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Email Intervention
- jannes 15y agoI have mixed feelings about this. I don't like to tell other people what they should or should not be doing. It's rude. Maybe that's just me, but I also have never heard of anyone using the "Invite to Gmail" feature (at least since registration is open to everyone).
- alexobenauer 15y agoThat may be the very reason why they made this - to make "Invite to Gmail" more fun, humorous, etc.? Interesting nonetheless, not something I'd care to use. Any of my friends / family not on GMail probably wouldn't understand the email anyway, and would probably assume it was spam.
- kelnos 15y agoI wonder if this is a part of the Google+ push. Once Google opens G+ to the general public, my assumption is that if you have a GMail account, you'll essentially automatically have a G+ account. If you're logged in, then you've become a G+ user just by using GMail or even Google Search.
- bencevans 15y agoI like having my privately hosted email services so Google can not start reading my mail and 'adjust my search accordingly' or anything like that!
- Joeri 15y agoFrankly, until google gets some kind of end-user support going, i would be hard-pressed to recommend any google service.
- jonknee 15y agoAnd the support people get from @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com and @aol.com addresses is better? Unless you're paying for something, don't expect support. You can pay for Google Mail if that end-user support thing is important to you, but I've never had a need for it.
- Vivtek 15y agoYahoo and Microsoft are not cutely asking you to stage an intervention to save your friends from their own misguided proclivities not to use them. So yes. Deserving of some derision.
- corin_ 15y agoPaying for Google services doesn't mean you get good support, FYI.
- jonknee 15y ago"Good support" is a pretty vague term, so I'm not sure what you mean. But you get a SLA and 24/7 access to support. Not sure what more you're looking for.
- corin_ 15y agoI've never needed support from Google so I can't speak from personal experience, but I've read many blogs and comments here on HN complaining that paying for gmail ought to mean good customer support, but in fact it's just as bad as it is for free users. I'm in bed on my blackberry and about to drift off, so I can't be bothered to find examples. Will take a look in the morning.
- 15y ago
- nollidge 15y agoI don't get it. Why would I care what e-mail people are using? I'll tell them about it if I think it will solve some problem they're having, but otherwise it doesn't matter to me.
- crikli 15y agoYou might be someone like me whose Mom can't resist clicking on every effing through that makes it past Hotmail's sub-optimal spam filter. I've tried to get her to go GMail for years but she can't grasp the concept that she doesn't have to tell everyone she has a new email address.
- rjd 15y agohotmail spam filter has improved greatly, more or less caught upto gmails. You'll probably find switching her to gmail won't fix the problem as shes probably signing up to things constantly online and causing the issue herself.
- codeup 15y ago"Save your friends from outdated email" Google has set up a dedicated website to help push people towards using their email service. That's just one side of the medal. The other is that Google wants people to stop using their current email provider and move to them. "Save your friends from YOUNAMEIT" Maybe we'll also see more sites that help you save your friends from continuing to use Gmail, Facebook, Skype,...
- Estragon 15y agoYes, I hate that many of my friends (even my wife) use gmail, so my personal email ends up in google's hands for analysis.
- ez77 15y agoI, for one, want to become proficient enough in sysadmin to painlessly run my own mail server and MUA, know how to back up properly and automatically, filter spam, set up SPF and DKIM. Oh, and host my own name servers too. No sarcasm. In the meantime, I'll stick to Gmail.
- spudlyo 15y agoIt's not entirely painless, but I do it anyway because I can. A third party is never going to have access to my personal email, it's just not going to happen.
- solarcanine 15y agoSo, how's running that datacenter been? Any trouble setting up peering agreements? Sorry, but using the "no third party blah blah blah" is just a strawman looking for a match.
- Vivtek 15y agoGetting the power plant up and running was the hard part, let me tell you!
- spudlyo 15y agoThe box is still my property, even though it is in somebody else's data center. My ISP has physical access, so it's not like it's uber secure, but there are a comforting number of hoops that they'd need to jump through to grovel through my mail spool.
- siglesias 15y agoDefinitely seems to be a play at getting them on Google+. After all, they are your "friends."
