Being a bit nostalgic, but Gmail was such a leap forward when it was released. In a world where everybody took the shittiness of hotmail for granted, using Gmail was like peeking into the future. In many ways it was.
Now Gmail is that shitty hotmail we took for granted.
It certainly was cool and popular from day one. However, it was also spyware from day one. Tech magazines wrote reviews about it, but the hype train was going so fast at the time that people somehow ignored the privacy aspect.
Nowadays people are beginning to realize just how evil it has always been.
I personally swapped over to Proton Mail recently. Exporting over all saved email, groups and labels from Gmail was easy. I love it so far, it’s very similar to how Gmail works. I’ve set Gmail to forward everything to my new one so I don’t need to go to back very often.
The only bugbear I have currently is while multi-selecting emails in the inbox, then open one up to read it and back out, the selections aren’t remembered. But they are pushing improvements all the time, so I’m sure that will be fixed with time.
Many websites prevent providing aliased Gmail address, how you’re planning to address that issue?
This looks nice but my worry is itll be gone in a year or two and then i lose access to accounts and important emails and people are emailing a non existing email. Any step y’all take to prevent this?
I’m looking at Tuta. It’s not free (well, they have a crappy free tier), but it’s cheap, is end to end encrypted (as much as email can be), has extra address support, and supports custom domains. So if I hate it, I’ll switch to something else (maybe ProtonMail). The initial switch from my Gmail will suck, but it’ll hopefully be a one-time thing.
20 years on, I still prefer folders instead of labels. And I still don’t want messages group as “conversations.”
It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free. Now there is a hard limit unless you pay.
I’ll just leave this here.
Did you read the article you referenced?
Or maybe I’m just not seeing the connection.
It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free. Now there is a hard limit unless you pay.
I don’t think anybody expected that to last forever. That said, the free limit is still way more than enough for most people. I’ve got 20 years of emails in my account, and I’m just barely past my free limit.
Everything else wrong with Gmail and Google aside, those are the least reasonable complaints? You can use labels as folders. You can also disable conversation grouping, but I doubt you go more than a week before turning it back on.
Yes, a label is just a more versatile folder. If you don’t like that, you can just use a single label per email, but I genuinely can’t see any value in that. But you can if you want.
I less the labeling system sucks, which it does. Also the rules. There’s no innovation and every damn feature of outlook should be basically available and EASY to use in gmail and any other mail client. The shit has been around forever and the lack of advanced options is just astounding. I’m simply disappointed.
It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free.
Within a week you could tell there was a set maximum, the speed of increase steadily fell the higher the storage value got. It was a good marketing ploy, but there was never a “forever expanding” promise made.
What if a message covers 2 different topics?
IMHO the entire OS should be based around files and labels, not files and folders.
On Linux file systems it basically is. A file name is just a label for an inode, and the same inode can have as many file names as you want.
Still this requires different directories for the hardlinks to be in the filesystem, and there’s not an easy way given a file to list all “labels” that file has, without checking other directories for files with the same inode.
From the comments on the article:
There was this brief shining moment when we had Google Now and Google Inbox and, at least for me, they were incredibly useful tools. Then they transformed into a content chum box and a stale email platform respectively and, while I think I know why, I’ll never understand WHY.
I feel this so hard. Inbox was so great and being forced back into old-school Gmail was so disappointing. RIP Inbox.
This.
I’ll never forgive Google for killing Inbox. Of all the projects they killed, that one hurt the worst. I went from being able to actually manage my email to it turning right back into an unmanageable mess overnight, and in spite of their promises, not a single one of Inbox’s features that enabled this were ever implemented in main Gmail.
That was a big turning point for me in being able to trust them for anything
I always wished for Inbox to simply become the new interface for Gmail. My wishes were destroyed once it got discontinued.
There was a brief moment between Jelly Bean and Kit Kat in which Google Now and Inbox made being tracked by Google kind of useful in everyday life
Until the idiots all complained about it being ‘creepy’. Ever since the tracking completely continued, but no longer with any benefit to us.
Great job idiots. Why people just don’t opt not to use features they find ‘creepy’ I’ll never understand. They are only satisfied if they bring it down for everyone.
Anyone got an invite? 😅
I remember how excited I was when I finally got an invite code. Now happily gmail-free for 2 years.
Google Maps and YouTube I can’t avoid but otherwise ungoogling successfully.
btw you can use freetube or libretube for youtube, and use an openstreetmaps clientt to replace google maps
What I am really looking for is beyond our email, it’s proper integration between calendar, contacts, and map.
I want to be able to share calendars with my family, and link contacts from certain events (birthdays, meetings, and also just meet-ups). I want those contact’s addresses to be available as navigation destinations in the mapping app. I want to be able to bookmark (“star”) map locations.
I wish osm+ was as good as maps. It’s so close and I’ll still use it for in town destinations.
I use proton mail but otherwise I would probably stick with the default iOS.
I self-host caldav with radicale and use native Debian/ios calendar apps. Immich to replace Google photos was especially satisfying.
