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> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. I’ll stop you here. Google offered it for free and, at t
by redserk 5mo ago
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.
I’ll stop you here. Google offered it for free and, at the time, offered such an high amount of mail storage for free it sounded insane. At the time, my ISP gave me a 25MB or 50MB inbox and that was considered pretty decent, when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB.
They absolutely have a right to take ant steps they deem necessary to prevent malicious use of their product, and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free, but Google wasn’t forced to provide a free email service, much less one that went so far above and beyond their competition.
- benoliver999 5mo agoI remember in the early days you could watch your storage quota go up in real time.
- bachmeier 5mo ago> and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free And I'll stop you here. It's less than obvious that there's no obligation. If you provide a critical service that folks rely on at a price less than your cost, you drive out competition, and it's a critical part of your own business model, dropping the service without warning is IMO on the border of what Google should be allowed to do.
- motbus3 5mo agoYeah! I can't believe people know basics about cartels, trusts and dumping.
- WalterBright 5mo agoExcept gmail is hardly a cartel, etc. I've never had a gmail account.
- s1mplicissimus 5mo agoI'd assume that you also never tried running your own email server and have the email actually delivered to a gmail address, then.
- WalterBright 5mo agoThat did work for decades up until recently. It took me a bit to realize that google email recipients had stopped receiving my emails.
- motbus3 5mo agoThey basically force yourself to register to their service go allow your emails to be possibly analyzed. It takes dozens or hundreds of emails to warm up a single self hosted email account
- vel0city 5mo agoI've self-hosted email systems for businesses for nearly 20 years. I've actually had far easier times delivering to Gmail/Workspace clients than Outlook. Outlook constantly breaks strict DKIM with some of their protection scanning nonsense for emails that seem to get good deliverability almost everywhere else.
- BenjiWiebe 5mo ago
- axegon_ 5mo agoNot only that. I was probably not even a teenager or barely a teenager when registering a gmail was not as simple as clicking "sign up". You needed someone to refer you and upon registration you got 25 referrals in return. Needless to say, entirely ditched gmail forever ago and use it as a spam mail. They can have all the fun they want training slop on that.
- ccppurcell 5mo agoAlso they make it really difficult to mass delete stuff. I'm basically stuck paying for their storage because I don't really have the skills to self host (but I'm working on it!)
- bigfatkitten 5mo agoThey make it impossible to delete stuff if you stop paying! I was on Google Workspace for about 10 years. I moved off their service because the mandatory Gemini price hikes meant that it no longer represented value for money. I get excessive storage utilisation warnings for some shared drives I used to have but because I no longer have a paid up license, I can’t manage shared drives anymore. So I can’t delete them. Google’s “support” team in India told me all sorts of lies about how to resolve the issue, but they’ve finally settled on a position that I would need to reinstate my Workspace account, at my own expense in order to delete the data to stop the emails and save Google money. They refuse to acknowledge the patent absurdity of this situation and escalate it to someone who can actually fix it.
- eks391 5mo agoGoogle has support?? How did you find it, and what other services besides gmail does it cover?
- vel0city 5mo agoNote they said "workspace". This has some level of support baked in, as this is the paid enterprise product. https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/support/contact-google-workspace-support https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/support/contact...
- bigfatkitten 5mo agoThey call it support, but that’s not the term I would use.
- ValentineC 4mo ago
- MichaelRo 5mo ago> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. This argument would have flown 30 years ago with Yahoo. Since then we had Uber pumping so much money into a losing business until it drew the competition bankrupt. And now we have AI pumping so much money into a losing business until they hopefully replicate Uber, only won't work and signs are all over the wall that they just burned a trillion dollars. Which opens great prospectives for incumbents WHO LEARN FROM THE MISTAKES of the powers be at the time. About time to start a "Don't be evil. FOR REAL." This time. If in 30 years it's necessary to start "Don't be evil. REALLY, REALLY, REALLY this time" then so be it. I'm starting the 2.0 version. Fuck AI. Fuck incumbents. Long live long life and freedom of choice!
- hn_acc1 5mo agoI find your views interesting and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. No really - got more ideas about "Don't be evil. FOR REAL"?
- MichaelRo 5mo agoDon't have an online presence yet, will let you know when I add that.
- alex1138 5mo ago(Please understand I'm being sarcastic. You should interpret this post as a joke) Hi. I'm a VC bigwig and I'm very interested in purchasing your company. I, too, believe in Not Being Evil
- gerdesj 5mo ago"when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB." The G in Gmail was for a gigabyte and that was what I got in the noughties for "free", when as you say my ISP offered something like 5MB on the end of a POP connection. To be fair you can cram a lot of ASCII into 5MB. However you can email piccies to a mailbox with a 1GB limit if your modem doesn't melt first. Obviously, this was during the "don't be evil" days.
- autoexec 5mo agoEven then the reason they were giving people so much storage space was because they wanted people to get in the habit of keeping their private data on Google's servers so that Google could mine it whenever they felt like it. Giving users effectively unlimited space was a selfish move on Google's part, not a gift.
- anjel 5mo agoTry signing up for a Google Gemini Paid account with a third party email... Better still, try signing up for a Gemini Paid account with a registered android phone that isn't triangulated to a desktop. If they can't own you, they don't want you at all.
- bmitc 5mo agoGoogle's annual revenue is $350 billion. I can't believe someone would feel bad for such a company, because as you pointed out, this entire Gmail thing is part of the reason they have that revenue. Google has done nothing but be a wolf in sheep's clothing. I'm not going to shed a tear because they have to maintain an email service.