Playing devil's advocate here... one cannot expect a free service without said service providing some form of income to the company providing the service. Therefore, if one were to desire a service with the expectation of absolute privacy, one should expect to pay for that service.
This isn't a novel assertion, but for just now un-novel it is, I'm amazed it isn't more often accompanied by the obvious conclusion: that the companies who profit from a) creating a market for personal data and then b) hoarding it also have a responsibility to be transparent about it. I'm sure a lot of people accept that premise, that if the product is free, you're the product, etc. But the ways in which that's true are deliberately obfuscated behind language like, "We collect your personal data to improve your experience/our product etc." If we can all agree that it's reasonable to pay, if not in money, then in personal data, why not have the terms presented and advertised clearly? I'm asking rhetorically, because of course if the incentives lay in transparency, a company would be transparent, therefore if they aren't transparent, the incentives obviously lie elsewhere.
Exactly. If you are not paying for the service, you are the product.
fastmail.com starts at $3/mo. If you care about privacy, it is a small price to pay. If you would rather keep your $3 and trade your data to Google for Gmail service, that is your choice too...
I feel like this is an impossible assumption to make. DIY email hosting is a massive PITA, there's an extremely small chance it gets easier as your in/out data transfer gets higher.
Seems worth reminding everyone that self-hosting your own email is still viable in 2021. Containerized services like mailu.io can help abstract out all the archaic configuration so you can focus on having a clean stable deployment.
One caveat I would add from personal experience is that if you are running a low volume mail server, even if you have a clean IP address, you probably will struggle with successfully delivering email to a lot of the big players (like Gmail and Outlook). A lot of email service providers seem to have switched to a white-list model where they really only accept mail from know good sources. One good way to get around this when self-hosting is to relay your outgoing mail through a higher-traffic SMTP service with a good reputation. I relay all my outgoing emails from my SMTP server through Amazon SES. It is basically free for the small number of messages I send and I have zero delivery problems.
With Gmail, privacy is one major concern, because it's no fun knowing that a company which actively pries into your life and none too subtly hates user privacy (at least from itself) is also scanning the content of all your messages. It's downright grotesque in fact, that we as users simply allow such a thing.
That aside though, my most pressing problem with Gmail is just how easily it can suddenly lock you out of your account for the most idiotic of reasons that should have easy solutions: Leave your country and need to log in? Suddenly lose a key device and need to log in from a new one? Randomly forget your password and want to go through recovery options? You may just be fucked for a while or permanently under any one of these conditions, all in the name of "protecting your account" (but with no human being to whom you can speak with a bit of common sense). I have had variants of them happen several times and finally said "fuck this".
There are other great email options that are much easier to deal with when it comes to accessing an account even under unusual circumstances, and many of them are also much more privacy-friendly, nicely. Google of course tries to insist on 2FA via phone number for supposedly better access security but no thanks. Not only is that a shit option for many reasons, it's also one more tedious step towards more prying and other theatrics.
I haven't decided on switching from Gmail yet, but recently I took a step in that direction and started switching over accounts to an address on my personal domain. The address still routes to my Gmail box in the end, but at least my most important accounts are no longer directly tied to it, and in theory I can point it anywhere else whenever I feel like I can ditch Gmail.
I've had this domain for ages, and I always planned on eventually using an email address with it, but changing every account I have seemed like too insurmountable a problem to even get started. Well, to anyone who is feeling the same way--the only way it gets surmountable is one account at a time. Start today!
Does anyone know how profitable gmail is for alphabet? Is this reported publicly? It’s hard to get away from your gmail account When so many other services tie you to an email address, but I would recommend using a app other than gmail on your phone to minimize the data you’re giving to google. Despite having a gmail, I don’t have any google apps on my phone.
I switched to protonmail and just forwarded all my mail to my protonmail address. I haven't had an issue since, and I just sign up to everything with protonmail, and if I can swap my email on my accounts, I do it as I use them.
i jumped the selfhosted email race with mailinabox and it has been surprisingly good experience. Oh, yeah, once a user sent like 3-4 mails to a gmail account and they decided it was spam and entire domain was spam blocked. had to ask that gmail user to unspam and things were back on track
