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"Embrace, extend, extinguish" all over again. I am appalled at how many people use Gmail, giving up their privacy, control over E-mail, and leading to an overly
by jwr 1y ago
"Embrace, extend, extinguish" all over again. I am appalled at how many people use Gmail, giving up their privacy, control over E-mail, and leading to an overly centralized system where our mail is controlled by 2-3 companies at most (about 30% of my spam comes from Google servers, they pretty much ignore abuse reports, and I have no way to block it, because they are "too big to fail").
Now we will get a slowly introduced proprietary encryption scheme that will pretend to be "open", but will be carefully controlled so that it is slightly broken for everyone except Google. Several years down the road we'll wake up in a world where people will be annoyed that you can't receive their E-mail and will tell you to "just use gmail".
Replace "Google" with "Microsoft" and "Gmail" with "Outlook" and it's the 1990s all over again.
- aptwebapps 1y agoWhat's the best Gmail alternative wrt UI features?
- ssivark 1y agoWhat UI features do you consider important? I feel that email UI is largely standardized, and the main differentiating factor is speed (and Gmail is definitely not fast). OTOH, what Gmail does with filtering promotional crap (spam, tbh) is decent, but I haven't compared against other mail service providers, so I can't give a comparative opinion.
- aptwebapps 1y agoGood conversation threading first. For the rest it may just be that I'm used to it but I find it generally much easier to read than, say, Outlook.
- Hnrobert42 1y agoI use the Spark Mail client for that reason.
- l72 1y agoDo you like how gmail does threading? It’s flat threading and incorrect ordering is why I will not use gmail’s web interface.
- ndr 1y agoFastmail finally made their android client work offline too. I've had a good time with them so far and am a happy customer. You can add as many domains you want and just easily leave if you're no longer happy.
- lentil_soup 1y agoanother vote for fastmail, I got my own domain and been slowly changing my email eveywhere away from gmail. No need to do it all in one go. I barely touch my gmail account anymore, feels so freeing!
- self_awareness 1y agoThunderbird
- ajyotirmay 1y agoNot a clue about what you're seeking. I'm using mailbox, and thunderbird as a client for my devices (android, windows, linux and macos). It works. For E2EE, I have GPG setup on all of my devices. It costs me a little over €1/month for paid account as I use my own domain. The experience has been good, and something I absolutely advocate for and promote.
- broken-kebab 1y agoThunderbird is not something one can recommend to a non-techie friend as a replacement for GMail. At least the last time I checked on Android, it required additional tuning for pushes, it worked poorly when there was too many messages in inbox (which is what almost everyone coming from Gmail has), didn't provide text formatting.
- agile-gift0262 1y agoI don't know about "the best", but I'm very happy with Fastmail. It has a very nice UI, it has contacts and calendar, uses open standards, and their privacy policy is fine.
- segphault 1y agoI switched to Fastmail when I degoogled, and I've been very happy with it. I genuinely feel that its UX and feature set are better than what I was getting from GMail.
- e12e 1y agoDo you mean a self-hosted webmail app? Or a native/multi-platform native email client? Personally I think Gmail UI is meh - but I no longer use email that much - so terrible UI/ux and no proper quoting/threading support isn't all that problematic.
- ajyotirmay 1y agoValid concern. I have been decoupling my dependency on Google for quite some time now
- t_mahmood 1y agoWhat is your email solution? I was looking at ProtonMail. Now FastMail seems good too. So, wondering what is the best option between each.
- auslegung 1y agoNot OP but I switched from gmail to fastmail in 2019 because at the time they were the cheapest option that provided unlimited email aliases and masked email. Masked email feels great, I feel like I’m in control of the communication. I can turn it off at any point
- Towaway69 1y ago+1 for fastmail, been using them for a few years now and haven't any complaints. Have many domains with them, wildcard emails are easily configured so that every service that I subscribe to gets a unique email address. One minor issue is their JMAP[1] protocol if you want to automate email sending - its intention are good just that no one else supports it. [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8621.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8621.html
- robertlagrant 1y agoI use Protonmail. Gradually switching my logins over, but it takes ages.
- bsoles 1y agoNot the OP. I have been happy so far with Proton Mail over the last 3 months. Moving my logins took some time, but I am pretty happy with Proton Pass for now and their other tools. The only dilemma that I have now is whether to use my own domain name or proton.me, pm.me, etc. I currently use the latter. Reducing the number of emails in my Gmail inbox to zero was a happy day for me. "Do no evil" my ass.
- 1y ago
- dist-epoch 1y ago> introduced proprietary encryption scheme that will pretend to be "open" You could say the same about Signal, how is signal more open than Gmail.
- willis936 1y agoThis signal? Is proprietary? https://signal.org/docs/ https://signal.org/docs/ https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal
- gruez 1y agoSignal doesn't officially allow third party apps, unlike emails where you can use whatever app/server you want.
- jwr 1y agoThis is a classic "whataboutism"-style argument: derail the discussion by asking "but what about...". Setting aside whether what you wrote is true, we are not talking about Signal here.
- ajross 1y ago> I am appalled at how many people use Gmail, giving up their privacy The article is literally about cross-vendor E2E email encryption. I mean, we all understand that you mean to invoke the Standard HN Litany Against Google here. But surely you at least should nod to the fact that the linked article stands as a point against your position, no?
- Kiboneu 1y agoI think he has a point. Slack and discord used to have IRC and XMPP, which made the decision to switch seem safer in light of the issues we experience today (holding backlog hostage for a fee, advertising, a/b tests). They timed the depreciation of these bridges so that it had minimal impact on their sales due to the existing network effects and captive audiences (employees, mostly). We have seen this played out over and over and over again. It’s tiring, and it would be great for more people to be aware of these market capture tactics to make them less effective.
- ajross 1y ago> Slack and discord Slack and Discord aren't Google though? Not understanding the point here. You can use this argument against any product from any manufacturer, it seems like. Are you arguing against interoperability in general? Or taking an absolutist free software position that proprietary tools are never acceptable? Doesn't seem to me like that was the position upthread I was responding to.
- Kiboneu 1y agoThe point we are both addressing has to do with a behavioral pattern exhibited by companies with the same incentive model over the past 30 years. Not a re-summarization of an article by one of those companies.
- theshrike79 1y agoGoogle Talk used to be XMPP too. It's not proprietary tools, it's the fact that they lure you in with open protocols and then rugpull to a proprietary one.