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Gmail now features ads that look like emails
- samsquire 13y agoFunny that the industry fights spam until it comes full circle and starts introducing its own version of spam but it's not called spam, it's advertising. cf. Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter
- Kiro 13y agoI don't mind.
- dotcoma 13y agoFastMail(.fm) costs $19.95 per year with 1 GB of storage and $39.95 with 10 GB of storage. And no ads, no NSA etc. Stop complaining. Change provider.
- amyunus 13y agoI read information there, instead of complaint. It's just like we live in the city and there are many ads on the road. Ads in Google Mail, so far, are not so annoying as other free email provider did.
- conroy 13y agoFrom the Fastmail thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6070070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6070070 Fastmail has servers in the United States (https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_about.html https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_about.html), which means the NSA can still request access to those servers.
- nmjenkins 13y agoI work for FastMail. We (Opera Software Australia) are an Australian company, subject to Australian privacy laws regardless of the location of our servers. We legally must only respond to Australian law enforcement agencies with valid Australian warrants (summary of the law is available here: https://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Privacy/tia.html https://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Privacy/tia.html).
- windsurfer 13y agoWhat happens if your hosting company gets an NSA request to access your servers?
- ceejayoz 13y agoBeing Australian probably makes it easier on the NSA, not harder. They're allowed to spy unfettered on foreigners.
- medde 13y agoI thought that the NSA was grabbing all data going through the cables at large ISPs so that they don't need to send requests at individual companies? For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
- jrockway 13y agoWhat leads you to believe that the NSA isn't monitoring FastMail?
- PurplePanda 13y agoThe article was about intrusive advertisements not who is or isn't monitoring which email providers. Switching to fast mail solves the problem the article was complaining about!
- scmccarthy 13y agodotcoma's comment however, claimed "no NSA etc". While it's not pertinent to this article, I think pointing out spurious claims (which people might be believing and acting on) has value regardless.
- mineo 13y agoBut dotcomas comment was claiming "No NSA".
- adventured 13y ago$19.95 for 1gb of storage? Never thought I'd consider $1.66 / month to be a rip off.
- dangrossman 13y agoRackspace Mail is $2/mo/mailbox. That gets you a 100% uptime SLA, 25GB storage, configurable daily backups and 24/7/365 phone/chat/mail support. http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/ http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/
- kexek 13y agoPrice is kinda misleading. It requires to add Microsoft Exchange (+10$ per month) or buy 5+ mailboxes
- Karunamon 13y agoAlmost certainly NSA'd, their SLA is along the same line as Google's (i.e. your compensation for critical email going down is an absolute pittance), not sure why I should be handling the backups. Nice support, though. One thing that Rackspace is really, really good at.
- codeka 13y agoOr Google Apps for $50 per year with 30GB of storage. No need to change platforms.
- agilebyte 13y agoOr use Namecheap Email Hosting which is free for the first year and beginning at $2.99/year (3GB) after that. It uses Open-Xchange as the web UI.
- aet 13y agoAnother option, Lavabit is $16 for 2 years.
- conroy 13y agoPrevious discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6068873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6068873
- neeee 13y agoWhy is this at the bottom?
- enraged_camel 13y agoBecause Google fanboys flag anything anti-Google. It has been happening often recently: stories that paint Google in a negative light fall off the front page despite continuing to receive a ton of upvotes and comments.
- RyanZAG 13y agoLuckily it's easy to disable, or I'd be jumping ship now. Just turn off the tabs and the ads go with them - and the tabs are pretty useless anyway.
- binderbizingdos 13y agoadblock?
- Kiro 13y agoThe tabs have already improved my Gmail experience tremendously so not sure why you think they are useless.
- cstross 13y agoIn my case they're useless because I read email via IMAP -- I only ever visit the web interface if I don't have access to my laptop or want to flag something as spam. More to the point, I do not want some algorithm "helpfully" sorting my incoming email into different views according to some opaque criteria that I don't get to define or tweak: I want to see everything in my default inbox, no exceptions. Permitting someone else to sort my mail via rules I have not defined is how important business email gets missed or overlooked.
- Legion 13y ago> according to some opaque criteria that I don't get to define or tweak Exactly this. When I saw the tabbed inbox, my first thought was, "oh, this will be cool", followed shortly by, "wait, I don't get to control or customize this at all?" Really, why can't I define my own tabs for specific searches/labels? The black box tabs they provide now should just have been defaults within a customizable feature.
- arkem 13y agoYou can customize it but the UI isn't particularly obvious. You can drag emails between tabs to teach gmail which is the most appropriate tab, you can also designate inboxes as a filter action. Personally I think it's a great feature but one I won't be using because I already have a labyrinth of filter rules that perform the same function.
- lloeki 13y agoTitle is wrong/linkbait. Not 'your inbox'. Actual title is: "New Gmail Inbox Features Ads That Look Like Emails, Above Promotional Email Subscriptions" (emphasis mine).
