Technology

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.

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.

I do on the browser version not the mobile

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

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.

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]).

Don't give them ideas

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.)

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]

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

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.

Even Thunderbird has a better spam filter after you train it for a few days.

I mean, if anybody knows what an ad looks like, it's Google.

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 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.