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. It's an endless pile of data to hold onto, FOREVER, as well.
I enjoy hating on Google when appropriate. But when it comes to Gmail, I understand what they're dealing with.
It's honestly why I believe the idea of free e-mail is just bad, fundamentally. You can't expect a free e-mail service to be good or have any kind of support. The fact that it still exists is more out of shear fear of the repercussions than any good will on the owner's part.
Just get a paid e-mail service. They're better, and offer a lot more peace of mind.
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 steps they deem necessary to prevent malicious use of their product, and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free, but Google wasn’t forced to provide a free email service, much less one that went so far above and beyond their competition.
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.
I don’t have much empathy for Google.
Corporations aren’t magical entities that somehow exist outside of social obligations and can do whatever they want as long as their own terms of service permit it.
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.
I was on Google Workspace for about 10 years. I moved off their service because the mandatory Gemini price hikes meant that it no longer represented value for money.
I get excessive storage utilisation warnings for some shared drives I used to have but because I no longer have a paid up license, I can’t manage shared drives anymore. So I can’t delete them.
Google’s “support” team in India told me all sorts of lies about how to resolve the issue, but they’ve finally settled on a position that I would need to reinstate my Workspace account, at my own expense in order to delete the data to stop the emails and save Google money.
They refuse to acknowledge the patent absurdity of this situation and escalate it to someone who can actually fix it.
This argument would have flown 30 years ago with Yahoo.
Since then we had Uber pumping so much money into a losing business until it drew the competition bankrupt.
And now we have AI pumping so much money into a losing business until they hopefully replicate Uber, only won't work and signs are all over the wall that they just burned a trillion dollars.
Which opens great prospectives for incumbents WHO LEARN FROM THE MISTAKES of the powers be at the time.
About time to start a "Don't be evil. FOR REAL." This time.
If in 30 years it's necessary to start "Don't be evil. REALLY, REALLY, REALLY this time" then so be it.
I'm starting the 2.0 version. Fuck AI. Fuck incumbents. Long live long life and freedom of choice!
No really - got more ideas about "Don't be evil. FOR REAL"?
What you mean for free? First, they have all the data they get from you. They now track you even when you are not using your phone. They can/could know if you are doing your number 2 regularly or not only.
They control how the internet moves. Https? Sure can enforce. Trackers, etags ? Why not.
They sell every single bit of information on you for a good price. And now they are even more friends with a very good orange buyer. They have a TOS on you that they can chop and sell you whenever they want and you can't complain.
What you mean for free? Maybe for you it seems free, but people are paying them premium for lots of stuff.
Google used to be admired by the innovation and good ideas that shaped the world to a better world. Now they are still shaping the world, but not for everyone
And it's isn't even like they're struggling with profitability, either. It'll be hilarious if this forces common folks to switch back to IMAP since once a user has been burned into spending the trivial cost to set up a local mailbox sync they're unlikely to go back into Google's arms (especially given how cheap (in money and time) disk space and cloud backups are these days).
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.
If that ceases to be true, goodbye (free) gmail.
Email marketing and campaign companies pay into these lists and they pass that cost onto their customers as well.
There has never been a email provider that accepts mass email delivery to millions of recipients for free.
A year or two ago they returned to full detail. I've always wondered if it was customer pressure or a backroom deal with Amazon was reached.
I kind of doubt that Google would cave to the former, right?
Maybe at some point in the mists of time, someone just wanted to offer people a good email service but at this point it's a pattern of behavior across every Google consumer product so I can't give them the benefit of the doubt.
No way they are doing it for free.
Basically they tied Gmail 1:1 to Android accounts. I have a Gmail mailbox for a few reasons: 1) self-squatting my usual handle, because they are a large email provider 2) it's my Android account and it's where I get documents shared on Drive 3) maybe it's the way I login to Google cloud but I don't remember. I used to have a customer with servers in there but it's long gone.
Anyway, gmail is their way to manage a part of the Android infrastructure and it seems they like running Android.
>Anyway, gmail is their way to manage a part of the Android infrastructure and it seems they like running Android.
I've deleted my Gmail mailbox and Android works fine, any document share notifications go to the email address on the Google account.
If anything it's better without a Gmail mailbox because those notifications used to only go to my Gmail no matter what alternative email addresses I set, now they all go to my actual email address.
Only problem is I can never reopen the mailbox because the "Add Gmail to your Google account" screen has decided I've already used my mobile number before.