- jsm386 15y agoWonder why the share on fb/twitter links are commented out. Share on G+ - really just preaching to the choir there...
- bpierre 15y agoI thought it was about fixing Gmail. http://www.email-standards.org/clients/gmail/ http://www.email-standards.org/clients/gmail/
- Macha 15y agoReally, I couldn't care less about my email client supporting CSS. I much rather emails in plain text than distracting formatting.
- Vivtek 15y agoOh, hey, yeah, I'm going to "stage an intervention" to get people to switch to the company that's going to yank their email with no human to complain to, whenever they feel like it. This is ham-handed and frankly not nearly as funny as I'm sure it seemed on campus.
- 9999 15y agoYeah, cringe inducing.
- gallerytungsten 15y agoMakes you wonder what happened to "don't be evil."
- Vivtek 15y agoWell, I'm pretty sure this would be covered under "Don't be naive", actually.
- dredmorbius 15y agoTruth to tell, AOL's customer service is hardly superior. If you want premium levels of email service, then sign on with a premium email service provider.
- Vivtek 15y agoYou know, I don't really care about AOL - but I normally wouldn't find this little Googlism all that much a hot-button topic either, were it not for this mess surrounding Google+ right now, including the deletion of a child's Gmail account when he gave a truthful date of birth when Google invited him to Google+. Which is to say, you're not wrong, but maybe not seeing the point I was going for. Google's drawn my negative attention an awful lot lately in terms of whether I'd feel comfortable recommending them to somebody who had somehow remained untouched by Google, and I found the "intervention" conceit to be going too far in terms of tone-deafness.
- unicornporn 15y agoOne of the fine thing about email is that (unlike social networking services like Facebook or Google+) it's based on open and widely used protocols that works across service providers. Why would I ever care what email service provider someone else uses? I trust peoples choices. Hotmail/Windows Live Mail is quite nice these days.
- bittermang 15y agoHotmail's got a lot of small neat features now days. Like Sweep, I can delete or move all the emails from a certain -- or multiple -- addresses in a few clicks. I can even check a single dialog box and make this in to a permanent rule. If I mark a message as Junk, but they're in my contact book, I get a check box that says "I think this person was hacked!" ... I have no idea what it does, but it seems like a neat idea in theory. Plenty of times I've gotten junk email from someone I know because they were compromised on some level. And those are just the features I've noticed, because I don't use Hotmail as my primary email contact.
- zobzu 15y agoSave your friends! Make them use all Google products! Make them give their details to Google, their emails, their browser, their lives, and make sure to reload those ads while you're at it! Internet in 2020: Using a Google Laptop to access the Google.com with a Google browser, using a Google search engine that searches mostly through Google services (other services died), talking to people via Google talk, phoning them via Google Voice, checking you Google email, managing your documents on Google docs, your schedule on Google calendar, share your pictures on Google picasa, your videos on Google youtube, your life on Google+ Heck, you don't see it coming yet?! What do you need more? Internet will be Google and world domination is rather near. Yeah I know it sounds funny but it's not actually just a joke - it looks pretty damn much near to our actually present already.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoYup, Google should stop making successful products because people like zobzu like to list them ominously and imply that Google is making you use them. I don't understand posts like this. Use a Microsoft Windows laptop to access Bing with IE, use Bing and Hotmail, talk to people on Windows Messenger, [no GVoice equivalent], checking Hotmail, managing docs on Live or Office 365, etc, etc. What a bunch of nonsense.
- wtn 15y ago[no GVoice equivalent] Skype :)
- rjd 15y agoOne friend? The majority of my friends don't use gmail. Its just not that good of a service, exchange, and big services like that make it laughable. Plus I've found it unreliable with certain ISPs, mail just doesn't arrive. Black holed, never making it to the spam folder, not being bounced back. So sorry its amatuer mail and I'll let people choose there own life style, but I will not recomend it for work related stuff.