- hrktb 13y agoThe previous discussion had this distinction all over the place as well, but...I've looked at what's in my promotions tab, and a few mailing lists and some of the shop member mail I subscrided went there by default. 'Promotions' is set as a split part of my inbox, not some feature coming out of nowhere with whole new and google only content. Having junk ads in there is the same as having junk ads in my inbox. PS: yes I can just get rid of the new tabs and go back to the old layout, and tha's what I did. I just hink the difference made between the main tab and promotions tab doesn't seem meaningful in this discussion.
- Shooti 13y agoTechnically all they did in the tabbed layout was swap the old ads which hovered over the Inbox message list with embedded ads in the Promotion tab. So the choice is between "Ads in Inbox list + Ads in message view" VS "Ads in Promotions tab + Ads in message view". There's no real difference between tabbed inbox style and the classic inbox styles except presentation if you think about it.
- comex 13y agoExcept that presentation is important. An ad that looks like an email is, in a sense, deceptive, masquerading as something you've valued enough to put in your inbox (well, at least enough not to bother opting out from...).
- jevinskie 13y agoReminds me of "Download Now" ads that purport to look like the one legit download link. It turns into a game of "try not to download malware".
- x0054 13y agoYou can also pay for google apps and get ad free interface with tech support, last I checked.
- tluyben2 13y agoSerious question (couldn't find it and mailing Google is not very effective usually): can I keep my current email address and convert it to paid Google apps? It would be absolutely useless if not :)
- tokenizerrr 13y agoI don't think so, at least not directly. Paid google apps requires you to use your own domain name as far as I know. Even so, you can set your old account to forward to your new, and add your old account as a sender on your new and make it the default. That way all email you send/receive on the new account will go to/come from the old account.
- tokenizerrr 13y agoIt does actually seem to be the case, I was wrong [1]. [1]: http://btsync.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/BitTorrentSyncUserGuide.pdf http://btsync.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/BitTorrentS...
- comex 13y agoI think you replied to the wrong post.
- tokenizerrr 13y agoI meant to correct myself since I could no longer edit.
- imonkey 13y agoThat's why I switch on iCloud mail!
- anuaitt 13y agoI don't understand why people are making a fuss about it. It shows only when you have chosen your inbox to show different categories. Secondly it shows only in promotional email subscriptions. Not disturbing "Primary tab".
- sigkill 13y agoI'm reasonably certain that this is far more sinister than a simple advertisement tactic. No, dear people, this has all the similarity to Google's 411 service. I have this feeling that Google has implemented some new nifty ML-algorithms and we are giving them the training data. "We" are those people who aren't techy and think 'Sweet, I can classify my email nicely now'.
- znowi 13y agoThat's nothing. Wait till they start streaming context dependent ads straight to your Google Glass :) * Getting in your 2008 Toyota... Tada! An ad presenting the 2013 model. * Walking by a Nike store... Tada! An ad featuring new sneakers. * About to make love and for some reason left your Glass on... Tada! A safe sex promotion ad.
- adityarajbhatt 13y agoI love the new Gmail interface. The promotions and social tab allow me to keep my main inbox (Primary) to be clean. In fact, now I will simply go for weeks without having to see the stupid promotional emails and just mass-delete them at some time.
- area51org 13y agoI have four Gmail accounts, and I've indeed seen this, but only two or three times. Anyone seeing this all the time?
- aroman 13y agoSometimes I would really like to switch from Gmail, but I look around at the alternatives and think "do I trust this to be as reliable as Gmail? as stable? as dependable?" The answer is always no. I hope I'm believing an illusion, but regardless, I still feel like Google's infrastructure is the only one I'd trust with my emails. Reliability > privacy for me (for now)
- seiji 13y agoIt's email, not a Volvo. email is one of the most fault tolerant things on the Internet. Start hosting it yourself. You'll be okay (plus, procmail!).
- packetslave 13y agoYou'll be okay Until you realize half your outbound mail isn't getting delivered because the person who had your VPC's IP before you was a spammer, or because you didn't correctly navigate the labyrinth of DKIM, SPF, feedback loops, and arbitrary recipient mail server policies.
- seiji 13y agoVery good points. I use a third party TLS SMTP server for most outgoing stuff. Realistically, DKIM, SPF, and other overbearing qualifications should only triggered if you're doing mass mailings. Ideally, you shouldn't get denied delivery if you're using an unqualified personal server (that, as you mentioned, hasn't previously been 100% blocked due to bad behavior by anybody in the past ever).
- medde 13y agoFinding something as stable or dependable as gmail isn't the problem (try live.com), but some of it's features is a different story (although not an email feature, live.com's calendar doesn't even have a search feature as far as I know).
- manishm 13y agoah those are under promotions tab anyway, how does this affect?