They should let others do email. The more email service providers we have the better it is for everyone
You have a point, but if you've ever seen how a gmail account behaves for the ordinary person once it reaches 80-90% storage capacity used (15GB free, some cumulative total of all emails and google drive content, google photos content), all of these free services exist to sell a perpetual monthly recurring subscription to users. And many people do pay. The default gmail web interface starts to have a big banner across the top warning about storage reaching maximum capacity with a link to the payment page.
Look at the workflow for a standard out of box android phone now that defaults to backing up all your photos to 'the cloud', which will almost immediately fill the 15GB free. Once your 15GB is full, then you're run through the payment/checkout workflow to enter your card and set up monthly recurring billing for some premium google service.
In general having a gmail account is the initial stage in the pipeline of getting someone to be a monthly-paid google customer for life. Whether it's just for more storage to hold all their google drive and photo content, or google workspace individual, etc.
Additionally, tying a gmail account to the primary-user android on-device account on any android 4.x+ device means revenue from google play store paid app sales. And then all those 'free' apps that the user installs where the app developer has implemented embedded small ad banners for google's ad network? More venue.
Isn't it the corporation which makes super-profits and gmail is just part of the equation?
I highly doubt that anyone would ever riot over loss of access to email, nor that it's some critical piece of infrastructure, there are dozens of other communication methods online today.
I need to get off of this fucking website.
But man, I would hate to be the one dealing with Gmail. It's a nightmare for the reasons I listed above.
Someone can in fact hold both of those opinions.
I was also actively telling people to de-Google and go elsewhere for a mail service.
Does everything need to be black and white?
It's bizarre how you make up a sob story about how Gmail is just so hard for Google to deal with. They aren't maintaining it for charity. I'm sure, if I had no ethics, I could manage the burden of dealing with a software system that harvests the data of >1 billion people as part of my corporation's business plan that nets hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The reasons you listed for why it would suck to be Google -- it's "free" for users, expensive for Google, and oh god, you have to hold on to the data... are not reasons at all, because Google profits from it and Google wants the data. The data is the point. You belabour how Google has the burden of controlling a huge chunk of the internet's infrastructure, as if gaining control of a huge chunk of the internet's infrastructure is not literally their anti-consumer goal.
yeah ok, google maps is free, youtube also...
And you know why? Because every single one of their product is either a data harvesting tool or an ad delivery mechanism, sometimes both. Let's not pretend they do it for free, it's their entire business model lmao
In exchange, Google gets to surveil half of the world's population, extract personal information from their email, and resell that information to governments and ad companies.
They aren’t doing this for free
Just because they don't charge you directly, doesn’t matter it's not profitable for them.
And now they have a treasure trove of AI training data, for free.
Google used to literally have a counter inside Gmail showing how your account had a super huge and always increasing amount of storage. The courted their current market position. This isnt "Oh how did we get here with our big bleeding hearts" its just enshittification.
Not for free. Being monopoly is a huge reward. It isn't possible today to have a small email provider. While probably not having that intention from the start, Gmail played a huge role here as its existence allowed everybody to just ignore/block small providers.
Lol, what? One of the biggest company on Earth is being pictured as a victim for creating services that siphon data out of half the planet's people? Don't take it personally but I can't fathom how you think this is FREE. It's literally the most lucrative business there is and it's only going to get worse—and not for them.
They CHOSE to offer it for free so they could monopolise the market. They got roped into absolutely nothing.
I suspect what is really holding them back is the loss of data, and the loss of the assumption that ~everyone has a Google account that they are logged into, which means they can be traced around the web. Google also benefits from this, since its anti-bot tool will be more accurate and less fustrating to users.
I think approximately 95% of all Gmail users would leave. Regular people are accustomed to paying nothing for things like email. And if I have to pay for email, I am not paying Google for it, especially not twice the cost of Fastmail.
People pay for it dearly with their data for advertisement.
In fact, even when you _do_ pay, you still get ads!
for free? I guess tracking you to death and shoving ads down your throat does not count as monetizing anymore then?
Not for one second, am I sympathetic to the firm, because it is simply a business acting on its incentives to minimize costs and maximize profits.
Google keeps it running because they make money off of it. Tech firms have profit margins unlike any prior industry; maybe feudal kings come close.
