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> 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 se
by 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 agoExactly. Outlook is the main source of deliverability headaches.
- expedition32 5mo agoIsn't that a good thing? I'm quite happy with Outlook filtering out trash.
- vel0city 5mo agoNo. It will do things when shuffling the email through its various scanner platforms that will make their systems think the original sender is outlook's systems. So then when their later downstream service looks at the email it's like "cool an email from Outlook, let's see if Outlook is allowed to send for this domain...hmm...seems like outlook isn't allowed to send and I'm supposed to reject emails coming from unapproved senders so rejected!" The way it sometimes bounces emails around in their own systems lead to them sometimes mixing up who actually originally sent the message. This causes all kinds of problems and seems entirely unique to their crappy setup.
- BenjiWiebe 5mo agoIn our case, we're a small business, and we don't do email marketing. So I'd say that anything of ours that gets dropped by Outlook isn't trash. The only non-hand-typed email we send are transactional - actually transactional as in "here's your invoice" or "here's you're tracking number". You know, you could achieve 100% spam filtering by just deleting every email. You wouldn't see any spam at all!
- drnick1 5mo agoI self-host an email server and can definitely send email to Gmail addresses.
- ranger_danger 5mo agoBeen doing it for over 20 years without issue, for myself and many other customers.
- account42 5mo agoYMMV but I never had issues with Gmail accepting mail from my personal server. And I didn't even do anything Gmail-specific, just standard SPF+DKIM and making sure my server is not an open relay etc. Microsoft on the other hand...
- mapt 5mo agoWe needed a stamp. Regulated "Emails cost 1 penny" would have worked fine. All you need to do to meaningfully fight spam is have a cost that isn't completely negligible; Spammers started out at a rate where they spend less than a day's wages to message literally every human being on the planet; At those costs even finding a single person you can convince of your Nigerian prince account nets you a profit. We controlled the pipes and the formats in the 90's and 00's almost unilaterally. We should have made a stamp.
- idle_zealot 5mo agoIt does feel like a lot of very intelligent people here basically start at a first principles belief in property rights, and discover or dispute all of the rights and protections put in place over centuries to patch up the issues that occur when that philosophy meets reality. It reflects poorly on our education systems that these apparently weren't covered or were unconvincing when presented. Or maybe it's just a reflection of the era? In practice organizations seem to be repealing these protections through limited interpretations or loopholes, so maybe that skews people's expectations?
- donkyrf 5mo ago[flagged]
- idle_zealot 5mo agoThat our education system wasn't resilient to that well-funded propaganda machine is what reflects poorly on it. That such a machine is allowed to exist reflects poorly on our institutions more broadly. I'll never blame human greed. Systems are designed for humans, if they fail to account for human nature then they're bad systems. I'm not really interested in litigating whether humans as a species are bad.
- Barrin92 5mo ago>Systems are designed for humans They also happen to be designed by humans, and if you're just begging to have the system fix people's beliefs about corporate greed for you but don't think people themselves are at fault I have no idea why you'd think the systems would be fixed. Always these complains about corporations or systems or institutions, the responsible person is never "I". If you're unwilling to take responsibility for your institutions why do you think they'd fix your problems? The beauty is people always get the institutions and rulers they deserve, it's not some mysterious system that allows these things to happen, it's you and I.
- idle_zealot 5mo ago
- redserk 5mo agoI should have been more clear that I feel bad for the users. I don’t have much empathy for Google.
- p-e-w 5mo agoI’d say that if Google suddenly stopped providing Gmail for free, destroying the primary means of communication for billions of people, governments would be justified in immediately nationalizing Google with no compensation. Corporations aren’t magical entities that somehow exist outside of social obligations and can do whatever they want as long as their own terms of service permit it.
- otterley 5mo ago> Corporations aren’t magical entities that somehow exist outside of social obligations and can do whatever they want as long as their own terms of service permit it. Where's your support for this statement in the law?
- p-e-w 5mo agoWhen push comes to shove, the law stops mattering, every time. That’s true for individual rights and it’s true for corporate entities too. The era where things like that don’t happen is a very small slice of human history that is currently coming to an end in real time all around the world. Not long ago, a government simply taking over a company was something that occurred quite regularly.
- gpm 5mo agoThe existence of law itself is the only necessary support... Law is merely encoded social obligations that the government will enforce. That a single law constrains corporations in any way (and that is clearly the case) proves the statement. In the broader context GP is clearly advocating for what the law should be, or should be changed to should certain events come to pass. Demanding support in existing law for a proposed change in law is nonsense if that's what you meant to do instead of narrowly discussing the nearly vaccuously true quote you pulled out.
- kelipso 5mo agoPeople can actually make new laws. Happens all the time.
- account42 5mo ago
- kevin_thibedeau 5mo agoThere were plenty of free email services before gmail. Google isn't at fault here because they provided a better experience.
- denkmoon 5mo agoThere are plenty of free email services _after_ Gmail too. If Google want to destroy their product, have at it.
- account42 5mo agoThere aren't any alternatives that let you keep you @gmail.com address.
- vel0city 5mo agoI'm not able to continue to receive mail at the apartment I lived at a decade ago. It turns out after I stopped paying for the apartment I lost the ability to control that mailbox. This is a normal thing to happen in the physical world. We really shouldn't have such strict connections between email being a primary identifier for a user, requiring only a single one on an account, and not letting users change what they consider their primary email address. Email addresses can and should change over time. If someone really wants to ensure you have a piece of digital real estate one should get into the "ownership" game and get your own domain. People somehow end up buying and selling houses all the time which is far more complicated paperwork-wise, and yet we act like registering a domain name and configuring it for an email provider is just nearly impossible for normal people to handle.
- account42 5mo agoIt's a giant pain in the ass in the real world. I don't think we should accept such friction for switching providers online just because we have such limits in superficially similar operations.
- 5mo ago
- bmitc 5mo agoI think people have forgotten the various historic monopolies and abuse they've perpetuated just because the new ones do it digitally.