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I have a MacBook and it’s great, I also have an iPhone. It’s the business model that matters to me more. It’s not a “hate on big companies” thing. In fact the

I have a MacBook and it’s great, I also have an iPhone. It’s the business model that matters to me more. It’s not a “hate on big companies” thing. In fact the big software companies usually have better security (google included) because they have some of the world’s best security people. I try to avoid companies that have an incentive to collect user information for ad targeting. Apple doesn’t have that (and they’ve also made privacy a brand thing now so they’re even better than average). Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product. Fastmail is actually better and I don’t say that as someone making excuses for non-google services. Their docs and custom domain support are really great. Their support for aliases is also great. They have good fancy workflow options I just don’t need so I don’t use. DDG was worse for a long time, but for the last year or so it’s become good enough for me to make default. I occasionally g! to run a google query, but that’s probably only 10% of the time (and of those only half are probably actually good).

RealStickman_ 6y ago
Apple's privacy protecting actions only apply in countries where they can go through with it. Here's one example where they can't protect your privacy. [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insight-idUSKCN1G8060 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
- fossuser 6y ago
  Yeah I'm with you there, I find western companies making exceptions for China pretty unethical and upsetting: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html I think it's wrong and something they shouldn't do.
  - tomcam 6y ago
    That would require actual patriotism from these companies. They have repeatedly demonstrate by playing (legal) games with taxes and by having Chinese slave kids create their products that it is simply not of interest to them. QED
actuator 6y ago
Well, if business model is what you are worried about. If people are fine with paying for email services, you can even pay for Gsuite and then no ads on even Gmail and even custom domain support. I am not sure on this but I doubt they would be mining any paid Gsuite user's data. Also, even in free you can turn off personalized ads and they would no longer be related to your data. The thing is as you mentioned, with something as personal as email, docs or drive, I would trust a big company to keep it safe. Specially one that has historically has had a very good track record of it. Google hires some of the best offensive security guys, some of them you can see in Project Zero. My experience with DDG hasn't been good at all with anything other than simple term search or website search.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I think that’s a reasonable position to take and you won’t find any disagreement from me. I like supporting software companies where the product is their main focus (I think the ad driven business model is a corrupting influence on design). It can also be tedious to go through all the settings and make sure things remain the way a user would want them. I like working with a company that has incentives aligned with the user. On DDG, I would have said the same thing not that long ago. Everyone will have their own threshold for what’s good enough for them.
- lioeters 6y ago
  > I doubt they would be mining any paid Gsuite user's data I use G Suite at work, and I wondered about this. From Google's modus operandi, I assumed they are mining data, for example, of all work emails to and from the accounts - and probably connected to my personal email addresses somehow, as part of a profile to target ads. Is there a confirmation that this is not (or is) being done? I suppose, from a security/privacy perspective, it's safer to assume that it is, because it's technically possible.
  - rwha 6y ago
    This is entirely anecdotal. I have two chromium profiles, one for work using a G Suite account and one using my personal gmail account. I've noticed the browsing history and search from my work profile impacting my personal search results. I don't believe they use G Suite email/docs to mine data, but the rest is likely fair game.
hellofunk 6y ago
> Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product. Gmail has actually gotten super slow to me, I'm not sure what the problem is. Their site loads slowly, navigating around it is slow, the whole UX is slow. It didn't used to be that way. I've considered migrating for that reason alone, let alone any opinion I have of the company.
- actuator 6y ago
  Yeah, Gmail hasn't become that fast with loading etc. considering how much internet has improved. That is one place where I think they can improve a lot. It also might be related to all the smart auto compose/grammar features they have been adding, which do really improve your workflow but might add just more resources to load/parse on page load.
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  This is how superhuman mail came about. Silly paid solution to a UX problem, but would recommend as a practical workaround if gmail is a major bottleneck to your day job productivity
mianos 6y ago
It seems to me gmail has not changed much in the last few years. Search is much the same but worse. The only change seems to be snippets that, for me, usually host some badly scraped content from another site with wrong answers but more effort on SEO. It seems a bit of a waste of 20% of the page. I wonder what those tens of thousands of people are mainly doing? Maybe working on stuff that we never see, like applying bandaids and string to hold together the ever growing infrastructure that provides the mediocre apps to more and more of the world?
- bb88 6y ago
  I really enjoyed google inbox. Gmail moved a few things over from it, but what I really appreciated was archiving everything older than a month, because usually it was promotional crap anyway.
  - javier2 6y ago
    I also really enjoyed Inbox
    - d3nj4l 6y ago
      In my circle, everyone who used Inbox loved it. One of the most bizarre decisions Google ever made was cutting it.
- jrnichols 6y ago
  I wonder what they're doing, and then I look at the educational space and I realize just what's happening. And I'm kind of alarmed by it, to be honest. Call me paranoid, but we have a growing generation of kids in school that only know Google services. The only web browser is Google Chrome. The only email is Gmail. All word/spreadsheet/etc is Google Docs. School is Google Classroom. Chat is Google Messenger or whatever it it. Google Photos. Google Search. Google Cloud. Google Drive. Google Video or Youtube. ALL they see all day in and out at school are Google properties. I can't be the only one that has noticed this over the years.
  - 6y ago
Zak 6y ago
I've found Gmail's automatic categorization and importance filtering to be a killer feature. Is anybody else doing that reasonably well? I don't want to have to set up a bunch of features manually. I had actually thought of building such things as a startup idea before Gmail was doing it. Perhaps I should have; perhaps Google would have just eaten my lunch.