They make money off of it because they (like all tech) avoid investing in human heavy services like customer support / trust and safety. I have had google safety members vent about how they can’t get engineer attention. That when they do get it, engineers don’t want to help the moderators or the moderation software. Their incentives drive them to find a way to obviate the moderation process entirely.
People working to fix things and make it better for users are great. The firm? Heck no.
The company that wilfully monopolised email somehow got involuntarily roped into running said email?
Do people love revising history like this?
You know, if it's such a bad deal they can stop owning it any time they want. They already lied about it - I was told I would never have to delete email, and turns out I had to.
I don't care either way, I moved to tuta last year.
More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665414
- 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 their phising site.
Gmail not only fails at spam classification, they classify these messages as important and nag you with first priority notifications and summaries.
The number of spam calls, texts, emails, iCloud account unlock requests, etc I’ve received in the last year is insane.
The man is the absolute worse person - unless your a rich guy, who wants to make more money by screwing over people who mostly don't even know it.
Anyone who reads this, I dare you to find out why that thing in your life you hate so much, sucks so bad - nothing is ever by accident or unintentional.
The United States, and its People, will be discovering/realizing different ways we have been absolutely f-d by that grifter for likely the rest of my millenial life, thankfully (silver lining!!) US life expectancy has dropped substantially for the 150 million Americans in the bottom 50% of income - rich people in America have to deal with this bs for almost 8 more years than we do
Oh yeah, if you want a faster out even yet - just make 30k or less per year, your life caps at 71 then.
I joke but I hate so much that people will read this and then promptly go back to sustaining this system at their job.
We work our lives away so the rich dont have to and they get to live 14 more years on average than poor people.
The reason is that I have an opposite experience, during the last couple of years I have received much less spam messages than before.
I have hosted my own e-mail server for more than 2 decades. Previously, I had to filter large quantities of spam messages, but lately the number of spam messages is much less than 10% of the total number of received messages.
Take DocuSign for instance. Still, this many years later, is a major source of phishing emails from their free trials. DocuSign could easily shut this down today by either requiring a CC for the trial, or forcing a call with a sales rep to start a trial. But they don't, they continue to allow their service to be used for wide scale phishing.
Atera, an RMM, is another one that has been a big source of malware delivery, also via the free trials.
Shutting down the trial accounts after the fact does nothing, the emails already went out.
It's such a good tactic too to start the voicemail with the conversation already going people are like "what? who?"
Email scanning and file scanning (on our computer) became acceptable when the level of spam and malware became intolerable. But it was at cost of our privacy. Today, Gmail scans all your mails and makes money from it. Both Windows and macOS have built-in anti-virus or malware scanners, and file indexers, and thus know all the applications and files in your system (which provides for more data on your profile with them). Now with both OSes, and even browsers like Chrome and Firefox, including AI, they will now use our own computers to not only collect our personal data, but even process it on our system and use it to build even better profiles to more profitably exploit us.
It also just happens that they're the ones best positioned to provide attestation and identity services.
So, pleas ignored, forward these recruitment scam emails to the legal/fraud/phishing teams of the impersonated brands. For a company without the appearance of caring (in my opinion), perhaps law firm letterhead can encourage necessary prioritization.
There are so many businesses now which exist mainly to cheat you, operating at the very edge of what’s technically legal, and relying on their customers not really understanding the full terms of the deals they’re agreeing to. It’s sickening.
Does anyone have a better source of information than this one forum comment from someone who thinks scanning a QR code is enough to get your phone to send a text message?
EDIT: It’s just an SMS URI. It doesn’t automatically send anything, just opens a text message for you to send.
This is just the old phone number verification with a QR code convenience method.
It’s not something specific to a phone. It’s just a convenient method to enter your phone number.
So if there are any costs for sending this SMS it’s on you.
It occurs to me this "force you to send the sms" might be a way to avoid exactly this sort of thing.
Told the owners that if Google is already being difficult during signup, imagine being locked out later with client work on the line. Pulled up a few horror stories about Google lockouts to drive the point home. They ended up with another workspace solution.
1. Personal/Child/Business
2. First/Last
3. Pick email
4. Date of Birth
5. Backup email / Skip
6. Password
7. Enter phone number
8. Confirm with 2FA code
9. Done.
I just made the email testregistrationflow@gmail.com and have since forgotten the password. So that’s one burned. But feel free to try testregistrationflow1@gmail.com and see if it works without a QR code.
The headline is clearly a misstatement of what is a specific flow for someone to make many Gmail accounts programmatically.
