Note that "scanning a QR code and sending a text message" means, for the most part, a smartphone. One could do so via a tablet too, I suppose, but most who register will do so via their smartphone device. For some reason accessing the www is increasingly tied to "identify now!". This is a huge contrast to the freedom of the 1990s. I don't think we should accept that.

(In many countries, including soon the USA[1], you can't get a phone number+sim without showing ID, also.)

[1]: https://reclaimthenet.org/the-fcc-wants-your-id-before-you-g...

- Permissionless email (i.e. for agents, empowered users who can program now)

- Pervasive email allow listing

Wonder if these can both exist at the same time, i.e. having a "public" email that is read first by AI (let's imagine we're in a world where prompt injections weren't so possible) and heavily filtered, along with one that is private and allow-list gated (via some easier-than-gpg-to-use identity marker).

People already assume that your "google name" is your official name, so much so that I had to patiently explain a delivery man once that the funny nickname he had for some reason in the delivery notice did not match my ID because that was an old google account from a time when it was usual to use any funny handle for your account.

Protest this by using a paid email provider. My $60 yearly payment just went through today, is that honestly too much for the typical person around here?

You can bypass this if you have a passkey, but phone and password isn't enough. No idea why they opted to do that, it's not like passkeys are indicative of any device binding.

Meanwhile the amount of spam from Gmail I'm getting goes up and up and up.

It’ll happen with social media accounts and other things too. The account creation date is going to become an even bigger heuristic in their spam models.

Google really need to get it together. Their sender reputation bypasses all the normal spam filters, but if it was up to me…

Try Tuta, or Proton, or Fastmail, or Zoho.

Both can ban you right away because they had to ramp up their anti-spam protections. Pretty much everyone already have an account, so most people creating new ones are just that, spammers.

And now they have a treasure trove of AI training data, for free.

for free? I guess tracking you to death and shoving ads down your throat does not count as monetizing anymore then?

Google used to literally have a counter inside Gmail showing how your account had a super huge and always increasing amount of storage. The courted their current market position. This isnt "Oh how did we get here with our big bleeding hearts" its just enshittification.

Lol, what? One of the biggest company on Earth is being pictured as a victim for creating services that siphon data out of half the planet's people? Don't take it personally but I can't fathom how you think this is FREE. It's literally the most lucrative business there is and it's only going to get worse—and not for them.

The company that wilfully monopolised email somehow got involuntarily roped into running said email?

Do people love revising history like this?

Don't bullshit to us here, please.

Google scan billions people's emails (including very sensitive ones like medical record letters) to then show relevant ads AND sell the data to some partners (hundreds of them).

It's not called "public infra for free". It's the serious for-profit business. The surveillance capitalism on the march.

People pay for it dearly with their data for advertisement.

In fact, even when you _do_ pay, you still get ads!

You know, if it's such a bad deal they can stop owning it any time they want. They already lied about it - I was told I would never have to delete email, and turns out I had to.

I don't care either way, I moved to tuta last year.

It's bizarre how you make up a sob story about how Gmail is just so hard for Google to deal with. They aren't maintaining it for charity. I'm sure, if I had no ethics, I could manage the burden of dealing with a software system that harvests the data of >1 billion people as part of my corporation's business plan that nets hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The reasons you listed for why it would suck to be Google -- it's "free" for users, expensive for Google, and oh god, you have to hold on to the data... are not reasons at all, because Google profits from it and Google wants the data. The data is the point. You belabour how Google has the burden of controlling a huge chunk of the internet's infrastructure, as if gaining control of a huge chunk of the internet's infrastructure is not literally their anti-consumer goal.

It also just happens that they're the ones best positioned to provide attestation and identity services.

> Evaluating Large Language Models' Capability to Launch Fully Automated Spear Phishing Campaigns: Validated on Human Subjects

> https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00586

LLMs make phishing absurdly profitable, and can now make profits from targets who were previously economically unviable to target.

Called my state senators to complain about it and ask for assistance. Enjoyed the complete lack of follow through.

