I've been burned so hard by them, I'd recommend against using anything Google.

My google usage is now

1. Occasionally watching Youtube videos in an incognito window

2. Very rarely using !g to search Google via DDG

3. Using Gmaps in an incognito window a couple times a month

and that's it. I don't find that I miss it at all. If I had to stop using Youtube and Gmaps, I won't miss 'em.

[0] https://serverfault.com/questions/218615/mail-server-checkli...

I'm not a big account with them, surely trivial compared to those mass domain parkers you mention, but they've never made me feel like I was less valued as a customer. I have received calls from humans just to ask me if I am currently satisfied with my service with them.

Especially if you have a business-critical service, this should simply be a baseline requirement for support, but it's becoming shockingly rare these days.

SPF is essentially a self-maintained whitelist.

Blacklists are public and searchable. Something to check after dealing with an infected machine, for example.

Ironically, commercial spammers have the best SPF records. And DKIM. And all the other goodies.

It was more of a mental "but but my decade-long history of gmail" thing, but it turned out that really was less of a big deal than I thought. I now have a nice custom domain and I forward my gmail to my fastmail, updating subscriptions every so often. Eventually gmail will receive no more mail I care about and I will remove the forwarding altogether. Its getting there!

Looking back on it now, about a year after migrating, my only regret is I didn't do it sooner.

If you aren't a FastMail customer yet, you're gonna assume we're shills. We're not, it's just the sort of quality product that makes you want to tell others. It's like having found Gmail in 2005.

No angels anywhere.

Now, if only good and valuable startups weren't getting bought by google by the dozens :( I guess it's your cue to start migrating to something in house when it happens.

So, for some applications, GCP works very well.

Yes, for that reason a POC I made for a side project costed almost 100 bucks to me (I was the single user)... I never checked the current bill because I was sure the total cost would have been around 15-20... when I got charged I noticed all the previous pushed versions had a single instance running, so the costs were incremental...

It may be my fault for not adequately reading all their caveats, but it seems to me that the default experience shouldn't be like that.

I love Google, but their Cloud Platform is still incomprehensible to me.