #212
traderj0e wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stuff they've shut down has been nowhere near as important as Gmail.

Shutting down GMail would practically amount to shutting down email. It's by far the largest email provider in the US (and probably in the world but I don't have that data). There's no other provider who could take up the slack; if it were to abruptly shut down, a lot of users would simply lose access to email altogether.

At one point AOL was the largest ISP and email provider on Earth too. If gmail died off people would just move to something else. It'd be annoying, but it wouldn't be the end of email

Re: Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

#429

Post by bigstrat2003 »

duskwuff wrote: post #212
traderj0e wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stuff they've shut down has been nowhere near as important as Gmail.

Shutting down GMail would practically amount to shutting down email. It's by far the largest email provider in the US (and probably in the world but I don't have that data). There's no other provider who could take up the slack; if it were to abruptly shut down, a lot of users would simply lose access to email altogether.

No, that wouldn't happen. Lots of people don't have email through Google, for one. Those people will still use email just fine. Moreover, the people who do use Gmail will simply sign up with another provider. It won't be a big deal.
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