
Stop using gmail.com for things you care about - dvl
https://medium.com/@xdvl/stop-using-gmail-com-for-things-you-care-about-14af40e43a88#.o3ln6fpl9
======
Jabbles
Last time I saw this on HN it was something like an art professor who'd been
storing pictures of cherubs or something and it had tripped Google's child-
porn detector.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810946)

~~~
chrischen
If someone emails you child porn, would that disable your account?

~~~
falcolas
If cherubs trigger it, it probably doesn't even need to be porn.

------
lambshanks
I use fastmail.com for electronic mail, and I gladly pay for it.

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.

~~~
Oletros
> and the "provider" makes money by selling data they have harvested from your
> interactions.

Which provider sell your data?

------
lern_too_spel
It looks like your problem is you discussed your account closure with people
who don't work at Google and can't get any information about your account
instead of using the official form
([https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/disabled2](https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/disabled2)).
One of the people you talked to pointed you to the official form. Did you try
it? Unless the official form also doesn't work, your conclusion appears
invalid.

------
jakobegger
The absolute lack of customer support for Gmail made me switch to Fastmail a
couple of years ago. I use my own domain now, so if I ever become unhappy with
Fastmail I'm not locked in.

Email is so vital to my personal life and my business that it is worth paying
50 bucks a year.

~~~
chx
Both Gmail (important and unread) and Google Inbox gives you a birds eye view
of important emails. Can fastmail do this?

~~~
chrischen
I find those features useless.

~~~
zzalpha
So... no?

------
gpm
And what's the alternative?

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.

~~~
SNvD7vEJ
The solution is to register your own domain.

~~~
emdd
But that still doesn't actually answer the email provider question.

------
xbmcuser
This part I dont get about Google they ban you but don't tell you why. At
least they should make a chart of offences of 1-5 and put different offences
in the chart according to severity of offence. So when banning you they can
say for this number it won't mean much to rest of the world but the person
getting banned could probably guess why.

------
bsclifton
I hate to be obvious, but you get what you pay for :P I dumped gmail for
Exchange and now use Office 365. Reasonable price, great support.

~~~
raverbashing
It's a good thing that GMail is not ad supported... oh wait

Being condescending with customers may backfire for them

------
thinkxl
I use [https://posteo.de/en](https://posteo.de/en) and am very happy so far,
it's 1 EUR per month.

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.

~~~
dvl
I'm also looking to move my domain from Google Apps, I'll consider Posteo.
Thanks.

~~~
eertami
>The only con is that you can't use your own domain.

------
atomlib
I use Yandex Mail For Domain
[https://domain.yandex.com](https://domain.yandex.com) which is free with the
exact same features regular Yandex.Mail has (“unlimited” mailbox size,
Yandex.Disk, letters up to 30 MB in size). By default you can create up to
1000 mailboxes per domain but if you state why you need more they can lift the
limit. There is DKIM support. They do have one weird restriction though. I
have no access to abuse@ and spam@ mailboxes since they use these for spam
reports.

What's far more interesting is that their tech support actually answers. It
may take a day or three but they do talk back.

------
KayL
Backup Emails is easy, just set up auto-forwarder to Yahoo Mail or Hotmail.
But losing the Google Account, you won't even able to login some single sign-
on services.

------
wineisfine
I doubt Google is just closing accounts without a good reason.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
It's a good point thought. I use Gmail as my primary email for quite a few
things, and my other email is also a free service. What am I to do if I need
support for either of these?

What email provider _should_ I use?

~~~
jakobegger
Whatever provider you choose, use your own domain. Then you can always switch.

~~~
eximius
Thats the easy part. But if there are no good providers, it doesnt matter that
you can switch to the next bad one.

~~~
drdaeman
If there are no good providers, you can always set up your own¹², or hire an
engineer to do this for you.

___

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/](https://cozy.io/) or
[https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)

~~~
the_common_man
See cloudron.io as well.