Every account having the ability to invite an only small finite number of new accounts is one way to thwart scammers.
So they'd just do this to farm invites if they needed
Google is probably doing A/B testing or they are using some sort of ML algorithm....
2FA has become the wedge to break privacy into a million shards.
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 your phone number to track you.
>>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.
(EDIT: TFA didn’t clear it up for me, but it sounds similar.)
My phone number - which I've had for about 15 years and have only ever used for personal purposes (minimal SMS, mainly just an iMessage/Whatsapp ID) - is apparently "not eligible" to create a new gmail account. Which is quite strange.
Apart from people who are knowledgeable or at least curious enough to search for alternative options, I suspect many people don't even know what a domain is or that they could register one for them to use. The jump from "why pay for email if Gmail/Outlook is free?" to "register a personal domain and use it for your emails" is too big.
I don't have the ideal solution but what I've suggested to friends and relatives is they should consider paying for their personal email accounts. Most of them don't care but some do and, as a result, at least try to understand what they want or need and are willing to pay for.
Dead on arrival.
Mostly because of conditioning: it’s been 25 years now that free webmail is the way Gen-X, Y, Z, and future generations do email. Boomers and the older Gen-Xers may still be hanging onto an ISP address, if they haven’t moved too much since the 1990s.
After all that, plus with their email addresses being the opposite of portable, there is no limit to how much crap people will take, when the alternative is learning a little bit about domain registration and DNS, and paying $60 a year for Fastmail or whatever. Email, they believe, is supposed to be free as in beer.
Sad but true. Also, confession: I used to use first name @ full name . com and got tired of the confused looks and typos when I had to give it out, so now I use a six-character Gmail with numbers so that it’s just like people expect.
You still need to register with someone like google, or Proton, etc.
I run my own email server on DO, nothing I send goes to spam. (I normally follow up on nearly all emails in case you're assuming some flavors of sample bias.)
Rollernet.us is a good one. They have excellent deliverability, reasonable prices, and everything you could want related to email.
They have a few minor other services, like DNS management, but they are not a cloud compute provider.
Another option is to use a cloud compute provider like AWS. You don't need to run the VM yourself to use SES for email messages. The hard part is the webmail access: you have to choose between a poor interface (an S3 bucket) or running a managed VM to host something like Roundcube.
Personally I have my own mail server and use smtp2go for sending which handles the deliverability issue. I'm not sure it's worth it going this way but I found it fun and its been 0 maintenance
For now my email is with Apple, since they offers email hosting as part of the icloud+ (or whatever its called). If they decide to die/enshittify, then I can move to another host without having to change any contacts.
One the other hand, since I did use my bare gmail for some years, I am still stuck with it, in case I have some service that depends on it.
I don’t wanna sound like a salesman. It’s just that it’s been a surprising good experience for my family, especially for the price tag of $0. And if it ever does start to suck, I can point our domains at a different server.
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.
I think that's considered "more secure" in most account security flowcharts.
I wonder if there is a single engineer at Google who actually understands the whole registration/verification flow and all the edge cases?
That's like saying you need to "scan a QR code" to open a train door, not mentioning that the real requirement is linking your phone to your payment data so they can bill you. It's not the ability to turn a data matrix into bytes that Google is verifying here...
The fact that they're introducing QR/SMS/MMS/whatever they want is actually an interesting signal, because it will harm the customer experience, which might result in the growth of responsible paid email services.
It is good to realize that it has never been "Nice Uncle Google" and always an advertisement moloch offering tools to hook their product. All that trust that was bestowed was never warranted.
My comment, as per subject, is about Gmail.
I've paid for email nearly forever (Earthlink, not the most high tech provider but good enough) and get nearly zero spam. Their price went up again recently, but apparently if you mention Fastmail they'll match the cost.
I was listening to the local TV news a few weeks ago and the reporter talked about an SMS scam insisting that you owe unpaid turnpike charges. He said "most of us have seen them". I'm thinking, I've never received anything like that!" and then realized it could be because I don't give out my phone number to just anybody who asks. And tend to push back when they do.
What happens if Google pulls the plug on your account and you have no offline archive?
- Permissionless email (i.e. for agents, empowered users who can program now)
- Pervasive email allow listing
Wonder if these can both exist at the same time, i.e. having a "public" email that is read first by AI (let's imagine we're in a world where prompt injections weren't so possible) and heavily filtered, along with one that is private and allow-list gated (via some easier-than-gpg-to-use identity marker).
