When Gmail first appeared in 2004, the idea of having what seemed like a never-ending space for email was revolutionary. Most paid services were providing a few megabytes of space, and here came Google promising a full gigabyte (which, at the time, seemed huge) for free.

Over the years, however, Gmail has added a plethora of features that it touts as “improvements” but some of them are irritating. Worse, it looks for ads for things that it will never need and sticks them at the top of email list.

Back in the dark ages before Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other free cloud-based apps, most email happened either via paid services or inside of walled gardens. In the former, you paid a service provider for an email account and downloaded your email into an app that only lived on your computer — an app with a name like Pine, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, or Thunderbird.

For the most part, nobody was scanning your email to find out the last time you bought shoes, or whether you were shopping for car insurance, or that you had recently been buying gifts for a relative’s new baby. Nobody was taking that information and selling it to vendors so they could drop ads into your email lists or surprise you with additional promotional messages. Your email lived on your computer alone. Once it was downloaded and erased from the server, it was just yours — to save or erase or lose.

  • sugar_in_your_tea
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    2 months ago

    Absolutely!

    I pay for Tuta, and it works great! I pay €3.60 because I haven’t fully committed, and I’ll probably prepay a year to get that down to €3/month. It’s really not that expensive, and I get to use my own domain as well (so me@mydomain.com).

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I’ve been slowly trying to claw my workspace email back to my Gmail account so I can stop paying for workspace and move it to proton, unfortunately I have a metric buttload of Android apps and Google auth wrapped around my workspace emails.

      • sugar_in_your_tea
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        2 months ago

        Yeah, I recently went through a lot of that pain. But I’m now 99% gmail-free, and most of the stuff forwarded from gmail is junk.

        • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          yeah my workspace has a catchall with forwards. I had practically abandoned my old gmail, but I need a viable google account for my phone

          • sugar_in_your_tea
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            2 months ago

            That’s fair, and it’s certainly a process.

            I largely went cold-turkey and got a phone w/ GrapheneOS and refused to install Google Play. I replaced a bunch of apps with FOSS alternatives available through F-Droid, and I have a handful I can’t replace installed through Aurora w/o my Google Account. I made a separate profile for Google Play apps, but that only has like 2 apps in it that I rarely use.

            It’s surprisingly functional, but it did totally suck during the transition period. But I’m mostly free of Google crap now, with the main leftover being Google Sheets because I like the =GOOGLEFINANCE() feature and haven’t found a replacement.