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tjoff

There is no reason to use gmail.

Preferably pay for some other service. And if you haven't already, buy your own domain.

Being tied to one service is never good, even if it isn't by google.

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If your employer uses Gmail, there is a reason to use it.

Maybe, but at least don't do mail in the browser.

It's also a good reason to choose a different employer.

Yeah. That's the first thing I ask during an interview - "What email provider do you use?". If they say"GMail" I just close the Google Meet tab in my Google Chrome mid-sentence. I can tolerate a lot from an employer, but not GMail. /s

You are being sarcastic, but whether an employer is self-hosting or is using cloud services (and which ones) is actually an important consideration for me, because it impacts QoL and is an indication of the employer’s values and competences.

Are you implying that GMail itself is a bad service, and you get better email QoL from the local IT folks, who think that Firefox is not compatible with displaying Stackoverflow? The bad things about Google could be listed for weeks without stopping for a coffeebreak, but "GMail is a bad email service" wouldn't be mentioned (if we disregard the web frontend).

How many water, sewer, garbage, and electrical services do you subscribe to at home?

My toilet only spies on me after I took three hits if acid

I know this was in jest, but most municipalities are collecting metadata through sewage treatment

This is where some of the most reliable COVID data came from

Your toilet actually spies on you quite a lot. Just not you individually, but your city and health officials actively monitor your “output” to keep track of things like disease spreading. Doesn’t just stop there though, your acid usage might well have ticked into some drug monitoring program.

Sounds better anonymized than any bullshit "we remove your name and IP from your data and call it anonymized", though.

Yeah it's a good thing that there is nothing in our sewer output that could be directly traced back to individual persons like an IPv4 could.

Please answer this question: say I give you a hair I found somewhere in the city. How do you proceed to identify who the owner of that hair is? Not theoretically; in practice, right now.

Now compare that to an IPv4. Do you get my point?

One of each, but is your point that those are essentially monopolies in many places? Email still isn't a monopoly, even if most people do use Google!

No, my point was that the GP said:

> Being tied to one service is never good

And furthermore, I could ask if you're multi-homed on the Internet? Got your own ASN with a BGP session and a /24 delegation? Your ISP's not a monopoly, so why are so many people "tied to one service"?

What about your health insurance? BCBS and UHC as a backup? Do you have more than one PCP?

Ah, but it's not good being tied to one of each service; it's just extremely impractical to have parallel infrastructure in some cases. (I've been without plumbed water before because the water service failed locally. It would certainly have been nice to have a competitor available.) The fact that monopolies exist isn't evidence that more monopolies is what we want.

The answer to the rest of your questions is "… yes, isn't this pretty normal?".

Multi-homing your Internet connection is in a completely different category of service because it's so trivial to fail over, but in fact my phone is routinely multi-homed (to a WiFi network and through 5G), and my laptop will fall back to its hotspot, so yes; aren't many people? That redundancy is enough for me not to run my own Internet infrastructure.

I have two parallel medical infrastructures (the NHS and private insurance), which I routinely switch between as appropriate; again, in my social class this is common. I have multiple credit cards, which is the closest I come to PCP, which is again common, and again I routinely switch between them.

That depends on who is defining "good" and what your criteria are. There are drawbacks and there are advantages to these things. You've faced some practical realities and admitted that we can't always have this idealistic consumerist candyland choice of a box of chocolates full of providers of every rainbow service under the sun. Please don't make blanket generalizations about value judgements that may have different factors for different people or organizations. It's paternalistic and condescending.

Sure, anyone is free to define anything they like as "good". If you like being unable to change providers for things, then that is certainly your prerogative (and boy do I need to learn how to start selling services to you)! I predict that most people have very different utility functions to you in this area, though.

> There is no reason to use gmail

Free service, perfect deliverability, never having to spell the part after "@", great spam filters, not having to "migrate" your address and emails anywhere else. There's a lot of reasons, actually.

One might not like Google, but you can't say there's "no reason"

There was some implied context in my comment given the HN audience.

Gmails spam filters are quite bad, but even worse than that is staggering amount of important emails they classify as spam. So gmails spam filter is only decent if you don't care about email. And if you don't care about email, sure, you can find reasons to tolerate gmail.

Why you'd do that, well, that is another question.

Search is also particularly bad with gmail.

> Free service

Nothing is free. You just pay differently.

> Perfect deliverability

I have never lost an e-mail with my non-GMail accounts. GMail is not the only reliable service out there.

> never having to spell the part after "@"

Sad to think that this would be the reason for GMail's monopoly, but well...

> great spam filters

I don't get much spam with alternative services, not sure if there is a formal comparison somewhere?

> not having to "migrate" your address and emails anywhere else

And not being able to, ever. And once you get out of free space because for some reason your smartphone automatically syncs with Google Drive and you don't know how to remove stuff you don't need (and you certainly don't want to lose that picture you didn't know existed), then you can start paying 2$ a month to get more space and keep your peace of mind.

No really, the one reason I see for GMail is that it is well known (no need to think about what server you want) and it is free. The rest is basically lock-in.

Sigh.

No. I don’t pay. Take my data, it’s there. It’s free. Stop with this nonsense. When you pay your bills do you think they’re not selling your data? Right.

> Stop with this nonsense.

On the case for not collecting everything about everybody: what when we get a ChatGPT trained on that where one can go ask "how can I manipulate [person] to do [something]"? Or "give me material to blackmail people that are likely to pay me"? People believe that it is not insane to think about sending humanity into space, that quantum computers will be a thing and that technology can solve the climate crisis. Why would it be worse to think that data is power?

Then ignoring the argument above, they don't just "take your data" that is "there". They harvest it. It makes their websites heavier, which makes you pay for a better internet connection and better hardware for no other reason. It makes them create addictive services so that you lose half of your life swiping meaningless infinite pages. Or it polarizes discussions online, promoting fake news and whatever engages people (usually not constructively).

Please take a step back, and tell me what has changed in e-mails in the last 30 years that actually makes your life better. Something that would justify not being able to use e-mails today with a 30 years-old computer. We're talking about e-mails here, but just think about that for anything "free" that you are using today.

The software industry wastes a lot of resources into "taking your data", because it makes money. What if we actually reflected about what technology is, and how it can serve society? We do have pretty big problems to solve, would be nice if the best software engineers out there were paid to work on them, instead of getting 5x the salary to improve ads online.

Ok you ranted about data collection, but you failed to address the fact that every single company does it, including those that you’re paying for, like your bank and ISP.

Data collection exists whether you pay for a service or not. Since Google does not have my CC info, Gmail is 100% free of charge, regardless of how you define data collection.

> but you failed to address the fact that every single company does it, including those that you’re paying for, like your bank and ISP.

It is not the core business model of every single company.

And no, not every single company does it... For instance, if you don't want your ISP to track you, you can use a VPN. And the core business of a VPN service is to not track you. If they do and it gets known, their out of business.

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