

Why I stopped using Gmail - jonemo
http://neubertify.tumblr.com/post/17218441386/why-i-stopped-using-gmail

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fluidcruft
What resonates with me is the growing feeling of vulnerability with google
integrating everything and weaving it through my entire online existence
coupled with their arrogant refusal to deal with people except through deaf
automated machines. It feels like you're playing hide-and-seek with a giant
growing robotic panopticon that's trying to find arbitrary infractions as an
excuse to disable access to Gmail. It's probably an irrational fear, I haven't
been targeted yet (and neither has anyone I know), but I have also never had
any positive experiences with google customer support. Fear is fear and it's
insidious in a relationship. Maybe if I had a positive experience with google
customer support at any point in my almost 8-year relationship with the
company--anything to help me believe that "things won't be so bad" should
things go wrong, I would feel differently. Heck, if they just sold real
support at some fixed price/event I would probably be OK. I don't like feeling
like helpless input to a triage operation.

For me, the Google warm fuzzies have all been evaporating since Google+ rolled
out and people started to lose access to their Gmail because of pseudonyms on
Google+. Now, bugs in a rollout are to be expected, but it was the stubborn-
headed defenses of the policy and bans by deaf Googlers that's the most
threatening to nobodies like me. Yeah Google fixed problems for VIPs, but I'm
not a VIP. Unfortunately, Google really hasn't done anything to regain my
trust and they continue to hide behind their machines while growing the beast
larger.

Unfortunately for Google this all made the reality of my relationship with
them very clear to me--Google is just maintaining a big enough herd that it
sells to advertisers. It's the herd that matters, strays are expendable. In
the months before Google+ rolled out I purchased my first smartphone (Android)
to bring Google and Gmail further into my life. In the aftermath of Google+,
I'm looking for ways out. I used to centralize all my email at Gmail, but I've
started to undo that. For now I still have Android Market on my phone, but the
other apps are being slowly purged and replaced as I have time to explore and
learn about alternatives. (It also does not help that search has become awful
seemingly in the last month or so. The latest example is that for whatever
reason (even using verbatim mode/personalized/world etc) if you search for
"octave blah blah" looking for information about using GNU Octave, Google's
search insists on showing me page after page of results for "matlab blah blah"
instead.)

My goal now is to make my Google account expendable. If I lose access, I want
to be able to just easily create a new one. Clearly the fundamental problem is
I place more value on my account than google places on me. I am toying with
deliberately destroying my google accounts following a schedule of a few
months (the only thing holding me back is my library of Android Market
purchases)--I already do periodic deletions of my other social networking
sites just because I find ekarma/gamification counterproductive to happiness.

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mvkel
Solution: use Gmail inside a native mail client like Apple Mail or Outlook.
All of these "issues" are inherent to Google's style guide and have nothing to
do with Gmail as a product. In fact, almost all of his complaints are about
Google+!

~~~
jonemo
I am not sure how using some alternative mail client would help with the
points listed in the article, aside from the "distraction" argument.

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pentae
My favourite takeaway from this article - "Google does not want me to love
their products. Google wants me to love Google. All of it."

Couldn't agree more.

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tylerritchie
I find his concern about losing access to his account interesting because the
_only_ feature I get sad that that gmail doesn't have is an easy export/backup
tool. Backupify has a nice service, and I realize I could run IMAP either
locally or on a seperate server, but that's less ideal to me than the ability
to set up incremental weekly backups to my dropbox/S3/box.net/etc account.

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webwanderings
My only problem is, we hardly saw these disagreements when Microsoft was
pretty much implementing similar features across the board with Live, and
Yahoo was doing the same. This was way earlier than Google (apparently around
the time when Facebook was trending up).

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webwanderings
"Nobody told the artificial intelligence that it’s above my pay grade to
invite professors to social networks."

Yes, yes, yes. Add the same gripe for Facebook and pretty much most of the
recommendations by algorithm (70%?) falls into this category.

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jc123
Did I miss what the author is using instead?

~~~
jonemo
Somebody did ask that in the comments and I gave him a somewhat detailed
reply. tl;dr: Zoho Mail.

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yanw
Then get an Apps account and don't complain if there is a fly in your free
soup.

~~~
zalew
Except moving a single private account to a google apps for business account
doesn't make much sense. Actually that isn't even 'moving' an account as
creating a new one and importing stuff by hand. Prove me wrong, but last time
I checked it worked that way, and if it made any sense you'd have an 'upgrade'
button everywhere (which I'd probably use). Apps ia a business suite for
collaboration in business entities, not 'a paid gmail'.