- rjd 15y agoAlso a recent update was lampooned pretty hard by my friend. They where advertising better ads as a new amazing feature... Really? Im pretty no one uses gmail to view ads on purpose... How about some rules and filtering options insteads... Priorities are wrong... Also hotmail has caught up on the spam issue, there isn't a real reason to switch except for ego.
- loup-vaillant 15y agoBrilliant. I can't wait to use that idea to save my friends from Big Brother. Hmm… But they would have to trust me instead of Google. Well, better send them a FreedomBox for Christmas, then.
- wcameron 15y agoReally, really nice design. I'm loving Google's newfound attention to aesthetics. What's with the Gotham though? I know H&FJ keep talking about making their fonts embeddable one day, but it hasn't happened yet: http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php?faqID=126#Faq_126 http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php?faqID=126#Faq_126
- carterdea 15y agoI saw a tweet from Jonathan Hoefler sarcastically saying he loves when the Gmail team uses pirated versions of his font online, or something to that affect, but it appears he has deleted it: http://twitter.com/#!/H_FJ http://twitter.com/#!/H_FJ
- Pewpewarrows 15y agoOh, so the HN hivemind decided it's shit all over Gmail day in this thread because a guy with pictures barely indistinguishable from child porn had his Google account temporarily banned? Good to know.
- bittermang 15y agoFirst they came for the alleged child predators, and I did not speak out because I support children.
- kalistoga 15y agoIn fact, more and more I want to encourage my friends to stay away from gmail. Hell even I'm in the process of moving away from using Google accounts. I can understand that Google is trying to collect as much user data in as accurate way as possible, but recently it's been increasingly annoying how they are trying to fix what's not broken. I have multiple google accounts for different purposes, and recently Google started disallowing multi-user access to their sites. This is extremely inconvenient and annoying for me that I'm even thinking about switching to another email provider. In fact I have already started using ymail for certain purposes. I might be a minority for now, but I see this annoyance will only accelerate in the future for even ordinary people as Google tries to fight against Facebook with identity. What do you all think?
- mirkules 15y agoPersonally, I still use Gmail because IMAP and POP access is still available. My machine at home downloads my emails via IMAP while I'm at work. No problem. But I find it creepy knowing that Google is keeping an eye on everything I do. Therefore, I started to diversify: use Bing for search, use Bing or Yahoo! maps, never stay logged into Google services... actually these are the only Google services I use regularly, so that's pretty much it. I do have to say, for searching programming stuff Bing is kinda "meh" but livable. I do have a question: suppose you sign into your Google account, and now your account is correlated with your IP address, then you sign out. I wonder if Google keeps track of searches from your IP address while you are signed out and correlates it with your account (perhaps with a little less weight)? Edit: Forgot to mention Android. Definitely more than creepy. Also, even if Microsoft is collecting information, it means MS will have only some of the info.
- kalistoga 15y agoWho knows what they are doing behind. What I'm annoyed about is that they seem like they are trying to commit suicide. I can understand they want to "leverage" their existing assets, but the sacrifice is too much. As you said, there's no problem if you use IMAP and POP access with your desktop client, and therein lies the problem. Google is supposed to bring everything to the cloud. They used to be good at it. But they are now going backwards and making people become dependent on devices. I already see many people using the mail client Sparrow just for that reason. I think they've lost their mind being too obsessed with Facebook and Twitter.
- sidwyn 15y agoI find this quite poorly programmed. The service looks for emails that end with @gmail.com, but fail to take into account companies with email provided by Google Apps.
- manish 15y agoSugar coating email invite is lame. There was a time when I almost always saw google doing awesome things. Now it doesn't look any different from other big companies like microsoft or IBM. I wonder if it is possible to be a big company and still do really cool things?
- DeepakAV 15y agoFunny thing is it works for sending mails for change to Gmail accounts too!
- patio11 15y agoThat's the least Googley Google thing I've ever seen. It's bald-faced bare-knuckles competitive, focuses 95% on FUD and 5% on features, and seems to know this and get by by saying "Don't worry, I'm being ironic about it" but it isn't.
- sramov 15y agoI wanted to make an opposite `gmailintervention.com` site, it appears they registered it with MarkMonitor Brand Protection™ :)