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veeesix ,
@veeesix@lemmy.ca avatar

Gmail is the gateway to their entire product portfolio; no way they’d kill it.

RootBeerGuy ,
@RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Howeeeeverrrr...

RvTV95XBeo ,

All it takes is one MBA with little foresight in the wrong position - the Gmail team is all expense (server hosting, labor), and no revenue; that's the "Ads" and "Drive/One/Business" teams.

Ghostalmedia ,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

The MBA. The only graduate degree you can get by attending class 3 days a month.

How some of these MBA programs can be considered a “masters” degree is an insult to people who actually had to spend years on 40-70hour a week graduate programs.

kaitco ,

The program cost for the executive MBA class entering in July 2023 was $205,897, which includes tuition, required electronic textbooks, hotel accommodations during immersion weeks and core course sessions in terms 1-3, administrative fees, and most meals during residence periods.

(Emphasis mine)

They are just straight up purchasing a degree at this price point.

Ghostalmedia ,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

Pretty much. There are cheaper alternative, but there are lots of ways to get a “masters” while still being able to hold down a 9 to 5.

No fucking way I could work while doing my masters in interaction design. Only way to way to do that was to take out a student loan because the program required even more commitment than full time undergraduate course work.

ramble81 ,

Remember. There is no such thing as free. They’re data mining the hell out of your email. You can rest assured that gmail is a revenue generator. Just in ways you don’t see.

fine_sandy_bottom ,

This is the answer. Kinda surprised this is buried three comments deep TBH. The emails you receive and how you interact with them is a far better source for profiling than browser history.

Imgonnatrythis ,

You are awfully confident about a company that kills things like a Russian dictator. I think what perhaps you mean is there's no way they'd kill it now. If they wanted to push users to some different type of platform they would certainly entertain the idea.

prettybunnys ,

Google has been looking for the thing to kill email for a looooooooong time though.

EncryptKeeper ,

Google getting rid of gmail would have to be hands down one of the biggest internet shakeups since its inception. Gmail has been the de facto free email service for almost two decades now. They have like a 53% market share of emails in the U.S.

waratchess ,

Also the shitstorm it would cause, when you can't access an account that you used Gmail to sign up.

stealth_cookies ,

Maybe it would finally force the surprising number of websites out there that don't allow for email changes to change their policies. I recently switched every account I could to a personal domain and I couldn't believe how many just don't allow for it.

BreakDecks ,

It's a weird problem actually. There are valid reasons for blacklisting and whitelisting free email providers.

Some sites only allow registrations from private domains. They blacklist all the free email providers, which makes sure that mostly businesses, academics, etc. are signing up for their services, rather than randos who may have little to no value as a user.

However, some sites see the randos as the only valuable users, and sometimes see private domains as a threat since a bad actor could use one to spawn an infinite number of valid email addresses for registering accounts. Free providers make it much harder to create a new address, so they whitelist them.

stealth_cookies ,

That isn't the problem I have though, the issue was how many websites don't let you change you email address full stop. Never had one reject my custom domain (but some shitty ones do reject email aliases)

tool ,
@tool@lemmy.world avatar

It's likely because they use it as the primary/unique identifier for the account, which is just dumb. It's like they've never heard of a UUID/GUID before.

teamevil ,

I'm glad I got my own website years ago....it's literally just a function email server for me...no bullshit spam and I can have separate emails for stuff that I don't need to monitor.

prettybunnys ,

OIDC is the future of this, logins tied to an account rather than a service.

whodatdair ,

With the terms of service for their “anti spam” and “productivity auto-sorting” features, they must gather SO much data about people by reading their emails - there’s no way they’d turn that off lol

femboy_bird ,
@femboy_bird@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I dunno Google has a cancelation tick so like i wouldn't be that surprised

takeda ,

I would imagine Gmail is the primary reason people create an account with Google.

femboy_bird ,
@femboy_bird@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Yeah that and youtube I'd think

HedonismB0t ,

No way will they cancel gmail. Google is using Gmail to train Gemini and power their Ad business. It might be a free email service in terms of not having a monetary cost, but you are paying for it with your data.

Gigan ,
@Gigan@lemmy.world avatar

Ugh, I've gotta switch from Gmail, any good email recommendations?

THE_MASTERMIND ,

Proton mail is the peak email service money can buy (it's also avilable for free but i suggest paying)

SuperSynthia ,

If you work for Proton then username checks out haha. Real talk I’ve been on the unlimited for a bit and it’s dope.

gusgalarnyk ,

Thank you for this recommendation, I'll look into switching. It's a slow process of moving towards less convenient but more private services but your comment has moved the needle for me at least.

