Stop using gmail.com for things you care about(medium.com) |
Stop using gmail.com for things you care about(medium.com) |
I also suspect of a problem with my credit card.
But Google refuses to tell me what was wrong.
Marvel at the simplicity: you pay for a service, and the provider's incentive is to serve you!
This versus the alternative where you use a "service" provided free of cost, and the "provider" makes money by selling data they have harvested from your interactions. You give away your privacy; you have no reason to expect support; you are not actually the customer.
Email is so vital to my personal life and my business that it is worth paying 50 bucks a year.
However like any service when it comes to your business read the TOS and the contract very well. Basing your business on "free" services is never a good idea, a paid contract usually gives you some sort of protection and better terms than "provided as is".
I could use an ISP (or in my case university) email, but I'll lose access to that in the future when I change ISPs (or graduate).
I could use <other free email provider>, but they will probably have the same problem, and unless I'm using one of the other giant services (e.g. outlook) are probably more likely to disappear than Google is to randomly ban me.
I could use a paid provider, but they are probably still more likely to disappear in the future than google is likely to randomly ban me.
Instead I would prepare to mitigate the damage of losing access to your account. Have local copies of emails, don't use two factor authentication with one factor being email.
That was my main reason to still use Gmail till today.
From now I'll be making regular backups, and always use an email address on my own domain, so I can freely change provider without much problems.
Being condescending with customers may backfire for them
Features for the curious:
- 2 GB email account
- 100% green electricity
- Saved data can be encrypted data
- Two-factor auth
- Ad-free
- Sign up without personal details
I'm not related with them in any way, just a customer. The only con is that you can't use your own domain.
What's far more interesting is that their tech support actually answers. It may take a day or three but they do talk back.
(A paid provider might make them too, but has more incentive to care and fix them. + I suspect they actually have less automatic abuse filtering, because free offerings are more vulnerable to that)
All I got is "read the ToS"
What email provider should I use?
Gmail is a large-scale impersonal system / organization. In every other walk of life, we see such large organizations making mistakes, for essentially inscrutable reasons.
Why would Gmail / Google be any different? The onus is on you to show that, rather than the OP to prove he's above reproach / faultless.
Mail is the lingua franca of the Internet. There are many, many alternatives to just getting an account with one of the handful of well-known huge providers and being locked in to whatever they want to do to you afterwards.
Just about any ISP will provide the necessary servers to send and receive electronic mail.
Plenty of hosting services will let you keep your own mail store in a remote, always-on location.
Either of these also works fine with your own domain with any decent provider, and either costs a modest amount to run for something so important and useful.
If you are limiting your options to a specific type of webmail service then of course you're going to be stuck with whatever downsides that comes with, but that's far from your only option.
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¹) On a leased hardware, network and address, but with proper backup and failover strategies, hosting providers are interchangeable (or one can always host on their own hardware) and it's somewhat less likely ICANN or your local registrar would yank your domain name registration than Google would do so to your account.
²) There are (nearly) one-click solutions for this, like https://cozy.io/ or https://sandstorm.io/
I'm pretty sure Gmail is the best free provider, but Fastmail is probably the best paid one.