12 ms·
Stop using gmail.com for things you care about
- wineisfine 10y agoI doubt Google is just closing accounts without a good reason.
- detaro 10y agoI doubt Google is not regularly making mistakes. (A paid provider might make them too, but has more incentive to care and fix them. + I suspect they actually have less automatic abuse filtering, because free offerings are more vulnerable to that)
- dvl 10y agoThe main problem is not assuming those mistakes. All I got is "read the ToS"
- wineisfine 10y agoPerhaps youre a spammer? Who knows. Just because you're on HN doesnt make it all good
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoIt's a good point thought. I use Gmail as my primary email for quite a few things, and my other email is also a free service. What am I to do if I need support for either of these? What email provider should I use?
- jakobegger 10y agoWhatever provider you choose, use your own domain. Then you can always switch.
- eximius 10y agoThats the easy part. But if there are no good providers, it doesnt matter that you can switch to the next bad one.
- teach 10y agoI hear nothing but good things about Fastmail. I'm pretty sure Gmail is the best free provider, but Fastmail is probably the best paid one.
- detaro 10y agoFastmail seems to be getting a lot of love. I like mailbox.org (from Germany, so maybe not the fastest in US). There are many providers of hosted Exchange or other Groupware, at least some of them have to be good.
- Silhouette 10y agoBut if there are no good providers Mail is the lingua franca of the Internet. There are many, many alternatives to just getting an account with one of the handful of well-known huge providers and being locked in to whatever they want to do to you afterwards. Just about any ISP will provide the necessary servers to send and receive electronic mail. Plenty of hosting services will let you keep your own mail store in a remote, always-on location. Either of these also works fine with your own domain with any decent provider, and either costs a modest amount to run for something so important and useful. If you are limiting your options to a specific type of webmail service then of course you're going to be stuck with whatever downsides that comes with, but that's far from your only option.
- drdaeman 10y agoIf there are no good providers, you can always set up your own¹², or hire an engineer to do this for you. ___ ¹) On a leased hardware, network and address, but with proper backup and failover strategies, hosting providers are interchangeable (or one can always host on their own hardware) and it's somewhat less likely ICANN or your local registrar would yank your domain name registration than Google would do so to your account. ²) There are (nearly) one-click solutions for this, like https://cozy.io/ https://cozy.io/ or https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/
- greenyoda 10y agoYou could try FastMail. I've been very happy with their service, and have even had good experiences with their customer support.
- dethi 10y agoProtonmail if you want really secure and private email service.
- dvl 10y agoI really thought the same, if you browse on Gmail forums you'll see a lot of similar histories.
- JabavuAdams 10y agoAt this point, that's a well-known psychological bias. Gmail is a large-scale impersonal system / organization. In every other walk of life, we see such large organizations making mistakes, for essentially inscrutable reasons. Why would Gmail / Google be any different? The onus is on you to show that, rather than the OP to prove he's above reproach / faultless.
- falcolas 10y agoNot to mention that it's impossible to prove a negative - that you've never broken Google's EULA in this case.
- wozer 10y agoWhy do you doubt that? There are quite a few examples.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jakobegger 10y agoThe absolute lack of customer support for Gmail made me switch to Fastmail a couple of years ago. I use my own domain now, so if I ever become unhappy with Fastmail I'm not locked in. Email is so vital to my personal life and my business that it is worth paying 50 bucks a year.
- Jabbles 10y agoLast time I saw this on HN it was something like an art professor who'd been storing pictures of cherubs or something and it had tripped Google's child-porn detector. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810946
- dvl 10y agoThat was the first thing I thought was "maybe I have uploaded some copyrighted material to Drive or triggered some filter". I also suspect of a problem with my credit card. But Google refuses to tell me what was wrong.
- chrischen 10y agoIf someone emails you child porn, would that disable your account?
- falcolas 10y agoIf cherubs trigger it, it probably doesn't even need to be porn.
- lern_too_spel 10y agoIt looks like your problem is you discussed your account closure with people who don't work at Google and can't get any information about your account instead of using the official form (https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/disabled2 https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/disabled2). One of the people you talked to pointed you to the official form. Did you try it? Unless the official form also doesn't work, your conclusion appears invalid.
- lambshanks 10y agoI use fastmail.com for electronic mail, and I gladly pay for it. Marvel at the simplicity: you pay for a service, and the provider's incentive is to serve you! This versus the alternative where you use a "service" provided free of cost, and the "provider" makes money by selling data they have harvested from your interactions. You give away your privacy; you have no reason to expect support; you are not actually the customer.
- bsclifton 10y agoI hate to be obvious, but you get what you pay for :P I dumped gmail for Exchange and now use Office 365. Reasonable price, great support.
- raverbashing 10y agoIt's a good thing that GMail is not ad supported... oh wait Being condescending with customers may backfire for them
- dvl 10y agoI was paying Google Drive to get extra space for emails too :(
- dozzie 10y agoThe only drawback is it's Microsoft, and extrapolating what is happening to Windows, you can start expecting advertisements and "telemetry" soon.
- thinkxl 10y agoI use https://posteo.de/en https://posteo.de/en and am very happy so far, it's 1 EUR per month. Features for the curious: - 2 GB email account - 100% green electricity - Saved data can be encrypted data - Two-factor auth - Ad-free - Sign up without personal details I'm not related with them in any way, just a customer. The only con is that you can't use your own domain.
- gpm 10y agoAnd what's the alternative? I could use an ISP (or in my case university) email, but I'll lose access to that in the future when I change ISPs (or graduate). I could use <other free email provider>, but they will probably have the same problem, and unless I'm using one of the other giant services (e.g. outlook) are probably more likely to disappear than Google is to randomly ban me. I could use a paid provider, but they are probably still more likely to disappear in the future than google is likely to randomly ban me. Instead I would prepare to mitigate the damage of losing access to your account. Have local copies of emails, don't use two factor authentication with one factor being email.
- dogma1138 10y agoOr well pay Gmail... https://apps.google.co.uk/products/gmail/ https://apps.google.co.uk/products/gmail/
- SNvD7vEJ 10y agoThe solution is to register your own domain.
- emdd 10y agoBut that still doesn't actually answer the email provider question.
- dvl 10y ago> I could use a paid provider, but they are probably still more likely to disappear in the future than google is likely to randomly ban me. That was my main reason to still use Gmail till today. From now I'll be making regular backups, and always use an email address on my own domain, so I can freely change provider without much problems.
- KayL 10y agoBackup Emails is easy, just set up auto-forwarder to Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. But losing the Google Account, you won't even able to login some single sign-on services.
- atomlib 10y agoI use Yandex Mail For Domain https://domain.yandex.com https://domain.yandex.com which is free with the exact same features regular Yandex.Mail has (“unlimited” mailbox size, Yandex.Disk, letters up to 30 MB in size). By default you can create up to 1000 mailboxes per domain but if you state why you need more they can lift the limit. There is DKIM support. They do have one weird restriction though. I have no access to abuse@ and spam@ mailboxes since they use these for spam reports. What's far more interesting is that their tech support actually answers. It may take a day or three but they do talk back.
- xbmcuser 10y agoThis part I dont get about Google they ban you but don't tell you why. At least they should make a chart of offences of 1-5 and put different offences in the chart according to severity of offence. So when banning you they can say for this number it won't mean much to rest of the world but the person getting banned could probably guess why.