THE_MASTERMIND ,

Less convenient

What are you talking about ? If anything proton is more convenient.

gusgalarnyk ,

I think part of convenience is name brand recognition. I don't know how you took a heartfelt compliment and made it hostile, but the reality is I grew up knowing what Google was and using it as a verb. Gmail was an obvious and convenient tool to pickup.

I just found out about Protonmail, or at least heard of it for the first time that it broke the barrier of not-caring into carrying. I imagine user numbers reflect that pretty readily.

That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying Protonmail is worse in anyway, please don't assume I am. It's okay to like a product and admit it's flaws, in this case the only flaw I'm suggesting it has is being less known than Gmail and even then only for me and my small corner of the world.

THE_MASTERMIND ,

Bruh i thought you were thinking proton mail maybe inconveniant to use that's why i corrected you . Sorry if i sounded hostile the problem is whenever people think of privacy they think like its for the paranoid ones and must be tough. I just wanted to clear it up for you.

swampdownloader ,

It takes a little bit of effort but it’s a great time to do the following:

  • get a password manager if you don’t have one already. I like 1password
  • get an alias service. Proton bought simplelogin so it’s integrated, there’s also anonaddy
  • gradually work through updating your online accounts from your old gmail to new aliases for each account (eg ebay@alias.domain.com) and set a complex password through your password manager that’s unique for each account

In a couple months you’ll eventually stop receiving emails to your gmail as you work through the accounts you use, and most incoming mail will all be through aliases. Then if you get spammed, you know what site leaked your email + you can turn off the alias and not get spam.

fruitSnackSupreme ,

Wait wait! You're saying proton lets you use aliases? As many as I'd like?

I guess Gmail does too, if you do the ole youremail+ebay@gmail.com. But not all websites allow the +

swampdownloader ,

Proton integrates directly with simplelogin. But you can use gmail for aliases with anonaddy or simplelogin, they just forward the alias emails to your real inbox.

redshift ,

Fastmail is fantastic.

MusketeerX ,

Agreed, it's so good.

tgxn ,
@tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net avatar

Yeah it's amazing. You have to pay, but at least you're not the product 👏

subtext ,

I love their app… it’s replaced the default iOS app for me it’s so good.

Monument ,

It feels like everyone hates Apple, but their hide my email service is bundled into their family plan, and it’s real nice just being able to give every site an email address you can then just delete if they spam you.
No one knows who I really am, and I’m good with that.

I guess my recommendation is to find a service that lets you make throwaway emails.
And I think Proton does that. Mozilla has a service for that, but their new CEO has thrown some question marks into that mix. There are definitely others.

squidspinachfootball ,

duckduckgo does that with @duck.com email addresses too, I've liked using them so far

teamevil ,

Get your own website and you too can have infinitely emails

federatingIsTooHard ,
@federatingIsTooHard@lemmy.world avatar

disroot

Sludgehammer ,
@Sludgehammer@lemmy.world avatar

I mean... I don't expect them to scrap GMail, but their reassurance means nothing. IIRC they said the same thing about Stadia.

red_pigeon ,

Stadia was destined to fail though. I still remember the key note in which it was introduced. The CEO started with the lines "I don't play many games, but ... ".

xantoxis ,

The fact that the question is significant enough to deserve an answer means somebody somewhere got wind of something real.

It probably doesn't mean a full cancellation of gmail but I wouldn't be surprised to hear they're trying something like Wave again.

slimarev92 , (edited )

Here's a wild idea - you can read the article and discover that the whole thing was a hoax.

teamevil ,

Nah, wildly jumping to conclusions makes for more fun

Jolteon ,

They make too much money from data harvesting to scrap Gmail, though.

Landmammals ,

Why would they voluntarily lose access to all my personal information?

Imgonnatrythis ,

They have enough to train an AI version of you and already predict your actions. Tracking real you is just boring now.

nova_ad_vitum ,

For the time being the compute required to simulate me is more expensive than tracking the real me.

Imgonnatrythis ,

Google+Nvidia : "we will fix that soon enough meat bag"

cyborganism ,

I just now created a Proton mail account just minutes before seeing this. I think I'm glad I did.

I've been thinking about de-googling myself for some time now. After being with them since they created the Gmail service in the early 2000s, I practically have my whole adult life on Google. I've been using drive and photos as well for as long as it has existed. It's going to be a lot of work to sort through all of this data and start over on a new service.

