Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by WhyNotHugo on Saturday December 23, 2017 @01:36AM
(#15993206)
This happens all over the place -- for some reason, the majority of the people won't learn. They'll tell you horror stories about how they lost a lot of work (or even money!) because a provider never gave them support, yet, go back to that same provider.
A group of acquaintances had a Facebook group where they shared research and documents. It got deleted and they lost everything. Thrice. I suggested they used something else for document storage each time, but was just ignored or shooed off.
The root cause of the problem is kinda beyond me -- but it's clear that people are unwilling to learn from experience when it comes to these things, and that these free services will continue to behave as they do because there's no downside to doing so.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by proactivesvcs on Saturday December 23, 2017 @08:08AM
(#15994024)
My sister had her broadband slammed (taken over by an ISP without any request or permission whatsoever) which left her with an unreliable and slower service. She stayed with them.
For about three years the router they sent her would kick off the fifth-oldest DHCP lease and the ISP kept refusing to replace it.
It's a truly fascinating psychological effect.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by nerflad on Saturday December 23, 2017 @01:00PM
(#15995333)
It's "who moved my cheese". People will violently resist changing their routines.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by bmon on Saturday December 23, 2017 @01:25AM
(#15993174)
But a Google account is not just email. It's also drive, calendar, and so on. There's a lot of time spent becoming familiar with those services, and to up and switch that entire suite would take a massive amount of relearning. Under the same circumstances as the author, I think I'd be back to Google. Remember, other services have their own issues as well.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by proactivesvcs on Saturday December 23, 2017 @08:10AM
(#15994030)
Having read the article, I start to wonder whether GMail is a service for Google, run by the user, where Alphabet are given invaluable personal information about a person, which they can then correlate with their other services in order to build a detailed mine of data about that person.
In the course of this transaction the user may be permitted to read the emails that belong to Alphabet.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by BrandoElFollito on Monday December 25, 2017 @04:06PM
(#16005708)
This is very much true. I built an ecosystem around Google because they work fine (usually).
Rebuilding this for, say, Microsoft would be a tremendous effort.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by wyclif on Saturday December 23, 2017 @03:41AM
(#15993457)
Worse than that, if we take those words at face value (and that person works in journalism), they apparently don't even know that email != gmail.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by rocqua on Saturday December 23, 2017 @07:47AM
(#15993976)
I'd love to switch away from gmail, but their 'important mail' function is essentially unique to them, and I love it.
Sadly, this seems like a system that can't really be self-hosted. It requires data.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by Godel_unicode on Saturday December 23, 2017 @11:26AM
(#15994799)
If you have Gmail you have a fantastic training set of important and not important email pre-labeled for you to try learning that model for yourself.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by jwilk on Saturday December 23, 2017 @02:26PM
(#15995776)
What alternatives to GMail do you recommend?
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by DashRattlesnake on Saturday December 23, 2017 @05:04PM
(#15996506)
https://www.fastmail.com/
It costs $5/month if you want to use your own domain. I've pretty much stopped using Gmail, etc. and switched totally to them.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by whiddershins on Sunday December 24, 2017 @02:31PM
(#16000930)
Do you find their web interface as good as Gmail?
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by DashRattlesnake on Sunday December 24, 2017 @04:32PM
(#16001394)
Yes, I do. The only thing I miss is tagging/archiving. Fastmail uses a traditional folder paradigm, and archiving only moves the message to a special archive folder.
Their login 2FA options are as good as Gmails, and I like their mail-rules better (though you have to drop into "power users" mode more than I'd like).
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by jftuga on Saturday December 23, 2017 @10:05PM
(#15997657)
How is their calendar?
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by DashRattlesnake on Sunday December 24, 2017 @04:37PM
(#16001411)
I haven't used it as much, but it seems just as good for single-person use. It's WebDAV IIRC. I haven't tried to use any "shared calendar" features.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by Can_Not on Sunday December 24, 2017 @09:06AM
(#15999567)
https://protonmail.com/ is free, open source, and encrypted.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by whiddershins on Saturday December 23, 2017 @03:30PM
(#15996114)
Honestly I think the answer to your question is: giant fail by the tech community, because to my knowledge there isn’t anything actually comparable, free or paid.
Re:I got locked out of my Google account for a month
by DashRattlesnake on Sunday December 24, 2017 @04:37PM
(#16001412)
Fastmail certainly is comparable.
“That same day I opened a second GMail account so I could have access to services like an email account if need be, [...]”
So, this journalist is in the middle of a horrible experience with Gmail and responds by ... opening another Gmail account, because basically realistically imagining email as something other than Gmail is far too much of a stretch in most people’s minds.