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Number of times I have had the problem of "email not working for some reason" since switching to gmail ~20 years ago: zero. Number of times I had this problem

by gfodor 7y ago

Number of times I have had the problem of "email not working for some reason" since switching to gmail ~20 years ago: zero. Number of times I had this problem when running my own mail server (and presumably would have today): non-zero. There's your entire explanation as to why this is a losing battle. Just one incident of an email delivery problem probably outweighs any privacy risk wrt using a centralized provider wrt email. That prior could change if there is a privacy related incident with these providers, but so far their track record has been good.

pera 7y ago
Not everybody weights privacy (and decentralization and control) vs convenience in the same way. By the way, how many times did you get locked out of your Gmail account vs how many times did the same happen with your own server?
- gfodor 7y ago
  Not once. Tbf, I am considering the herculean task of getting off of gmail, but if I were to go with my own server the burden has basically nothing to do with setting up the email server (easy) as this post might suggest, but instead the burden and latent risk involved of having to be personally responsible for operating, maintaining, and being exposed to externialities (like 0days, being blocked by filters, server outages, etc.) Setting up services is trivial compared to the aggregate cost in time, money, and context-switching tax over time of operating them.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
    > being blocked by filters That's the part that I really don't understand. If the recipient hired someone to throw away their emails, why would that possibly be my job to rectify? I sent them a legitimate email, they hired someone who promised them to throw away spam, but obviously is incompetent at doing so, so it's up to them to hire someone else!?
    - kilburn 7y ago
      Power relationships. Say the recipient is the client that represents 90% of your income. And the incompetent secretary is the boss's daughter. Is it "up to them to hire someone else"? Totally. Will they? No. Your turn. Will you bend backwards to acommodate that client or will you drop it?
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
        I probably would have avoided ever getting dependent on them to that degree in the first place. But, yeah, sure, I see the point--but my impression is that people automatically see it as their responsibility to figure out why someone else's email provider is throwing away their emails, regardless how much you depend on them.
beagle3 7y ago
It’s true, but it is only half the story. I’ve used a paid provider other than gmail for 18 years. I occasionally had problems starting a couple of years ago, and every single one of them was caused by google not delivering a mail (or marking it spam, which is for almost all practical purposes, not delivering it). I eventually caved in and switched to fastmail - and everything is good since then. Google is giving you no trouble because the main instigator of trouble these days is google. You may find it acceptable to use them with this in mind. I do not.
- gfodor 7y ago
  My point was that running your own server isn't about just getting Hello World working, its about the fact that you basically are now living in a world where you will potentially have delivery failures of your email, or incidental things you need to fix at random. Imagine if this is how your phone worked: on a given day, you may find yourself suddenly having to learn about why your phone calls stopped going through, or in general, 0.01% of the time people can't reach you with no explainable reason. The idea I could wake up on a random Tuesday and find myself debugging ancient erlang code to diagnose my phone calls regressing feels no less disastrous than having to read the source code to my email server if/when it mysteriously stops working. In any case, this is a argument as to why it's an uphill battle to convince people that running your own server is an easy endeavor. (Which seemed to be the point of this post.) It says nothing about switching off of gmail to another provider as you did, or if the actual burden of running a server is worth the privacy trade-off for an individual (i'd argue for most it isn't, but wasn't really the point i was trying to make.) Switching from Google to another 3rd party provider doesn't eliminate privacy risk, it shifts around the probability distribution for certain kinds of events to occur. (Arguably, so does hosting your own server, but hosting your own server does rule out large classes of failures.)
baobabKoodaa 7y ago
> Number of times I have had the problem of "email not working for some reason" since switching to gmail ~20 years ago: zero. This is incorrect. By using Gmail you've lost several legitimate incoming emails due to their horrendous spam filtering. It's just hard to be aware of the emails you've never seen, so you think nothing ever failed. In addition, if you are relying on @gmail addresses, you run the catastrophic risk of permanently losing access to your email with no-one to call for help. There's so many instances of this happening that you can't even call them isolated instances. All it takes is for Google's ML algorithms to think that you have violated their T&C somehow. And poof! Everything is gone.
mike-cardwell 7y ago
I self host my personal email. We use gmail for work. Gmail randomly filters github commit emails into Spam for us. It randomly filters messages from our own hosted domain, that pass DMARC into Spam. As far as false positives go, for me, Gmails filtering is crap. Much worse than an untuned SpamAssassin setup. They have crap filtering, a crap web UI, and crap mobile apps. And yet people still use them.