I don't trust Google anymore over anything. Whether it's privacy (though I was pretty naive to think I had any in the first place) or their ability to keep a service up long enough for anyone to commit.

It's a shame because they started as a really nice company with their do no evil motto with great services and then everything went to shit. Even their killer feature, the search engine, has become complete shit.

SnotFlickerman ,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I agree, but just a counterpoint...

Back in the day, after Hotmail and Yahoo! email but before Gmail, people started becoming really skeptical of emails from @xyz.net and started treating anything that didn't come from a major email provider as "spam."

I've kept my old gmail accounts around for "spam" and "work" respectively because despite people (finally) waking up to the privacy issues of Gmail, I cannot trust that emails with a @protonmail.com address won't be viewed skeptically by people recieving the email. Especially in regards to jobs. Unless you're in Cybersecurity and taking privacy seriously is your professional obligation, you're not going to run into tons of people who view ProtonMail very favorably.

De-googling is good, but don't leave yourself stranded and ignored by people because you had the audacity to use a different fucking service.

thetreesaysbark ,

I'd wager most people who don't think about cyber security even look at the sender email address these days.

RIPandTERROR ,
@RIPandTERROR@sh.itjust.works avatar

Based on kb4 metrics I've seen at past jobs, you'd win that bet

uninvitedguest ,
@uninvitedguest@lemmy.ca avatar

Does proton mail allow me to use custom domain names?

RandomStickman ,
@RandomStickman@kbin.run avatar

It's a paid option afaik

taiyang ,

Good counterpoint, and to add, Gmail itself is more than happy to throw any email into spam if it isn't from a major provider. I had this happen with my own domain email, and even after telling Gmail the email is legit, it still spam filters it.

Plus, guess what email provider HR often uses but shouldn't... That domain isn't Gmail but you better believe their boss paid the 6 dollars a head to get them a gsuite portal with Gmail Spam filters.

EncryptKeeper ,

I don’t think that’s really much of a concern. I can’t imagine any world where a proton.me email will cause you any issues. I’ve had mine for years now, in fact on my resume and job applications I used my own domain’s email addresses and I’ve never experienced a problem. What you’re saying isn’t entirely impossible but it’s definitely not a problem you’re very likely to run into. You’re not likely to run into a single person that cares about your proton email much less one that views it disfavorably.

Railcar8095 ,

*Indian government: hold my lassie

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/16/india-may-block-proton-mail/?guccounter=1

All it takes is that some services you use have mail hosted in India, and your emails might never reach.

EncryptKeeper ,

They’re not blocking ProtonMail due to it being “not gmail” or any other recognizable domain or having a poor reputation, they’re blocking it because ProtonMail is doing what they promised to do and not divulging customer information to Indian authorities.

I suppose if OP lives in India then yeah that might be an issue but otherwise they’re still totally fine.

SnotFlickerman ,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I guess it speaks more to the idea that there's definitely people out there who look skeptically on a ProtonMail address. There's a lot of people who know what it is and also hold a "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" mindset and immediately assume the worst about the person with the ProtonMail address. Because of course, in their minds, if you have such an address, you surely must be unsavory and have things to hide. It's not just autocratic governments who don't like it.

EncryptKeeper , (edited )

On the contrary, I think it’s autocratic governments specifically that don’t like it. Which is more or less the point, in the same way that any service that uses encryption and doesn’t give up user info is something they won’t like. Otherwise everyone with a Mac, IPad or IPhone would be considered shady, which as we know isn’t the case.

The people who hold the view you mentioned more than likely don’t even know what ProtonMail is.

SnotFlickerman ,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I don't necessarily disagree, but I have personally met a few people who did know what it was and also thought it was very sketchy and didn't trust it.

However, at the same time, I know how worthless a personal anecdote is in the bigger scheme of things, so you're probably right that most people that hold that attitude don't know wtf it is.

EncryptKeeper ,

I just feel like there isn’t a big enough crossover of people who both A.) know what it is and how it’s different from any other email provider and B.) don’t trust it simply because it’s encrypted.

The only thing ProtonMail does differently, functionally, is encrypt your data at rest, which while somewhat rare for an email provider to do, is extremely common for any other website or communication service to do.

Like somebody has to know what ProtonMail is and what it does enough so to not trust it, but somehow also not distrust iMessage, or WhatsApp, their banking site, etc.

Then you take that group of people, and cross them again with group C.) people who are responsible for the cybersecurity of any given website.

