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> Would the world be better off without free (to users) GMaps and free GMail? Hard to say for Maps. There were maps freely available before Google Maps, but th

> Would the world be better off without free (to users) GMaps and free GMail? Hard to say for Maps. There were maps freely available before Google Maps, but they didn't look as nice and they didn't have Streetview and the routing services, and you couldn't embed them on your Website for free (well, paying with you visitor's data, really). For Gmail? I feel like emails were more reliable before Google decided that any email is likely Spam unless it's sent by one of a dozen commercial providers. Gmail didn't jump ahead in features like GMaps did vs the existing systems, it had a nice web interface and came with a lot of free space in exchange for reading your emails to create a better profile for targeted ads, but that was pretty much it.

sokoloff 6y ago
While gmail spam filtering was tightening, spam was also getting 50-100x “worse” as well. I used to have no spam filtering at all on my mail (other than human visual grep). That was ok through 2003 and barely tenable up until about 2007. I then tried to run my own with SpamAssassin and the like. Around 2012 I folded and switched to running inbound mail through gmail. Life immediately got massively better. I almost never see spam and my own domain mail (outbound self-hosted, no commercial provider) gets through to gmail users just fine. Yes, I get some false positives (ham categorized as spam). I probably have undetected false positives as well. It’s still 100% worth it as email was getting difficult to use previously.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Yes, spam was an issue, though at least for me commercially available filters made it more than manageable. Today, even with my addresses being on public sites for close to two decades, dnsbls and Thunderbird are enough to bring spam landing in my inbox down to 0-5/day, and about half of those are using AmazonSES, Sendgrid, Mailchimp etc (only mailchimp seems responsive to complaints), with something like 0-5 false positives per quarter. Google false positives on the other hand are a pain in the butt. Even sending from one GSuite account to another on the same domain does not ensure delivery (but makes it much more likely than using a dedicated server that has low traffic to Gmail). I've adapted and now use my own Gmail account if I need to send email to Gmail users that is somewhat important.

sokoloff 6y ago

While gmail spam filtering was tightening, spam was also getting 50-100x “worse” as well. I used to have no spam filtering at all on my mail (other than human visual grep). That was ok through 2003 and barely tenable up until about 2007. I then tried to run my own with SpamAssassin and the like. Around 2012 I folded and switched to running inbound mail through gmail. Life immediately got massively better. I almost never see spam and my own domain mail (outbound self-hosted, no commercial provider) gets through to gmail users just fine. Yes, I get some false positives (ham categorized as spam). I probably have undetected false positives as well. It’s still 100% worth it as email was getting difficult to use previously.

luckylion 6y ago
Yes, spam was an issue, though at least for me commercially available filters made it more than manageable. Today, even with my addresses being on public sites for close to two decades, dnsbls and Thunderbird are enough to bring spam landing in my inbox down to 0-5/day, and about half of those are using AmazonSES, Sendgrid, Mailchimp etc (only mailchimp seems responsive to complaints), with something like 0-5 false positives per quarter. Google false positives on the other hand are a pain in the butt. Even sending from one GSuite account to another on the same domain does not ensure delivery (but makes it much more likely than using a dedicated server that has low traffic to Gmail). I've adapted and now use my own Gmail account if I need to send email to Gmail users that is somewhat important.