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
Gmail is the gateway to their entire product portfolio; no way they’d kill it.
Howeeeeverrrr…
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.
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.
This is the answer. Kinda surprised this is buried three comments deep TBH. The emails you receive and how you interact with them is a far better source for profiling than browser history.
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.
The program cost for the executive MBA class entering in July 2023 was $205,897, which includes tuition, required electronic textbooks, hotel accommodations during immersion weeks and core course sessions in terms 1-3, administrative fees, and most meals during residence periods.
(Emphasis mine)
They are just straight up purchasing a degree at this price point.
Pretty much. There are cheaper alternative, but there are lots of ways to get a “masters” while still being able to hold down a 9 to 5.
No fucking way I could work while doing my masters in interaction design. Only way to way to do that was to take out a student loan because the program required even more commitment than full time undergraduate course work.
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 has been looking for the thing to kill email for a looooooooong time though.
One thing that’s very clear to me is that when a tech company says something is “here to stay,” it doesn’t actually mean it’s here to stay.
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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.
Killing Gmail would be like killing search or youtube, they would NOT dare.
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.
Ha, wish I could find that. I remember inviting people left and right at first, felt like opening a new world. Chain mails that you scrolled we’re still a thing, so email needed an upgrade from the hotmails and yahoos.
And they were giving you something like 1gb of space for free. At the time unwashed working for a big international company and employees quota for emails was something like 50mb!
I wish there were still players like Google was 20 years ago instead these days all we get ate short videos and same day delivery (oh and llms that create funny images with weird fingers)
Ain’t nobody killing off the golden goose!
Oh well, it doesn’t feel like Google Search is going that well. Searching on Google now feels like shit.
Stupid question: what the shit do you do with your 15 years of communication history if your email provider falls off a cliff?
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.
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.
Restore it from the backup that you regularly make rather than relying on a free service to protect it for you for decades?
You pop3 your mails or keep a local copy of you imap them. That’ll make sure you don’t lose any historical communication.
As soon as you start doubting if the service with persist, start switching services over to a new address, logins first.
You pop3 your mails or keep a local copy of you imap them. That’ll make sure you don’t lose any historical communication.
*checks email inbox historical folders: oldest entry 1997-05-07. :)
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.
Chaotic me wishes they would kill Gmail. The next handful of cool things would surface from the ashes and I could finally cut ties with big G.
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.
Also the shitstorm it would cause, when you can’t access an account that you used Gmail to sign up.
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.
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.
It’s a weird problem actually. There are valid reasons for blacklisting and whitelisting free email providers.
Some sites only allow registrations from private domains. They blacklist all the free email providers, which makes sure that mostly businesses, academics, etc. are signing up for their services, rather than randos who may have little to no value as a user.
However, some sites see the randos as the only valuable users, and sometimes see private domains as a threat since a bad actor could use one to spawn an infinite number of valid email addresses for registering accounts. Free providers make it much harder to create a new address, so they whitelist them.
That isn’t the problem I have though, the issue was how many websites don’t let you change you email address full stop. Never had one reject my custom domain (but some shitty ones do reject email aliases)
It’s likely because they use it as the primary/unique identifier for the account, which is just dumb. It’s like they’ve never heard of a UUID/GUID before.
OIDC is the future of this, logins tied to an account rather than a service.
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
Ugh, I’ve gotta switch from Gmail, any good email recommendations?
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.Get your own website and you too can have infinitely emails
duckduckgo does that with @duck.com email addresses too, I’ve liked using them so far
disroot
Fastmail is fantastic.
Agreed, it’s so good.
I love their app… it’s replaced the default iOS app for me it’s so good.
Yeah it’s amazing. You have to pay, but at least you’re not the product 👏
Proton mail is the peak email service money can buy (it’s also avilable for free but i suggest paying)
Thank you for this recommendation, I’ll look into switching. It’s a slow process of moving towards less convenient but more private services but your comment has moved the needle for me at least.
Less convenient
What are you talking about ? If anything proton is more convenient.
I think part of convenience is name brand recognition. I don’t know how you took a heartfelt compliment and made it hostile, but the reality is I grew up knowing what Google was and using it as a verb. Gmail was an obvious and convenient tool to pickup.
I just found out about Protonmail, or at least heard of it for the first time that it broke the barrier of not-caring into carrying. I imagine user numbers reflect that pretty readily.
That’s all I’m saying. I’m not saying Protonmail is worse in anyway, please don’t assume I am. It’s okay to like a product and admit it’s flaws, in this case the only flaw I’m suggesting it has is being less known than Gmail and even then only for me and my small corner of the world.