It occurs to me this "force you to send the sms" might be a way to avoid exactly this sort of thing.

I know you mean charge just these bulk senders, but if they didn’t charge consumers a similar rate too, whoever wants to spam SMS can just set up farms of consumer SIMs and dump them onto the network that way. In fact, they already do this.

Outlook eats Gmail for breakfast. The way shared accounts, lists, and work assignments are done in Outlook require their backend (share point inheritance), and google drive is pretty good even for some small files, but when all is considered O365 wins.

Then if you are in Europe, you should not use any of those and other very good solutions are currently growing super fast.

Hi. I'm a VC bigwig and I'm very interested in purchasing your company. I, too, believe in Not Being Evil

No really - got more ideas about "Don't be evil. FOR REAL"?

I don’t wanna sound like a salesman. It’s just that it’s been a surprising good experience for my family, especially for the price tag of $0. And if it ever does start to suck, I can point our domains at a different server.

You probably risk some legal fallout though, so be cautious.

Also try squeezing the phone at various points to see if it pops the internal connector back in. You can find a repair video to see where the connector is.

I was on Google Workspace for about 10 years. I moved off their service because the mandatory Gemini price hikes meant that it no longer represented value for money.

I get excessive storage utilisation warnings for some shared drives I used to have but because I no longer have a paid up license, I can’t manage shared drives anymore. So I can’t delete them.

Google’s “support” team in India told me all sorts of lies about how to resolve the issue, but they’ve finally settled on a position that I would need to reinstate my Workspace account, at my own expense in order to delete the data to stop the emails and save Google money.

They refuse to acknowledge the patent absurdity of this situation and escalate it to someone who can actually fix it.

There are so many businesses now which exist mainly to cheat you, operating at the very edge of what’s technically legal, and relying on their customers not really understanding the full terms of the deals they’re agreeing to. It’s sickening.

So if there are any costs for sending this SMS it’s on you.

There are some limited mechanisms for opting out of targeted mail (e.g. things that have your name on them), and mechanisms for opting out of credit offers in particular. There are not any mechanisms for opting out of "current resident" spam sent to everyone in an area.

We need actual liability laws for compute services at this point, and they should pass through every entity between the bits on disk and the end user.

Google disappears someone's realtor's corporate email, and it cost the agent a $100K real estate commission? Google and the employer get to pay $50K, plus damages to the customer.

Or whatever. The point is not that they'd be paying lots of these fines. The point is the cost of non-compliance and insecure setups is 1000x the cost of just doing their jobs. At that point, the bean counters would allocate another 10% to engineering, and all the easily-solved problems would disappear.

PS Has the bio trap snared any robots yet?!

If that ceases to be true, goodbye (free) gmail.

Infrastructure costs were marginal, near 0,

because SMS was just 140 bytes of text stuffed into already-occurring network traffic

between phone<->telco.

Yeah, I can "just" after I "just" do A, and B, and C, and D, and E, and F, and G.

Drives me batty on top of being insulting. "Surely you realize I thought about that weeks ago, and if it were that simple, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

But hey, I get paid every 2 weeks.

Corporations aren’t magical entities that somehow exist outside of social obligations and can do whatever they want as long as their own terms of service permit it.

I don’t have much empathy for Google.

[0] https://x.com/MSFT365Status

Yeah, I'm not sure that pinning one's hopes for a better-educated populace on LLMs is going to pan out well. Education requires trust and active defense against malign actors.

They are not.

Microsoft on the other hand...

Regulated "Emails cost 1 penny" would have worked fine. All you need to do to meaningfully fight spam is have a cost that isn't completely negligible; Spammers started out at a rate where they spend less than a day's wages to message literally every human being on the planet; At those costs even finding a single person you can convince of your Nigerian prince account nets you a profit.

We controlled the pipes and the formats in the 90's and 00's almost unilaterally. We should have made a stamp.