RealStickman_ 6y ago

Apple's privacy protecting actions only apply in countries where they can go through with it. Here's one example where they can't protect your privacy. [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insight-idUSKCN1G8060 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...

fossuser 6y ago
Yeah I'm with you there, I find western companies making exceptions for China pretty unethical and upsetting: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html I think it's wrong and something they shouldn't do.
- tomcam 6y ago
  That would require actual patriotism from these companies. They have repeatedly demonstrate by playing (legal) games with taxes and by having Chinese slave kids create their products that it is simply not of interest to them. QED

actuator 6y ago

Well, if business model is what you are worried about. If people are fine with paying for email services, you can even pay for Gsuite and then no ads on even Gmail and even custom domain support. I am not sure on this but I doubt they would be mining any paid Gsuite user's data. Also, even in free you can turn off personalized ads and they would no longer be related to your data. The thing is as you mentioned, with something as personal as email, docs or drive, I would trust a big company to keep it safe. Specially one that has historically has had a very good track record of it. Google hires some of the best offensive security guys, some of them you can see in Project Zero. My experience with DDG hasn't been good at all with anything other than simple term search or website search.

fossuser 6y ago
I think that’s a reasonable position to take and you won’t find any disagreement from me. I like supporting software companies where the product is their main focus (I think the ad driven business model is a corrupting influence on design). It can also be tedious to go through all the settings and make sure things remain the way a user would want them. I like working with a company that has incentives aligned with the user. On DDG, I would have said the same thing not that long ago. Everyone will have their own threshold for what’s good enough for them.
lioeters 6y ago
> I doubt they would be mining any paid Gsuite user's data I use G Suite at work, and I wondered about this. From Google's modus operandi, I assumed they are mining data, for example, of all work emails to and from the accounts - and probably connected to my personal email addresses somehow, as part of a profile to target ads. Is there a confirmation that this is not (or is) being done? I suppose, from a security/privacy perspective, it's safer to assume that it is, because it's technically possible.
- rwha 6y ago
  This is entirely anecdotal. I have two chromium profiles, one for work using a G Suite account and one using my personal gmail account. I've noticed the browsing history and search from my work profile impacting my personal search results. I don't believe they use G Suite email/docs to mine data, but the rest is likely fair game.

hellofunk 6y ago

> Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product. Gmail has actually gotten super slow to me, I'm not sure what the problem is. Their site loads slowly, navigating around it is slow, the whole UX is slow. It didn't used to be that way. I've considered migrating for that reason alone, let alone any opinion I have of the company.

actuator 6y ago
Yeah, Gmail hasn't become that fast with loading etc. considering how much internet has improved. That is one place where I think they can improve a lot. It also might be related to all the smart auto compose/grammar features they have been adding, which do really improve your workflow but might add just more resources to load/parse on page load.
texasbigdata 6y ago
This is how superhuman mail came about. Silly paid solution to a UX problem, but would recommend as a practical workaround if gmail is a major bottleneck to your day job productivity

mianos 6y ago

It seems to me gmail has not changed much in the last few years. Search is much the same but worse. The only change seems to be snippets that, for me, usually host some badly scraped content from another site with wrong answers but more effort on SEO. It seems a bit of a waste of 20% of the page. I wonder what those tens of thousands of people are mainly doing? Maybe working on stuff that we never see, like applying bandaids and string to hold together the ever growing infrastructure that provides the mediocre apps to more and more of the world?

bb88 6y ago
I really enjoyed google inbox. Gmail moved a few things over from it, but what I really appreciated was archiving everything older than a month, because usually it was promotional crap anyway.
- javier2 6y ago
  I also really enjoyed Inbox
  - d3nj4l 6y ago
    In my circle, everyone who used Inbox loved it. One of the most bizarre decisions Google ever made was cutting it.
jrnichols 6y ago
I wonder what they're doing, and then I look at the educational space and I realize just what's happening. And I'm kind of alarmed by it, to be honest. Call me paranoid, but we have a growing generation of kids in school that only know Google services. The only web browser is Google Chrome. The only email is Gmail. All word/spreadsheet/etc is Google Docs. School is Google Classroom. Chat is Google Messenger or whatever it it. Google Photos. Google Search. Google Cloud. Google Drive. Google Video or Youtube. ALL they see all day in and out at school are Google properties. I can't be the only one that has noticed this over the years.
- 6y ago

Zak 6y ago

I've found Gmail's automatic categorization and importance filtering to be a killer feature. Is anybody else doing that reasonably well? I don't want to have to set up a bunch of features manually. I had actually thought of building such things as a startup idea before Gmail was doing it. Perhaps I should have; perhaps Google would have just eaten my lunch.