Bruh i thought you were thinking proton mail maybe inconveniant to use that’s why i corrected you . Sorry if i sounded hostile the problem is whenever people think of privacy they think like its for the paranoid ones and must be tough. I just wanted to clear it up for you.
It takes a little bit of effort but it’s a great time to do the following:
- get a password manager if you don’t have one already. I like 1password
- get an alias service. Proton bought simplelogin so it’s integrated, there’s also anonaddy
- gradually work through updating your online accounts from your old gmail to new aliases for each account (eg ebay@alias.domain.com) and set a complex password through your password manager that’s unique for each account
In a couple months you’ll eventually stop receiving emails to your gmail as you work through the accounts you use, and most incoming mail will all be through aliases. Then if you get spammed, you know what site leaked your email + you can turn off the alias and not get spam.
Wait wait! You’re saying proton lets you use aliases? As many as I’d like?
I guess Gmail does too, if you do the ole youremail+ebay@gmail.com. But not all websites allow the +
Proton integrates directly with simplelogin. But you can use gmail for aliases with anonaddy or simplelogin, they just forward the alias emails to your real inbox.
If you work for Proton then username checks out haha. Real talk I’ve been on the unlimited for a bit and it’s dope.
I dunno Google has a cancelation tick so like i wouldn’t be that surprised
I would imagine Gmail is the primary reason people create an account with Google.
Yeah that and youtube I’d think
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.
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.
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.
It’d almost definitely kill Google if they were to kill Gmail. Gmail, YouTube, and Android are pretty much what brings people to use Google services in the first place. I was just referencing the people that panicked when they saw the fake email going around that looked like it was from Google themselves about sunsetting Gmail. Google’s reputation didn’t help quell the panic which is why they had to come out to the public saying they won’t shut down Gmail
Well spoken, I mostly agree. Although I wouldn’t go so far and say that shutting down Gmail would kill Google - their search is still pretty popular, too. Their horizontal integration in systems does play a huge role in the search‘s popularity though.
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.
I got bit in the ass by Google when I decided to try using their domain service and they decided to nuke it and sell it to Squarespace. Google domains was so good too. I jumped ship to Porkbun before my domains were completely locked into Squarespace so I managed to get out before it was too late thankfully
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.
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Hey Liz Lemon do you kind if i degoogle myself in your office?
Not a problem. I use my Domain so can easily move elsewhere. And I have a backup of all my mail in my email client.
This is good advice for anyone considering to move out of Gmail.
Do not just move to another provider, use your own domain and you’ll never have to worry about changing your email address everywhere
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.
Yes, I own a domain (it’s like 10 dollars/euros per year) and I just point the records to a third party service like ProtonMail or Purely mail (they give you the exact records you need to input in your DNS panel)
Nearly every email provider (even Google’s paid version) lets you use a custom domain, self-hosting is optional and probably not recommend for most.
Why would they voluntarily lose access to all my personal information?
They have enough to train an AI version of you and already predict your actions. Tracking real you is just boring now.
For the time being the compute required to simulate me is more expensive than tracking the real me.
Google+Nvidia : “we will fix that soon enough meat bag”
Any of these large business coming out to explicitly say “this will not happen” is concerning.
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.
Especially Google who is famous for randomly getting bored of developing and then suddenly cancelling services
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.
gmail has a fine website but email is a commodity service, hundreds of replacements exist and could be used.
Same but with education. Fuck the dept. Ed. Qld
LOL they truly suck
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.
Exactly, it’s like if a company said “We’re not going to launch a bomb, trust us”… It would totally mean that they’re considering launching a bomb
I mean, unless there was a hoax that led to widespread belief that they were gonna launch a bomb
Its suspicious if its out of nowhere, but less so if its in response to an existing rumour
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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.
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I am in the process of moving to Proton now. It’s way easier than I though it was going to be!
May I ask what steps you followed to make the transition smooth? I’ve been meaning to use proton + simplelogin, but I’m concerned it’ll quickly become a time sink to transition from one service to the other.
1: Register a new Proton account
2: Set up email forwarding from Gmail to Proton
3: Add a filter that labels all Mail incoming to Gmail with a Gmail label.
4: Whenever you feel like it, go to some of your Gmail labeled mail and change the registered mail to Proton etc.
I’d still recommend buying your own domain though, it took me less than 15 mins switching completely from Skiff to Proton, and I didn’t have to reregister anything. Only when you have a costum domain you’re truly serviceprovider-independent.
I second the custom domain part.
It’s easy to setup and it doesn’t lock you to any single provider, in case you want to change in the future
