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.
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.
I think that’s a really good idea, let me know if it works!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.”
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!
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
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.
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?
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 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 turned that off so many years ago I forgot it exists.
Yeah, abjectly hate conversation view.
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.
My free Bluebottle account had tags, which are basically labels, but that was like 100 years ago.
Isn’t the linked article just a puff piece that says nothing substantial at all?
I’m still using gmail, but reading it trough the same old school local clients downloading everything trough imap. For everything important i have tutanota and private servers. Proton indeed looks like honeypot to me.
Eudora! I had forgotten all about that one.