People already assume that your "google name" is your official name, so much so that I had to patiently explain a delivery man once that the funny nickname he had for some reason in the delivery notice did not match my ID because that was an old google account from a time when it was usual to use any funny handle for your account.
Protest this by using a paid email provider. My $60 yearly payment just went through today, is that honestly too much for the typical person around here?
It’ll happen with social media accounts and other things too. The account creation date is going to become an even bigger heuristic in their spam models.
You can bypass this if you have a passkey, but phone and password isn't enough. No idea why they opted to do that, it's not like passkeys are indicative of any device binding.
SMS also isn't free. Many contracts contain "free" texting, but that's just SMS being packaged into the subscription price.
Carriers charge each other for (excess) SMS exchanges, so SMS simply cannot be entirely free.
Google really need to get it together. Their sender reputation bypasses all the normal spam filters, but if it was up to me…
Try Tuta, or Proton, or Fastmail, or Zoho.
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.
I also want to share a comment that someone (Velocifyer) added on my comment:
"If you make a blog post, make sure to also comment on how the audio reCAPTCHAs are nearly impossible and are blocked on public VPNs. The visual reCAPTCHAS have vauge instructions (they say “Select all squares with busses.” when they mean “Select all squares that have a bus or part of a bus and do not select any other squares.”. For 2 years I could not figure that out so I had to use the audio captchas but then Google blocked them on public VPNs and also made them almost impossible. I could only figure that out when Google Gemini clarified it for me."
Also another fact that I had discovered but to upload youtube vidoes more than 15 minutes you have to do this verification with sms and I found that its system of sending sms was quite finnicky and (too much limits is actually just one try)
Google and other tech giants's recent changes/lobbying are really impacting the open internet and it feels to me like we as people who have knowledge about these topics must do something to reform things as I simply cannot ask people who are technically unaware about these topics to fight for these changes unless we advocate and educate them about it
Most people just have simply way too much of other issues to fight for these things that they have almost taken for granted, but this to me means that the responsibility is on us people who are technically sound to fight against the attacks on open internet if we wish to preserve it.
I think my point is that we all might be waiting for other people to protest against these tech giants but I think that the world is looking at us people for such protests, Let's hope that we are able to educate more people and the open internet is preserved.
Our small steps might mean a lot in the future and so to not be dis-illusioned to make small steps thinking that they might be too small but we have to fight tech giants if we wish to preserve open internet. Every step is meaningful no matter how small
Years ago IIRC there was a "bug" where the Android emulator allowed you to create real Google accounts. This was found and I'm sure millions of these accounts were created. There's a whole black market for Google accounts. Whereas I lost a Google account I'd created for a relative because it hadn't been used in awhile and it was tied to a mobile number I no longer had.
I don't see how this ends without registering for a service like Gmail being tied to your government ID.
(I run an ad blocker, so the ads will not be displayed either way, but I see more agent blockers on ad free sites than ad supported ones anyway.)
(In many countries, including soon the USA[1], you can't get a phone number+sim without showing ID, also.)
[1]: https://reclaimthenet.org/the-fcc-wants-your-id-before-you-g...
Note that "scanning a QR code and sending a text message" means, for the most part, a smartphone. One could do so via a tablet too, I suppose, but most who register will do so via their smartphone device. For some reason accessing the www is increasingly tied to "identify now!". This is a huge contrast to the freedom of the 1990s. I don't think we should accept that.
Meanwhile the amount of spam from Gmail I'm getting goes up and up and up.
It's like saying that the government has outsourced burger making to McDonalds.
We need to prove it's really you, they posited. Simple enough I thought. I'll just use the same password I've used since 2001.
Oh, I must authenticate with a text, you say? Certainly not a configuration I've made myself, but they're holding the cards on this one, so be it.
I enter the confirmation code.
We still need to prove it's really you, again.
Shucks. I try again. And again. And again.
Sorry, but you'll now have to fuck off. Why? Because we've locked your account for complying with our security theater.
Fuck. I'm in a disaster zone. I need to get things done!
Google cares.
But thankfully, so did the FCC, which I registered a complaint with, arguing from the perspective of interference with emergency communications.
The FCC actually sent the rascals a letter. The leviathan complied and unlocked my account, and suddenly my password was secure again.
Thank you FCC. Although I doubt I'd get the same results with current adm...
