Claims that Google plans to sunset Gmail were a hoax, so there's no need to panic
Google confirms Gmail is “here to stay” amid speculation over plans to scrap the email service::Claims that Google plans to sunset Gmail were a hoax, so there's no need to panic
All it takes is one MBA with little foresight in the wrong position - the Gmail team is all expense (server hosting, labor), and no revenue; that's the "Ads" and "Drive/One/Business" teams.
The MBA. The only graduate degree you can get by attending class 3 days a month.
How some of these MBA programs can be considered a “masters” degree is an insult to people who actually had to spend years on 40-70hour a week graduate programs.
Remember. There is no such thing as free. They’re data mining the hell out of your email. You can rest assured that gmail is a revenue generator. Just in ways you don’t see.
You are awfully confident about a company that kills things like a Russian dictator. I think what perhaps you mean is there's no way they'd kill it now. If they wanted to push users to some different type of platform they would certainly entertain the idea.
Google getting rid of gmail would have to be hands down one of the biggest internet shakeups since its inception. Gmail has been the de facto free email service for almost two decades now. They have like a 53% market share of emails in the U.S.
Maybe it would finally force the surprising number of websites out there that don't allow for email changes to change their policies. I recently switched every account I could to a personal domain and I couldn't believe how many just don't allow for it.
I'm glad I got my own website years ago....it's literally just a function email server for me...no bullshit spam and I can have separate emails for stuff that I don't need to monitor.
With the terms of service for their “anti spam” and “productivity auto-sorting” features, they must gather SO much data about people by reading their emails - there’s no way they’d turn that off lol
It feels like everyone hates Apple, but their hide my email service is bundled into their family plan, and it’s real nice just being able to give every site an email address you can then just delete if they spam you.
No one knows who I really am, and I’m good with that.
I guess my recommendation is to find a service that lets you make throwaway emails.
And I think Proton does that. Mozilla has a service for that, but their new CEO has thrown some question marks into that mix. There are definitely others.
No way will they cancel gmail. Google is using Gmail to train Gemini and power their Ad business. It might be a free email service in terms of not having a monetary cost, but you are paying for it with your data.
Stadia was destined to fail though. I still remember the key note in which it was introduced. The CEO started with the lines "I don't play many games, but ... ".
I just now created a Proton mail account just minutes before seeing this. I think I'm glad I did.
I've been thinking about de-googling myself for some time now. After being with them since they created the Gmail service in the early 2000s, I practically have my whole adult life on Google. I've been using drive and photos as well for as long as it has existed. It's going to be a lot of work to sort through all of this data and start over on a new service.
I don't trust Google anymore over anything. Whether it's privacy (though I was pretty naive to think I had any in the first place) or their ability to keep a service up long enough for anyone to commit.
It's a shame because they started as a really nice company with their do no evil motto with great services and then everything went to shit. Even their killer feature, the search engine, has become complete shit.
Back in the day, after Hotmail and Yahoo! email but before Gmail, people started becoming really skeptical of emails from @xyz.net and started treating anything that didn't come from a major email provider as "spam."
I've kept my old gmail accounts around for "spam" and "work" respectively because despite people (finally) waking up to the privacy issues of Gmail, I cannot trust that emails with a @protonmail.com address won't be viewed skeptically by people recieving the email. Especially in regards to jobs. Unless you're in Cybersecurity and taking privacy seriously is your professional obligation, you're not going to run into tons of people who view ProtonMail very favorably.
De-googling is good, but don't leave yourself stranded and ignored by people because you had the audacity to use a different fucking service.
I don’t think that’s really much of a concern. I can’t imagine any world where a proton.me email will cause you any issues. I’ve had mine for years now, in fact on my resume and job applications I used my own domain’s email addresses and I’ve never experienced a problem. What you’re saying isn’t entirely impossible but it’s definitely not a problem you’re very likely to run into. You’re not likely to run into a single person that cares about your proton email much less one that views it disfavorably.
Good counterpoint, and to add, Gmail itself is more than happy to throw any email into spam if it isn't from a major provider. I had this happen with my own domain email, and even after telling Gmail the email is legit, it still spam filters it.
Plus, guess what email provider HR often uses but shouldn't... That domain isn't Gmail but you better believe their boss paid the 6 dollars a head to get them a gsuite portal with Gmail Spam filters.
I've never had a problem with that. My simplelogin aliases on the other hand, they're much more weird. But for email I share to people, it's a protonmail.com address. Even my parents use it, it's fine.
Yeah, I'd drop Fi, Pixle, and use of Google in a second. Gmail is the backbone of everything Google is. Had it since day 1 and will have it until it disappears, and then I will disappear into the woods forever.
I don't know if it's still there but a couple years ago poking around in gmail settings I was able to find that there was still a section for inviting new users to the gmail beta. I had 97/100 invites remaining. Been like that for almost 20 years now which is crazy.
Doesn't matter. It's in the aether now that "Google promised Gmail won't go anywhere," so it will definitely be eliminated. People believing a Google product won't be discontinued is the Google product kiss of death.
Fully agree. I find it surprising that Google’s public image deteriorated to a point where just mentioning rumors of them shutting down a service gets people upset with them.
I mean this would be insane. Gmail is probably the most used email service in the world, and even though I'm not a Google fanboy, it's also probably the best.
What are people gonna use? Outlook? Fuck that. I only use that piece of trash because of my job.
Yeah a random website on a DDG search (ironically) that I just did said that Gmail has 30% of the email marketshare, which I'd definitely believe. It would be a HUGE shakeup and very disruptive if they were to stop it.
This is in direct response to a misleading viral social media post that claims that Gmail is going to be discontinued, which selectively quotes from a real announcement that Gmail is discontinuing the "basic HTML" browser interface for the service, now that pretty much every device has good performance on the regular browser interface.
