Back in the days that was awesome. I had some kind of shitty Hotmail like German mail provider. 100MB storage, lots of ads. Google pushed into the right direction, almost unlimited storage, at first no ads. This was a huge step forward for email back then. Anyways I ditched Gmail and most of their services years ago, paying for mailbox.org for years, never looked back.
From the comments on the article:
There was this brief shining moment when we had Google Now and Google Inbox and, at least for me, they were incredibly useful tools. Then they transformed into a content chum box and a stale email platform respectively and, while I think I know why, I’ll never understand WHY.
I feel this so hard. Inbox was so great and being forced back into old-school Gmail was so disappointing. RIP Inbox.
This.
I’ll never forgive Google for killing Inbox. Of all the projects they killed, that one hurt the worst. I went from being able to actually manage my email to it turning right back into an unmanageable mess overnight, and in spite of their promises, not a single one of Inbox’s features that enabled this were ever implemented in main Gmail.
That was a big turning point for me in being able to trust them for anything
I always wished for Inbox to simply become the new interface for Gmail. My wishes were destroyed once it got discontinued.
Same
There was a brief moment between Jelly Bean and Kit Kat in which Google Now and Inbox made being tracked by Google kind of useful in everyday life
Until the idiots all complained about it being ‘creepy’. Ever since the tracking completely continued, but no longer with any benefit to us.
Great job idiots. Why people just don’t opt not to use features they find ‘creepy’ I’ll never understand. They are only satisfied if they bring it down for everyone.
Being a bit nostalgic, but Gmail was such a leap forward when it was released. In a world where everybody took the shittiness of hotmail for granted, using Gmail was like peeking into the future. In many ways it was.
Now Gmail is that shitty hotmail we took for granted.
Feels somewhat familiar, doesn’t it.
That, and Chrome was cool when it came out, now it’s just evil…
It certainly was cool and popular from day one. However, it was also spyware from day one. Tech magazines wrote reviews about it, but the hype train was going so fast at the time that people somehow ignored the privacy aspect.
Nowadays people are beginning to realize just how evil it has always been.
20 years on, I still prefer folders instead of labels. And I still don’t want messages group as “conversations.”
It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free. Now there is a hard limit unless you pay.
It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free.
Within a week you could tell there was a set maximum, the speed of increase steadily fell the higher the storage value got. It was a good marketing ploy, but there was never a “forever expanding” promise made.
Everything else wrong with Gmail and Google aside, those are the least reasonable complaints? You can use labels as folders. You can also disable conversation grouping, but I doubt you go more than a week before turning it back on.
Do I need to write comments that represent what you feel?
It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free. Now there is a hard limit unless you pay.
I don’t think anybody expected that to last forever. That said, the free limit is still way more than enough for most people. I’ve got 20 years of emails in my account, and I’m just barely past my free limit.
I remember how excited I was when I finally got an invite code. Now happily gmail-free for 2 years.
Google Maps and YouTube I can’t avoid but otherwise ungoogling successfully.
btw you can use freetube or libretube for youtube, and use an openstreetmaps clientt to replace google maps
What do you do for mobile?
I use proton mail but otherwise I would probably stick with the default iOS.
I self-host caldav with radicale and use native Debian/ios calendar apps. Immich to replace Google photos was especially satisfying.
So Apple, got it
I’m mostly over on ProtonMail but I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable fully deleting my Gmail :/
Anyone got an invite? 😅
20 years of making billions from users private data.
11 years of ProtonMail let’s goo
20 years of surveillance by Gmail…
I remember when getting an invite was such a big deal.
$100/pop on eBay. At the time, Hotmail inboxes had a storage limit of 2 MB.
From the article:
When you have enough storage that you never have to delete anything, you can keep an infinite record of your life. Packages, receipts, itineraries of past trips, messages from loved ones, photos, appointments, documents — you can just label them, archive them, and search for them later.
I don’t want Google to have that information for free, to analyze/monetize/sell to 3rd parties. That’s one of the reasons why I quit GMail. It was difficult too because I was registered to literally 100s of websites with that address.
This is where I got lucky. I’m up my Google workspace for free still (grandfathered in) and I can just switch my MX record whenever I feel the need to no impact. I’ll keep my same email address since it’s under a custom domain.
