If you haven't already, you are better leaving Gmail
1. Have your own domain for emails. This is important. Gmail (or any service provider) can block you/remove your account for no reason and with no recourse. Your email is very important if you are doing serious work and have financial sites and data linked to that email address.
2. The very reason that I used Gmail was speed and storage. The very reason that I left Gmail was speed. Storage is no longer relevant now. Speed become a problem in 2012-2014. It seems better now, but there seems to be "rush hours".
3. The Gmail web app is no longer good. I like a very simple interface because I write very long email. Why make the "compose" show up as a pop-up? I write emails and not chat messages.
4. The SPAM filter is good until it catches a couple business emails. This is when I decided that no SPAM filter is better.
5. If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. I left Gmail after using it for 8 years. I was fine for 12 years but as the business grow I thought about that line. Suddenly, I had strange thoughts about Google using all my data.
You have a really interesting argument against the oft-repeated "If you don't pay, you are the product." I think you are right, that there is great power in anonymized data, but ultimately motives matter. From what I saw as a former scientist, the goodwill of patients donating their tissues formed the foundation of great cancer (and neuroscience, and HIV, and...) research. IBut I think there is a social contract for scientists (and open-source programmers, and nonprofits, and...) that gives them credibility. Maybe it's our human nature to trust them, and for them to trust themselves?
But 1)corporations are obliged to care about profit, and 2) anonymized data can be de-anonymized with (to me) astonishing ease. In Data and Goliath Bruce Schneier cites a dozen cases of de-anonymized data, from health records to Netflix history to personal identification.[0] It is possible that I'm just more paranoid than the average GMail user, but this scared the bones out of me.
I'm an ex Google Apps user and now a happy FastMail user. I left Gmail for many reasons, some technical (poor IMAP support, unhappy with the available clients) and some ideological (I don't want to vote with my wallet for monocultures). However ...
> Have your own domain for emails
Gmail allows you to own your domain. You just subscribe for Google Apps, at $5 / user / month, which is reasonable.
> If you don't pay for the product, you are the product
Well, with Google Apps you very much pay for the product. But I don't agree with such thoughts not even for the free Gmail. Yeah, it's a cute line, but has nothing to do with reality, the reality being that products being sold have to be produced, the essence of capitalism being to lower the costs and increase the scale, turning sold products into commodities and users, by being people, are anything but commodities, being in fact entities that in comparison with hardware or whatever, can always get pissed off or switch to a competitor. Such lines also assume a very simplistic view of the producer / consumer relationship. Cash changing hands is nice, but in our world an ecosystem is much more complex than that, much like how in nature there's a very complex and life creating relationship between predators, cattle and grass, each link in that food-chain being essential for the survival of everything else. And the genius of Google has been to recognize that the welfare of users is paramount to their success, though unfortunately they seem to forget that ever since Google+ and Vic Gundotra.
More realistic would be to say that a zero price tag is in fact subsidized with something else, as there's always an implicit cost. The cost of the free Gmail is lock-in. And just like in nature where monocultures are unhealthy for everybody, free Gmail is hurting competition and worse, they are dropping the ball on standards. So Android is my favorite mobile OS, but can you believe that Android doesn't have a modern, well designed and standard email client? I mean, you're good as long as you're a Gmail user. Exchange also works. But for plain IMAP? Say goodbye to push email and to basic functionality, like archiving by swiping. They should also be ashamed that Android doesn't support CalDAV or CardDAV out of the box, though granted you can buy some add-ons.
Excellent points. I really like your reinterpretation as "a zero price tag is...subsidized with something else...The cost is lock-in." It is definitely more accurate with respect to Google Inc. Though to my ears it sounds like a more generalized version of "if you are not paying for it, you are the product." But don't we almost always think of Google when quoting this line anyway?
Android has bad IMAP support -- is this a limitation of Android, or of IMAP? (are there push notifications for iOS?) IMAP has been a thorn in my side for ever, but I assumed that was the fault of an old outdated protocol?
1. Have your own domain for emails. This is important. Gmail (or any service provider) can block you/remove your account for no reason and with no recourse. Your email is very important if you are doing serious work and have financial sites and data linked to that email address.
2. The very reason that I used Gmail was speed and storage. The very reason that I left Gmail was speed. Storage is no longer relevant now. Speed become a problem in 2012-2014. It seems better now, but there seems to be "rush hours".
3. The Gmail web app is no longer good. I like a very simple interface because I write very long email. Why make the "compose" show up as a pop-up? I write emails and not chat messages.
4. The SPAM filter is good until it catches a couple business emails. This is when I decided that no SPAM filter is better.
5. If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. I left Gmail after using it for 8 years. I was fine for 12 years but as the business grow I thought about that line. Suddenly, I had strange thoughts about Google using all my data.