Like law of large numbers says that it’s plausible that this person exists out there, but is it enough for you to actually worry about using ProtonMail? So far at least, no.

SnotFlickerman ,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I largely agree, but I've also seen the sheer capability of large conspiracy networks in the USA to propagate misinformation, and their predilection for assuming there's a giant cabal of child-abusing elite satanists controlling the world. These are largely people of the mind "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" and love the police while also feeling like they cannot trust the US government (or at least those satanist jewish LIBRULS), as if those aren't inherently contradictory positions. I guess the point I'm making is that a lot of people already have conspiracies about this kind of thing, and all they see is "encryption" and think "this must be what child abusers use." There's a lot of people (here in the USA at least) who aren't playing with a full deck and aren't coming to these conclusions from any sort of coherent reasoning other than "rules for thee, not for me" (considering it's okay for them to use encryption to organize their Proud Boys meeting or whatever).

Because otherwise, your logical conclusion makes sense, but we're officially dealing with millions of people who aren't approaching anything logically or coherently anymore, while being exposed to propaganda networks that can put those kind of ideas in their heads.

nodsocket , (edited )

Use a custom domain to hide which email provider you use. Plus it let's you move to another provider without having to inform all your contacts of a new address.

pineapplelover ,

I've never had a problem with that. My simplelogin aliases on the other hand, they're much more weird. But for email I share to people, it's a protonmail.com address. Even my parents use it, it's fine.

phoneymouse ,

Good for you. I degoogled in 2019. It’s been fine.

Jourei ,

Killing Gmail would be like killing search or youtube, they would NOT dare.

Dozzi92 ,
@Dozzi92@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, I'd drop Fi, Pixle, and use of Google in a second. Gmail is the backbone of everything Google is. Had it since day 1 and will have it until it disappears, and then I will disappear into the woods forever.

Toribor , (edited )
@Toribor@corndog.social avatar

I don't know if it's still there but a couple years ago poking around in gmail settings I was able to find that there was still a section for inviting new users to the gmail beta. I had 97/100 invites remaining. Been like that for almost 20 years now which is crazy.

Dozzi92 ,
@Dozzi92@lemmy.world avatar

Ha, wish I could find that. I remember inviting people left and right at first, felt like opening a new world. Chain mails that you scrolled we're still a thing, so email needed an upgrade from the hotmails and yahoos.

SkippingRelax ,

And they were giving you something like 1gb of space for free. At the time unwashed working for a big international company and employees quota for emails was something like 50mb!

I wish there were still players like Google was 20 years ago instead these days all we get ate short videos and same day delivery (oh and llms that create funny images with weird fingers)

fne8w2ah ,

Ain't nobody killing off the golden goose!

Scrollone ,

Oh well, it doesn't feel like Google Search is going that well. Searching on Google now feels like shit.

slimarev92 ,

It's funny that most comments here are debating this seriously when the article (that apparently nobody bothered to read) clearly says it was a hoax.

JustZ ,
@JustZ@lemmy.world avatar

Doesn't matter. It's in the aether now that "Google promised Gmail won't go anywhere," so it will definitely be eliminated. People believing a Google product won't be discontinued is the Google product kiss of death.

Dayroom7485 ,

Fully agree. I find it surprising that Google’s public image deteriorated to a point where just mentioning rumors of them shutting down a service gets people upset with them.

himmyguap ,

Gmail is untouchable. That more than any other product has kept me tethered to Google since 2004. That being said I wouldn't be surprised if some greedy, future regime at Google botches it up.

Shadywack ,
@Shadywack@lemmy.world avatar

I already moved over to Proton in anticipation of Google charging for Gmail. It's untouchable as far as longevity, but it's going to be majorly enshittifiedto the point that leaving it will be more desirable than staying.

Burn_The_Right ,

I am in the process of moving to Proton now. It's way easier than I though it was going to be!

scituselectrum ,

May I ask what steps you followed to make the transition smooth? I've been meaning to use proton + simplelogin, but I'm concerned it'll quickly become a time sink to transition from one service to the other.

Clandestine ,

1: Register a new Proton account

2: Set up email forwarding from Gmail to Proton

3: Add a filter that labels all Mail incoming to Gmail with a Gmail label.

4: Whenever you feel like it, go to some of your Gmail labeled mail and change the registered mail to Proton etc.

I'd still recommend buying your own domain though, it took me less than 15 mins switching completely from Skiff to Proton, and I didn't have to reregister anything. Only when you have a costum domain you're truly serviceprovider-independent.