Gmail is untouchable. That more than any other product has kept me tethered to Google since 2004. That being said I wouldn't be surprised if some greedy, future regime at Google botches it up.
I already moved over to Proton in anticipation of Google charging for Gmail. It's untouchable as far as longevity, but it's going to be majorly enshittifiedto the point that leaving it will be more desirable than staying.
I bought a domain and started using it for all my email last year. It’s the best and I suggest it to everyone.
The combination of your own domain, Fastmail, and Bitwarden is powerful.
You can move email services by changing a few DNS records and Fastmail has an API that Bitwarden hits to create new masked email addresses using your domain so every site gets a different email address. Start getting spam? You know exactly who leaked/sold your info and you can now send that address right to the trash.
Of course it is. I know Google scraps a lot of things, but Gmail is for the most part liked and, far more importantly to Google, is an absolute treasure trove of personalised, easily parsable data, yet nowhere near as costly to maintain as, say, YouTube.
The fact that after making search, an email provider was their next big project, shows how serious they are about it.
Why does anyone think Google would shut down Gmail? You'd have to be stupid to think that they would shut down the most used email service on earth, one that is deeply integrated into Google as an ecosystem.
Google does have a reputation for unnecessary and/or prematurely killing everything it makes so I wouldn't blame people for believing an email that looked like it was from Google saying that Gmail is shutting down in August
They shut down services that aren’t profitable. Gmail is highly profitable as it’s an important lever to identify people’s interests, which they use to sell ads at a higher price. They’d have to be stupid to shut it down.
Google shuts down projects so regularly that I just wouldn't adopt anything new they make because it's not going to be around in 5 years. The core products: search, email, youtube, chrome, android, are decades old now and I wonder if the company can survive shutting down any of them.
Because there's a viral post going around that they are. They're just squashing this dumb rumor, because despite how dumb it is, it did get some traction.
The week after: Google introduces AI Mail that will receive and automatically respond to all mail. This will happen without the users' consent or knowledge. In fact, users won't be able to access their mail anymore at all "for security reasons".
I messed up my data partition ONCE on a windows upgrade with the most recent backup being over a year old, and I still beat myself up over it.... The only time I actually ever paid a professional data recovery service for private purposes.
Nothing you can do. This is the implicit (and sometimes explicit) contract we have with cloud services, that they'll keep our data safe and keep the lights on forever. If you think about it, though, unless you're paying for it this is untenable. A single user, when paying with their attention, will only ever generate a fairly fixed amount monthly. And yet the cost of keeping them on as a user grows steadily over time as more data is accumulated.
I would recommend getting a Google Takeout export every year or so. Even before it falls off a cliff it's a good idea to have your own backups. Accounts can get blocked, hacked, etc.
Oh thank goodness. Ya know I trust Google, when Google speaks it's always true. They're very not evil.
And this definitely isn't a fun way to lessen the blow of an announcement that would be so.. displeasing to the masses.
see if they were even remotely trustworthy or even rational no one would ever even entertain the possibility of Gmail being discontinued. for any other party this would be laughable. with Google it's plausible.
Nah, they want to keep the data pipe wide open. Everything that can get you to voluntarily put your data into their service they'll leave as free as air.
Plus, Gmail has the added bonus of being like a supermarket loyalty card: it gets their name into your browser toolbar and daily routine for bonus psychological impact.
I doubt they'll give any of that up for a paltry $3.99.
Of course it is. e-mail is well established and very widespread for both personal and corporate use, Google would never abandon this service which is actually a great source of collecting personal data from users and non-users and therefore a source of revenue for them
Google almost killed Gmail for me - I'm on a deprecated google apps free family plan they tried to kill recently. It was going to cost over a hundred dollars a month to move everyone on my personal family domain to a professional plan to keep it, and at the last minute they retreated and kept it free.
But for me that was a warning shot I can't ignore. Way back I ran a Microsoft Exchange server for the family, before that postfix with squirrelmail. But I'm tired of all the tech support that came with it, so some kind of permanent, relatively spam free email option that we call rely on for decades would be welcome.
Proton is way too overpriced for older accounts with a lot of stuff accumulated and encryption is a gimmick unless you're only communicating with other Proton users. All companies encrypt email at rest.
I'm currently using and can definitely recommend purely mail. Obviously backup, but so far the service has been excellent. It's the only fairly priced service out there for personal hosting that supports custom domains.
Recently moved to protonmail. The setup was fairly easy, with proton copying all the mails over and setting up forwarding from gmail. I've started to gradually change accounts over. Decided to subscribe as well, even though could manage without.
If you buy a custom domain then you won't have to worry in the future, you will be able to switch mail provider without changing your email on any service you use
That's a good point. I've considered it before, but always struggle with coming up with a domain name. Also, with respect to tracking a personal domain means that anyone can check the registrar information to find full name, address etc?
Wait didn't someone on Lemmy just make the fake Google shutting down Gmail image? Did it spread that far or was there already illiterate idiots already thinking that it was on the way out?
I'm assuming just to host it and send through an SMTP provider? Even in the self hosting community whenever I see someone ask about running their own email server the answer is usually "don't". I think because dealing with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC isn't usually worth the effort.
I'd like them to scrap it actually. So much bullshit you have to do setting up an email server so that GMail would accept your, you know, mail. And there's little demand for alternative services cause everybody has MS and Google mail address (or a dozen).
Spam is a bad thing, yes, spammers have to be fought. But again, I personally would prefer only obviously invalid letters (with spoofed From etc) to be discarded this way. There are local spam filters after all for many local clients, which is how you are supposed to use email.