This exactly. I once tried the twitter game, I thought it was important to have a big following or say clever things, whatever.
I was lightly burned by a tweet (of my own authoring) once, and I thought "I make $XYZ per year, twitter pays me nothing, this joke tweet caused me a lot of stress, the odds that being on twitter will get me cancelled will cost me $XYZ are non-zero and I don't control them"
Then I deleted all my tweets and my twitter account (8 years ago) and life has been really nice without it!
Exact same story except recently I created an empty account with private lists that I follow (so not even the people I "follow" is public), and I can still keep up with some topics from a source of information that generally is on the bleeding edge. Usually I find things in twitter / discord first, then they hit Reddit, then mainstream media. If you only follow reddit you have a slight delay currently, and for some of my interests, fresh information is helpful.
TL;DR "People watch fewer videos if they see more dislikes which means we make less ad revenue, the result of this A/B test is we will continue to optimize for ad rev"
Is it? How do they bill you without knowing how much data you transferred? How do they debug what went wrong with your connection without logs?
This stuff is barely scratching the surface of the data those companies collect and maintain, likely for long periods of time, just to analyze and improve customer experience.
As if ATT gets on the line with end-users to debug site-specific issues!
Aggregate data usage is one thing, but retaining any kind of detailed logs on where one goes or how much data was used on a specific site is unnecessary for the base provisioning of network connectivity.
>This stuff is barely scratching the surface of the data those companies collect and maintain, likely for long periods of time, just to analyze and improve customer experience.
Heh, just to analyze and improve customer experience? Nothing else a bit more unsavory?
>> This stuff is barely scratching the surface of the data those companies collect and maintain, likely for long periods of time, just to analyze and improve customer experience.
> Heh, just to analyze and improve customer experience? Nothing else a bit more unsavory?
The point is this data would get captured regardless, surveillance or no. Mass surveillance (at least in this matter) often isn't so much about what gets captured, but how long it gets retained and who gets access to it.
I am starting to feel really nervous about storing my life in Google. It's not that I wouldn't pay for these things...it's just that I worry one day I'll lose access and fall into the pit of "trying to get Google to help a single human regain access" that sounds horrible.
Backups and self-hosting! These threads keep coming up where [Cloud service] deletes someone's data, bans their account, or otherwise denies service suddenly, and someone always asks "What [other cloud service] should I utterly rely on?" Maybe the answer is to not rely on cloud services to store the only copy of something precious or important to you.
I have my own domain, and run exim+dovecot on a low spec Linux machine. This setup has run solidly for years. I serve E-mail for family and friends. When I first set it up, I had some deliverability problems, but once I had DKIM and SPF set up, it's been rock solid. No experience with containers or docker or any of that stuff, sorry.
My emails get rejected from @comcast.net but nobody else as far as I can tell. I haven't figured out a good way to debug the issue. As a result, I am not completely off of free Gmail. If you need your emails to be 100% received on the other end, I would recommend paying a hosting provider.
I’ve been very happy at Fastmail for the past few years. Their customer support has been quick and very helpful for me. It’s paid so I know that I am a customer and not a product.
When I signed up I just forwarded my old gmail account to it. Now it sounds like I should finally update my email address for all the services still using it!
FastMail is probably the best among the bunch but it's still worse than GMail:
- There is no "always display images from this contact" option if you don't want to load images automatically. You have to click on "show images" every time you read an emai, even from a trusted contact.
- There is no "open mailto: links on FastMail" option on desktop.
- Spam filter is too aggressive. I've missed too many legit mails while trying it.
- Contact list manager is too barebones. There isn't even a "find and merge duplicates" option.
The spam filter can be customized, but I agree that it isn’t nearly as good as gmail’s. I have it configured to move messages with a score higher than 3.5 to spam which prevents all false positives for me, but 1 or 2 spam emails a week still get to my inbox. https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/spamchecks.html#cust...
I agree that the comment manager is barebones. Fastmail does support CardDAV so you could use a different contact manager but I haven’t had the need.
Edit: I swear I am not a Fastmail shill. Just a happy customer!
