
Gmail: can't delete records of purchases and reservations; Protonmail? - oriettaxx
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/8vo5ga/how_do_i_delete_googles_records_of_purchases_and/
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oriettaxx
The basic is just to run away from Gmail, but it's not easy.

Alternatives?

I just tried Protonmail (the paid account, of course), but it's a pretty sad
experience so far. The huge gmail feature that is missing is the lack of full
text search: yes, you cannot search in the body of your past email (to me
this, in 2018, is not acceptable)

The other big issue is import data from Gmail. I had 10Gb of data in Gmail, so
I paid Protonmail for a 15GB storage, then realized soon I could not import my
data: here there are some issue

1) you cannot connect to protonmail IMAP without their Protonmail/Bridge
(which is pretty understandable for security) and using a Thunderbird/Outlook
client, in theory, but:

2) there is no Protonmail/Bridge for linux (only Win + Os)

3) the Windows version of Protonmail/Bridge crashes very often (I did file a
bug of course), and it crashes mostly during an import (so I even ended up
loosing emails)

4) the Protonmail/Brige is, after a while, very slow: I see I am not the only
one which thing there is a throttling check

From the Gmail side, keep in mind there are very strong limits on the amount
of data you can transfer, so keep it in mind before purchasing Protonmail
storage
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en)

~~~
craftyguy
There are other mail providers out there besides protonmail that use standard
interfaces by default (e.g. imap). startmail, mailbox.org, runbox, mailfence,
etc.

All of the problems you described are from protonmail trying to do things
their own way and ignore what everyone else wants/uses.

~~~
bartbutler
We (ProtonMail) don't provide a server-side IMAP/SMTP interface because we
don't want to see your cleartext mail. And if you are doing the encryption and
key management yourself locally, then you can literally use any email provider
you want. The Bridge sidesteps this issue by exposing a local IMAP/SMTP
interface and handling the encryption/decryption locally, but there are very
good reasons we built it the way we did.

~~~
craftyguy
You still get plain text if someone in your garden tries to communicate with
someone outside of your garden. Or, alternatively the folks outside your
garden get an awkward link to your website where they can only view the
message there.

I don't think those are very good reasons for doing what you did, since the
set of users not using protonmail is orders of magnitude larger than the set
of users that do, so protonmail is basically just covering a very small edge
case (communication between protonmail customers) while making it more
difficult to use the more common case of communication with folks that do
_not_ use protonmail.

~~~
bartbutler
It's not a small use case for corporate users where the internal mail is all
encrypted. We also have full PGP support and the bridge is fully integrated
with this, so we hope the garden aspect will decrease with time, though we
expect PGP volume to remain small. You are also heavily discounting the
overhead of having users manage their own keys locally in your preferred
solution.

------
therealtbs
Interestingly the linked page shows no purchases, except for Google Play
subscriptions, for me.

That's probably because I use G Suite.

~~~
usr1106
I have used gmail as my single mail account for more than 10 years and I don't
deleted anything by real spam (unsolicited mail to harvested or stolen
addresses). However, I get 99% of my mail forwarded from other addresses, I
don't give my gmail address out.

When I look at the linked address I get

* no purchases * no subscriptions * (nearly?) all of my flights and hotel reservations since 2013.

Obviously Google is too American to understand that I travel more frequently
by train than by plane. Several of the flights are displayed as "cancelled"
although I am 100% sure that I took them without any rebooking or anything
else. As a matter of fact the only flight that I could not take because of a
strike is shown as "confirmed". That much about reliability of harvested data.

Originally it was part of Gmail that they scan your mails automatically in
order to show you targeted ads. However, I remember they announced some time
ago they would stop scanning mails. Probably I did not read the fine print in
their legalize...

Evil company that I should do even more effort to avoid.

