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.
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What gmail did to email, was provide an insanely good spam filter compared to others. It was in their best interest to keep everyones ads out of your email except their own.
To this very day, I know nobody - NOBODY - who even comes close to Gmail’s spam filtering capability.
They bought up postini. Before then their spam filtering was poor.
They then leveraged that to get enterprises ising postini into their email service. This created a vacuum for enterprise spam filtering since many customers did not like the Gmail enterprise features or changes to UI.
Is this how we’ve ended up with outlook?
No, it’s how we ended up with proofpoint, mimecast, barracuda and all the other spam filtering services.
No, that’s Microsoft being Microsoft to great effect.
They regularly filter first emails from my self-hosted domain to friends. So clearly they know jack shit and just go overboard on false positives. Google is full of pieces of shit.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en
Did you set up SPF and DKIM? It helps Google know you are not a spammer.
I just checked - SPF is set up. I had never heard about DKIM, but I checked, and it’s also enabled. So as I said, google is just full of shiteaters.
They would also filter out a newsletter I signed up to that I actually wanted to read.
A couple years ago I signed up for an email provider so I could use my own domain and avoid Google being able to kill my email account. They’ve got a spam filter, but it’s ridiculously bad. I’ve been looking for better ways, but still haven’t found them.
Ironically, I’m hoping a free locally-run LLM will soon be able to filter emails appropriately. I haven’t seen anyone trying yet, but I’m sure they’re out there.
Protons spam filter is really good in my experience as well, and you can also use your own domain.
The only downside so far imo is that you can’t just add it as an imap or pop3 server to any mail client, you have to use their apps or host their bridge somewhere. Something to do with their e2ee I think.
I think that’s a really good idea, let me know if it works!
Oh, I’m not trying to make it happen. I just think it’s inevitable that someone will. And probably pretty soon.
I get a lot of spam/phishing in one of my Gmail accounts for some reason. They send me PDF attachments with nude pics on them of hot ladies that ostensibly want to meet my penis and stuff. “Click here!” it says on the nude pic PDFs, with links to .ru websites and junk
Wait, you open attachments from spam?
How else would they get to see naked ladies?
No I let Gmail preview the attachment in the browser, without clicking the content inside
Proton
Something bugs me about Proton. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop on that one. It feels like a honeypot or something. Like - I question if it’s going to be around in 10 years. I don’t know what gives me that feeling about them, but I’ve resisted moving over to them completely.
They’ve been around for 10 already. They will be around longer too, given that they’re profitable, which they’ve continued to be. They also aren’t under any legal pressure because they’ve complied with government requests, just with limited data because that’s all the data they store. Their client software, which is where the encryption happens, is all audited and open sourced. Any reason to distrust them would really be baseless right now. At the very least, they are definitely better than Google when it comes to trust…
I don’t think they’re a honeypot, but they do seem like posers. Privacy is just good for marketing now.
They’ve been focused on privacy for 10 years, before it was nearly as marketable.
You mean like Signal?
No, because Signal is open source and I’ve seen a lot of government agencies complain about it. It’s auditable.
Edit: I was unaware that the proton apps are open source.
I mean, if anybody knows what an ad looks like, it’s Google.
Even Thunderbird has a better spam filter after you train it for a few days.
I am using my mail provider’s standard filter and at most I get 5 mails per week that make it through. And that’s with my mail being publicly available on my personal website. Not sure what sort of sites people sign up for, but spam has never been an issue, even away from Google.
I’ve had 1 spam email get through in like…15 years on Gmail. 5 per week is absolutely atrocious, in my honest opinion.
AT MOST 5 a week and there are also weeks where I receive none at all. Interestingly it always seems to be the same type of spam from different adresses so there is probably a bot net somewhere that has my address and every month or so when the owners start a new wave I get a few and thats it.
On the other hand how many false positives have you had to pick out of the bin?
Maybe 1 every 2 years or so?
So far, Proton has been doing a better job than Google ever did for me. Especially considering that they don’t even read my mail content, that is genuinely impressive to me
That’s the Postini purchase from a ways back. It’s truly amazing.
The Gmail spam filter filters out emails from Google, half the 2FA authentication emails I get, things I’ve actively subscribed to and hit “not spam” on several times, and does not block “You’ve won a Home Depot gift card!” from [email protected]
To this very day, I know nobody - NOBODY - who even comes close to Gmail’s spam filtering capability.
I disagree. Perhaps you need hard evidence for a claim like that.
