Google stopped mining it last year: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
> Google stopped mining it last year: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in....
Google stopped mining it for ads, but it's disingenuous to say they stopped mining, period [0]. How do you think those Gmail suggested replies are generated?
[0]: https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...
I don't really see how running the contents through an quick reply generation function is different to running it through whatever function prepares the body for display, here. An implementation of that which involves wide-scale mining of email content is imaginable, but not necessary.
Would you stop using Protonmail if they offered the same feature?
You can be locked out of your account for arbitrary-reason-of-the-day and good luck finding a contact number or email address for support.
If email is important to you, you probably shouldn’t be using a “free” service.
“just use an existing service / do what everyone else is doing”
probably isn’t very representative of the entrepreneurial / hacker spirit.
If you can't be bothered, just use a provider who will set it for you... like Google.
This, in turn, means that even when considering non-free email service providers, you need some reassurance that provider will be around and will not institute crazy policies in the future. Which favors large providers like Google over smaller ones, and reinforces the lock-in.
- Notify your contacts of your address change.
- Set your old address to forward to your new address and always reply to emails from your new one.
- After 2 months, set your old email to auto-reply to all messages saying that you have changed your address and the old one will soon be deactivated.
- Finally, turn deactivate the old email.
It's work, but I've done it on multiple occasions. I wonder if there could be a service that could automate the entire process, since it could all be done via IMAP.
I have documented a few cases of such unnoticed termination in my blog post:
https://paradite.com/2016/02/18/stay-independent-problems-wi...
Over time, I've been replacing various Google services with smaller alternatives. At this point, it's down to Youtube, which is pretty hard to beat. But it feels a lot better to provide usership to smaller businesses that could use it more.