> There is no "always display images from this contact" option if you don't want to load images automatically. You have to click on "show images" every time you read an emai, even from a trusted contact.
Oh man, this is one feature that I've really missed from Gmail, which actually gives you the best of both worlds by proxying external images from their own servers so images can load automatically without compromising privacy.
Can't blame a small-time email provider like Fastmail from not offering something like this given the resources it'd likely require, but I'm using Microsoft's "enterprise" solution (Exchange Online) and they really have no excuses other than poor prioritization.
Anyone aware of other providers offering this feature?
I chose FastMail + domain (standard plan, one user) after spending way too long weighing all the provider options this year; so far it's been great for me (email only, files/data went elsewhere).
The hardest part is dealing with all the websites who (a) don't let you change your email, (b) require you to contact Support to change your email, or (c) break when you try to change your email. FastMail migrated everything (contacts too) from GMail with one click and set up an IMAP poller against it while you work on the long road to convert. $0.02
Edit: just to cover my bases, a 10-year registration of the domain was < $100 USD at Namesilo.
I'd pay. But mostly, I'd pay to know the customer service would respond to me. Customer service at Google is like trying to cancel Verizon service - endless transfers.
“If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” :)
FWIW I’ve contacted Fastmail’s support once and they were excellent: they helped through a funny DNS issue that was my own doing within an hour of contacting them, and didn’t bat an eye at the question. It was one of the few times I’ve contacted support and thought “this person knows what I’m trying to do, why I messed it up, and how to fix it” at a deep level.
They’ve either made great runbooks or hire great people, but the result is the same.
ProtonMail is great - the company also seem like they’re trustworthy and worth supporting. I was particularly impressed by ‘Help us defend democracy and freedom in Hong Kong’(https://protonvpn.com/blog/hongkong/), a political stance that most other companies were afraid to take.
More important than the current email provider you happen to use is controlling your email _address_, and this means using a domain you control.
It enables for a surprisingly pain-free email migration experience as I found out not too long ago, where all you have to do is point the DNS records to the new provider and do an IMAP import from your old email provider, and everything will just work as you'd expect.
If I wasn't already sold on the power of federation, that would definitely have sold me.
It is a best practice to separate your registrar email from a domain you have, yes.
Fastmail makes this easy for me: I have an @fastmail.fm email from them that I have only ever provided to my domain registrar and I’ve set my MUA to scream and shout loudly if it ever gets mail.
That + using Fastmail for all my domains makes this seamless for me.
> And if you ever forget to renew it, you will lose it.
I’ve had one gmail account nuked by Our Benevolent Overlord’s AI for no rhyme or reason. At least it was unimportant, but it still happened - and I have zero recourse to get it back.
Losing control of my domain or a paid email service? That’s entirely on me ;)
LuxSci is pretty good. They're oriented towards HIPAA-compliant solutions, but they're fine for anyone who doesn't want Google rifling through all their emails (of course, if the other party uses Gmail, you're out of luck either way).
"What's another good email provider?" - an alternative is to run your own mail server. I used to do that and the harddrive with all the mail (and a backup copy) is not going away because some company changes policy..
No, it's going away because of bad sectors or Flash memory. Or you lose it, or accidentally format it. Or forget to backup. Keeping your data safe is a hard task.
I wish I could find this company again I saw online. It was a family owned "google photos" that was pay for, specifically and only sold photo storage for securing your family pictures. Dammit! Someone help!
Sure, but say your engineers cost you $100/hr, and every hour beyond 2,000hrs per year they work, they become more unhappy.
I think it's worth spending the 8 hours/yr/site, supposing you have relatively few sites. Plus, your engineers for 1hr/month will never achieve the same SLAs that AMZN will.
For smallish numbers of sites, it seems like the AMZN solution is fine. For bigger ones, there is always enterprise pricing :-)
I was lightly burned by a tweet (of my own authoring) once, and I thought "I make $XYZ per year, twitter pays me nothing, this joke tweet caused me a lot of stress, the odds that being on twitter will get me cancelled will cost me $XYZ are non-zero and I don't control them"
Then I deleted all my tweets and my twitter account (8 years ago) and life has been really nice without it!