I have a gmail account, and a proton mail account. My gmail account is packed with spam. It has so much spam its crazy. The account is basically unusable. Which is fine, because I no longer trust google. It’s been years since I’ve told anyone to use this account.
On the other hand, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve got a spam message in my inbox on protonmail. In fact, I remember. It’s 2. The account isn’t as old, but I’ve used it to sign up for at least as many things. It’s my main account now - partially because I’ve turned anti-google, but also because its not choked by mountains of junk.
(To be fair, I suspect the main reason that my gmail account is so bad is that it has a popular username, and other people have accidentally signed up for things with my email accidentally instead of their own. Nevertheless, the fact is that the gmail is spam-central, and the protonmail account is clean.)
Hey’s spam filtering is a thousand times better than Gmail at least nowadays. Mostly because hey is literally built on the premise that you whitelist who you want to get emails from. The rest are blackholed. But the spam filtering is still very good for the approval part of it.
Odd not a single mention of hotmail in there the original web based email service which arguably was the one of the prime options till gmail offered way more storage.
Don’t forget Netscape mail.
But hotmail / outlook.com still exists… Does netscape mail?
When I left college, my university closed my email account. That sucked, but I moved on. Then the paid service I used closed down, so I had to change again. That sucked. I lost access to my Xbox Live account because they send all my “update password” emails to that old address and won’t update to my new address without confirming the change on an email that no longer exists.
Now I’ve had the same email address for 17 years and really really don’t want to move on, even though I hate that it is with Google. They went from “don’t be evil” to “be as evil as possible.”
And that is why I pay for my own domain. The service can change, but my domain is eternal (or near enough for my purposes)
I’m regretting not doing that 20 years ago.
I did the conversation a few years ago.
Yes it took me a full year probably of updating accounts. But it’s doable if you do it in small chunks at s time. I set up a forwarding to my new domain and when I felt like it updated a few more accounts. Untill one day, nothing showed up anymore.
Worth it
Actually deleted my Gmail account I think
It’s important to maintain a non-personal domain account for management in case there are issues with logging in and the domain email has a disruption. I read some horror stories on the other place about such Catch-22s.
I joined gmail in beta so similarly had had my address for an absurd amount of years.
Last year I completely switched over to proton for everything and keep my gmail as a junk account for shit I want to sign up for but don’t want to dirty my main with.
It was a daunting feeling undertaking at first but honestly it took me a couple of hours to go through and change the email on things I actually use and want to keep.
It was a nice freeing feeling and really helped me weed out what accounts I truly use and want to keep. I would highly recommend it as a cleansing exercise as much as anything else!
Could you share some more thoughts on your experience with Proton over the last year after switching from Gmail?
I don’t know if I am the best person to ask as I am not really a “power user” or anything. It sends and receives emails and isnt google which is all I really need, I can’t really talk about any features it may or may not have that people might look for.
I like that I can make up to 10 different address from within that same account, send emails from any of those accounts from just a drop down box without logging in and out of different accounts.
I like that they give me credit to my account based in how much space I actually use in my inbox.
I recently upgraded to an “ultimate” type account which covers all their products for me and my gf to try and encourage her to move away from google. The way the drive works is a bit counter intuitive in my opinion and the password manager thing seems to work well across both windows and android but I’ve never used a password manager programme before so it could be dogshit in comparison to others, but it seems to work well for me.
Never tried the VPN as I pay for AirVPN.
Sorry, not very insightful for you in terms or details but I like it a lot and it all works well for me, I’ve never had issues with any of the apps or logging in and accessing my stuff. The primary thing for me was moving away from google.
Thank you, this is helpful! I hadn’t heard about the credit for unused space. That’s kinda cool.
I bought a custom domain and use it with Proton. If Proton shuts down or something I can easily use the same domain with another provider.
That is a good point. I have moved to Proton mail but I keep my Gmail account as a backup and it’s part of my still used Google account. Can’t see myself ever shutting it down completely just in case, as much as I avoid Google as much as possible now.
Ctrl+F: “thread” “conversation” zero results
I feel like people have forgotten how email worked before, when webmail providers were emulating the desktop client model of “received messages go in Inbox, Sent folder is for sent.” Gmail’s conversation view was shockingly intuitive, one of those “why hasn’t it always been this way?” things that feels so obvious in retrospect.
I turned that off so many years ago I forgot it exists.
Yeah, abjectly hate conversation view.