This is a normal thing to happen in the physical world. We really shouldn't have such strict connections between email being a primary identifier for a user, requiring only a single one on an account, and not letting users change what they consider their primary email address. Email addresses can and should change over time. If someone really wants to ensure you have a piece of digital real estate one should get into the "ownership" game and get your own domain. People somehow end up buying and selling houses all the time which is far more complicated paperwork-wise, and yet we act like registering a domain name and configuring it for an email provider is just nearly impossible for normal people to handle.

The reason is that I have an opposite experience, during the last couple of years I have received much less spam messages than before.

I have hosted my own e-mail server for more than 2 decades. Previously, I had to filter large quantities of spam messages, but lately the number of spam messages is much less than 10% of the total number of received messages.

Take DocuSign for instance. Still, this many years later, is a major source of phishing emails from their free trials. DocuSign could easily shut this down today by either requiring a CC for the trial, or forcing a call with a sales rep to start a trial. But they don't, they continue to allow their service to be used for wide scale phishing.

Atera, an RMM, is another one that has been a big source of malware delivery, also via the free trials.

Shutting down the trial accounts after the fact does nothing, the emails already went out.

I've always had some level of political spam, usually only close to voting months, but this year has been the worst for me.

In the US, we elected a well-known scammer ... twice!

It's such a good tactic too to start the voicemail with the conversation already going people are like "what? who?"

The man is the absolute worse person - unless your a rich guy, who wants to make more money by screwing over people who mostly don't even know it.

Anyone who reads this, I dare you to find out why that thing in your life you hate so much, sucks so bad - nothing is ever by accident or unintentional.

The United States, and its People, will be discovering/realizing different ways we have been absolutely f-d by that grifter for likely the rest of my millenial life, thankfully (silver lining!!) US life expectancy has dropped substantially for the 150 million Americans in the bottom 50% of income - rich people in America have to deal with this bs for almost 8 more years than we do

Oh yeah, if you want a faster out even yet - just make 30k or less per year, your life caps at 71 then.

I joke but I hate so much that people will read this and then promptly go back to sustaining this system at their job.

We work our lives away so the rich dont have to and they get to live 14 more years on average than poor people.

The way it sometimes bounces emails around in their own systems lead to them sometimes mixing up who actually originally sent the message. This causes all kinds of problems and seems entirely unique to their crappy setup.

You know, you could achieve 100% spam filtering by just deleting every email. You wouldn't see any spam at all!

what could possibly go wrong

Unfortunately scamming is a business and if certain actions become less expensive, I would expect more of them.

> On October 1, 2013, HealthCare.gov was rolled out as planned, despite the concurrent partial government shutdown. The launch was marred by serious technological problems, making it difficult for the public to sign up for health insurance.[4] The deadline to sign up for coverage that would begin January 1, 2014, was December 23, 2013, by which time the problems had largely been fixed. The open enrollment period for 2016 coverage ran from November 1, 2015, to January 31, 2016.[5] State exchanges also have had the same deadlines; their performance has been varied.[6][7][8]

> The design of the website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and built by a number of federal contractors, most prominently CGI Inc. of Canada. The original budget for CGI was $93.7 million, but this grew to $292 million prior to launch of the website. While estimates that the overall cost for building the website had reached over $500 million prior to launch[1][9][10][11][12] and in early 2014 HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said there would be "approximately $834 million on Marketplace-related IT contracts and interagency agreements,"[13] the Office of Inspector General released a report in August 2014 finding that the total cost of the HealthCare.gov website had reached $1.7 billion[14] and a month later, including costs beyond "computer systems," Bloomberg News estimated it at $2.1 billion.[15]

Got it. So if you're fighting an obstinate faction that would rather the government not exist than provide services then that can cause issues. Further, contractors will fleece you for everything you're worth. Compare to a successful project like the Post Office that gets pushed through with overwhelming political will and is run directly by a government agency (oddly structured as a government-owned corporation) and then even despite attempts to destroy it it continues to provide good service.

It's not easy; you need someone competent heading it up and setting it up for success. If the Democrats were to propose it in 2028 under president Gavin I would expect it to be a boondoggle. That doesn't change the fact that I want it to be done and done well.