Scrollone ,

I second the custom domain part.

It's easy to setup and it doesn't lock you to any single provider, in case you want to change in the future

cley_faye ,

Any of these large business coming out to explicitly say "this will not happen" is concerning.

Scrollone ,

Exactly, it's like if a company said "We're not going to launch a bomb, trust us"... It would totally mean that they're considering launching a bomb

Kellamity ,

I mean, unless there was a hoax that led to widespread belief that they were gonna launch a bomb

Its suspicious if its out of nowhere, but less so if its in response to an existing rumour

asexualchangeling ,

The risk there for a company is: I had heard nothing about this rumor until they started denying it, and Im far from alone

makyo ,

Especially Google who is famous for randomly getting bored of developing and then suddenly cancelling services

detinu ,

I mean this would be insane. Gmail is probably the most used email service in the world, and even though I'm not a Google fanboy, it's also probably the best.

What are people gonna use? Outlook? Fuck that. I only use that piece of trash because of my job.

Zealousideal_Fox900 ,

Same but with education. Fuck the dept. Ed. Qld

SkippingRelax ,

LOL they truly suck

AProfessional ,

gmail has a fine website but email is a commodity service, hundreds of replacements exist and could be used.

retrieval4558 ,

Yeah a random website on a DDG search (ironically) that I just did said that Gmail has 30% of the email marketshare, which I'd definitely believe. It would be a HUGE shakeup and very disruptive if they were to stop it.

GamingChairModel ,

This is in direct response to a misleading viral social media post that claims that Gmail is going to be discontinued, which selectively quotes from a real announcement that Gmail is discontinuing the "basic HTML" browser interface for the service, now that pretty much every device has good performance on the regular browser interface.

RGB3x3 ,

The biggest thing holding me to Google is Gmail and photos.

They scrap Gmail and I'm literally out. No more Google accounts, except to use an android.

Google offers very little value to the consumer these days

capital ,

I bought a domain and started using it for all my email last year. It’s the best and I suggest it to everyone.

The combination of your own domain, Fastmail, and Bitwarden is powerful.

You can move email services by changing a few DNS records and Fastmail has an API that Bitwarden hits to create new masked email addresses using your domain so every site gets a different email address. Start getting spam? You know exactly who leaked/sold your info and you can now send that address right to the trash.

Is google photos free?

bitwyze ,

It's free if you stay within the data limit. For anyone interested in self-hosting, immich is getting pretty mature these days.

https://immich.app/

capital ,

Keep in mind the maintainers themselves advise that they make changes often and this should not be the only place you keep your photos.

I just started using it and the facial recognition feature works very well.

I’ve become obsessed with S3 compliant storage lately so I was going to suggest Wasabi, B2, or Storj as a replacement for Google storage.

Wappen ,

Some services only accept whitelisted domains for accounts sadly.

doubletwist ,

I've been using a personal domain for over 20 years. I've never had a service reject my email domain.

capital ,

I haven’t seen any issues with sending to google or Microsoft services.

I think I’ve heard of some admins blocking some of the newer ones like .xyz but they were getting lots of spam from those and knew they wouldn’t be getting business mail from there. Though I don’t know how much longer that will be true.

Scrollone ,

lol considering Google's parent company address is abc.xyz...

asdfasdfasdf ,

You don't need a Google account to use Android.

callouscomic ,

Next week: "Google scrapping gmail."

A_Random_Idiot , (edited )
@A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world avatar

exactly my thought.

"They are saying its here to stay, which means people should get their data off it asap"

InternetUser2012 ,

100%

echodot ,

I doubt it. It's free data, they ain't getting rid of that.

lud ,

It's not free though. Running an email service is not cheap.

echodot ,

Trust me they make way more money by running the service then it costs to run especially considering that everything is now in house. They own their own servers.

lud ,

It's absolutely not free like you said though.

echodot ,

It's free for you. I have absolutely no idea what point you're trying to make.

GiddyGap ,

One thing that's very clear to me is that when a tech company says something is "here to stay," it doesn't actually mean it's here to stay.

Nurgle ,

I’m starting to worry Lemmy users read the article at a lower rate than redditors.

TheGrandNagus ,

Of course it is. I know Google scraps a lot of things, but Gmail is for the most part liked and, far more importantly to Google, is an absolute treasure trove of personalised, easily parsable data, yet nowhere near as costly to maintain as, say, YouTube.

The fact that after making search, an email provider was their next big project, shows how serious they are about it.

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