I read some sysadmin forums about Conversation View, and most of them say users regularly ask how to turn it off. I always turn it off immediately.
I have always used conversation view in my desktop email client. Not sure why you think this is revolutionary or exclusive to gmail.
It was a novel new feature they introduced decades ago. Email was far less organized before then.
Labels were a pretty simple yet novel concept for categorizing mail which i seldom see in any other provider, sadly.
Incidentally the same labels make Gmail fundamentally incompatible with the way IMAP works causing lots of weirdness whenever you use any standard email client not specifically designed for Gmail.
Proton has labels & folders both.
Proton’s labels implementation sucks though. I can’t filter by two labels for example, like “Credit Card” & “Statements”. Kinda makes labels the same as folders… I don’t really see a point in it
My free Bluebottle account had tags, which are basically labels, but that was like 100 years ago.
Yup, it’s now the #1 feature I want w/ my current service: Tuta.
I currently filter into folders, which works, but it makes the UX a bit clunky. I hope they add it soon (or maybe I’ll try my hand at it since it’s FOSS).
Fastmail has them, they’re better than gmails and they import cleanly once you migrate away from gmail.
Who else doesn’t see ads in Gmail? I never have and have been using it since its inception.
I do on the browser version not the mobile
even in Promotions and Updates tabs?
on the other two inbox tabs sometimes, promotions and updates. just checked, saw one in the app for Verizon in promotions.
I use Firefox with ublock origin and pihole, blocking over 1 million sites.
And Hotmail deleted all my emails after not signing in for some period, twice. Then, I just stick with gmail since the early days until now.
(and got royally pissed at Google for sunsetting its cool Inbox app).
inbox was amazing! closing down the project radicalized me against everything google touched from that point forward lol
Fr. I was so upset when they axed inbox. I found an alternative, but iirc you can’t bring your own email or something like that.
How people will accept having their entire lives scanned, categorised and sold off to the highest bidder is beyond me. Fastmail - or any other paid product - for the win.
This is why the dark ages line is only half true. Paying for what you consume is normal anywhere else. Bringing that back to the internet would be a good thing IMO.
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 [email protected]).
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.
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.
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
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.Nice tips, thanks!
How people will accept having their entire lives scanned, categorised and sold off to the highest bidder is beyond me
Me too. It was painfully obvious what Google will do once they launched Gmail and I never used it because of that.
cutting ads out of your life cuts them off at the ankles. so what if they know in some database that I bought something, I don’t see their ads, so it’s useless info.
The question should be “How do countries/EU accept most of their citizens surveilled by a monopolistic company subject to a foreign country’s intelligence agency?”.
I don’t think it’s my personal responsibility to care unless I’m casting a vote. I don’t have enough extra energy to avoid surveillance anyway. Expecting billions of people each to take personal responsibility of finding out how to de-google, de-apple, de-microsoft, de-amazon, de-meta is too much. What percentage of people can install and configure Linux and Graphene OS and move everything from normal social media to Lemmy and Mastodon? We see the answer in current reality.
Yeah very fair points. Although in defense of the EU it’s not like it isn’t fighting back.
Imagine using a google service. Do yourselves a favor and use anything else, even outlook, over Google.
So you could just use Email in these archaic programs called Thunderbird etc. If you really wanted to use gmail. You know, without adds, without the need for an ad blocker, without AI recommendations and at your leisure.
But hey, you’d have to install something on your computer for that… how horrible.
And who uses computers for work anyway, you can just write your essay on a tablet. (but there are also email apps on those)
It’s a shittier way to work but hey it’s easier.
One of the nice things about Gmail at the time, was that you could access your emails when not home. If you were at a friend’s or on holiday at a net café, all you needed was to know your email and password.
That sounds silly, but at the time the majority of ISP mailboxes were pop only. Or those Webmails you could get were attached to what you would now think of comically small mailboxes. Full history Webmail added a convenience we didn’t get before.
as long as they keep gemini out of it enough for me not to notice, fine
Don’t give them ideas
pretty sure theyve already got that one
Eudora! I had forgotten all about that one.
emails
emails
emails
emails
Oh Barbara. For someone absent on ‘mass nouns’ day in elementary school, you’ve come far.
People who complain about the fact that “emails” is an incorrect plural form, even if it’s incredibly common and accepted, and sometimes language evolves and changes, should be sure that they write it ‘E-mail’, and also don’t forget to capitalize Internet!
Isn’t the linked article just a puff piece that says nothing substantial at all?