by gfodor 7y ago

pera 7y ago

Not everybody weights privacy (and decentralization and control) vs convenience in the same way. By the way, how many times did you get locked out of your Gmail account vs how many times did the same happen with your own server?

gfodor 7y ago
Not once. Tbf, I am considering the herculean task of getting off of gmail, but if I were to go with my own server the burden has basically nothing to do with setting up the email server (easy) as this post might suggest, but instead the burden and latent risk involved of having to be personally responsible for operating, maintaining, and being exposed to externialities (like 0days, being blocked by filters, server outages, etc.) Setting up services is trivial compared to the aggregate cost in time, money, and context-switching tax over time of operating them.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  > being blocked by filters That's the part that I really don't understand. If the recipient hired someone to throw away their emails, why would that possibly be my job to rectify? I sent them a legitimate email, they hired someone who promised them to throw away spam, but obviously is incompetent at doing so, so it's up to them to hire someone else!?
  - kilburn 7y ago
    Power relationships. Say the recipient is the client that represents 90% of your income. And the incompetent secretary is the boss's daughter. Is it "up to them to hire someone else"? Totally. Will they? No. Your turn. Will you bend backwards to acommodate that client or will you drop it?
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
      I probably would have avoided ever getting dependent on them to that degree in the first place. But, yeah, sure, I see the point--but my impression is that people automatically see it as their responsibility to figure out why someone else's email provider is throwing away their emails, regardless how much you depend on them.

beagle3 7y ago

It’s true, but it is only half the story. I’ve used a paid provider other than gmail for 18 years. I occasionally had problems starting a couple of years ago, and every single one of them was caused by google not delivering a mail (or marking it spam, which is for almost all practical purposes, not delivering it). I eventually caved in and switched to fastmail - and everything is good since then. Google is giving you no trouble because the main instigator of trouble these days is google. You may find it acceptable to use them with this in mind. I do not.

gfodor 7y ago
My point was that running your own server isn't about just getting Hello World working, its about the fact that you basically are now living in a world where you will potentially have delivery failures of your email, or incidental things you need to fix at random. Imagine if this is how your phone worked: on a given day, you may find yourself suddenly having to learn about why your phone calls stopped going through, or in general, 0.01% of the time people can't reach you with no explainable reason. The idea I could wake up on a random Tuesday and find myself debugging ancient erlang code to diagnose my phone calls regressing feels no less disastrous than having to read the source code to my email server if/when it mysteriously stops working. In any case, this is a argument as to why it's an uphill battle to convince people that running your own server is an easy endeavor. (Which seemed to be the point of this post.) It says nothing about switching off of gmail to another provider as you did, or if the actual burden of running a server is worth the privacy trade-off for an individual (i'd argue for most it isn't, but wasn't really the point i was trying to make.) Switching from Google to another 3rd party provider doesn't eliminate privacy risk, it shifts around the probability distribution for certain kinds of events to occur. (Arguably, so does hosting your own server, but hosting your own server does rule out large classes of failures.)

baobabKoodaa 7y ago

> Number of times I have had the problem of "email not working for some reason" since switching to gmail ~20 years ago: zero. This is incorrect. By using Gmail you've lost several legitimate incoming emails due to their horrendous spam filtering. It's just hard to be aware of the emails you've never seen, so you think nothing ever failed. In addition, if you are relying on @gmail addresses, you run the catastrophic risk of permanently losing access to your email with no-one to call for help. There's so many instances of this happening that you can't even call them isolated instances. All it takes is for Google's ML algorithms to think that you have violated their T&C somehow. And poof! Everything is gone.

mike-cardwell 7y ago

I self host my personal email. We use gmail for work. Gmail randomly filters github commit emails into Spam for us. It randomly filters messages from our own hosted domain, that pass DMARC into Spam. As far as false positives go, for me, Gmails filtering is crap. Much worse than an untuned SpamAssassin setup. They have crap filtering, a crap web UI, and crap mobile apps. And yet people still use them.