First they came for Google Wave, and I did not speak out—Because I never really understood what Wave was to begin with.

Then they came for Google+, and I did not speak out—Because almost all the people I want life updates from are on Facebook.

Then they came for Google Reader, and I did not speak out—Because I never actually heard of Reader until years after it was eliminated. Maybe Reader was actually first?

Then they came for Works with Nest, and I smugly said, "I told you so"—Because I always thought it was a bad idea to expose my thermostat to the internet.

Finally, they game for GMail—and I couldn't contact anyone who might speak out for me.

You don't seem fully serious, but the writing is probably on the wall for third party tools which integrate with GMail.

I use InboxZero through Beeminder, and could see Beeminder being locked out.

There are contractual obligations around changes to GSuite products (and their APIs).

For select users that are willing to advocate for themselves against Google and are covered under a binding, unexpired contract Google will likely let them continue using said APIs. Everyone else is likely to see APIs break at Google's whim, as most users aren't covered by custom GSuite contracts.

Contracts expire and can be not renewed.

Ideally your Gmail ought to be through a domain and services that add value via imap.

Then its impossible for the functionality to evaporate.

You are assuming they will retain imap functionality.

Ask the xmpp/jabber folks about hangouts.

Yeah I fully expect imap to disappear in the next few years. I've started migrating to domains I own for this reason.

I can see them keeping it around for enterprise for a bit longer, though.

I think it will stick around as long as it is the way the iOS Mail app connects

I don't know. Seems like an easy way to force everyone on to the iOS Gmail app. People aren't going to change their email address because it doesn't work with the iOS mail app.

I assumed nothing. If you sync regularly via imap you could switch providers tomorrow and lose nothing.

Good for you, that's the smart way to use e-mail. But most people, many of in tech and many of them knowing better, rely on GMail's web and mobile apps.

Also, unless you're using IMAP to sync the entire mailbox, you'd still lose. If your mail program only stores e.g. last 30 days of mail locally, and lets everything else live on the mailserver, then you'd only have 30 days worth of e-mails left.

This would be assuming that google opted to drop imap with zero warning AND you weren't smart enough to sync all your mail.

The first is out of character for google and the second is totally within your control.

All your mail is for most people merely GB at most per user.

Uh, you realize that imap support has been in GMail for its entire history?

Google Talk had XMPP support for its entire history... until they killed it

So?

Doesn’t mean they can’t get rid of it.

Getting rid of say outlook support would greatly weaken Gmail.

Furthermore if you have an up to date sync on the day imap support ends then you have all your email and need face only changing over to a new address or if you already use a custom domain logging on and changing the email provider.

They make it really difficult to use your Gmail account with K9 Mail. You have to jump through a bunch of hoops and "critical security warnings" for attempting to sign in with a non-Google app.

By the time they get around to killing Gmail all of HN/technorati will have grown to fully hate it anyways. :P /s

So tomorrow then?

One can dream. :-)

Damn I miss Reader.

Why? There are tons of perfectly good rss feed readers. I've never understood this one. I was a heavy Reader user, seamlessly switched to Feedly like the day after it was spun down, and never thought about it again.

Do you mostly consume text, or images/rich media? Something about Reader just worked for me. It was partly some blogs I followed and wanted to keep up with reading, but the meat of it for me was just scrolling endless pictures from various design blogs, that i'd sometimes star or label. Or some webcomic that I'd share with my handful of friends that were on there. Or I'd catch up whatever BMX or ski edits that came out. The interface was just clean for seamless and endless scrolling of all that media, (without titles and sources and headings taking up too much space), and the organization was clutch. Nothing else has caught my eye since. I've tried Feedly, old reader, and a few others, but none of them have me coming back for more, I just never got in the habit with them like i did for Reader.

Looking back, I guess it served as a kind of instagram/facebook feed, but for the internet that I wanted to see (which would differ from time to time, sometimes i want webcomics, sometimes I want ffffound <- this is largly something social media has yet to pick up on, the ebb and flow of what our attention wants). But no social media has captured my attention like Reader did...

Reader worked really well for me, too. And killing Reader seemed to send a signal to a lot of people that rss was 'done', whether rightly or wrongly - all that matters is that people believe it. I saw a lot less rss around subsequently. I switched to a few other services but ultimately just faded out on rss in general, which is a shame, as it was nice to have a non-algorithmic-curation feed of stuff I liked.

Good news for you! Every site that publishes a feed of articles still has an rss feed! You can go back whenever you want, nothing has changed.

Isn't Feedly exactly for people like you? I never liked it because I mainly want text, but it always struck me as a reader for people who want pictures.

The really killer feature, to me and a lot of others, is that it let you discover, and communicate with, people that also liked the same feed entries. I had, entirely without planning, accumulated a nice little group of people with which I shared anything and everything I read via RSS.

I use Feedly now too but I still miss my Reader band.

Ok I didn't know it did that. I never used that, but it does sound neat.

I really recommend checking out Inoreader. It's a nearly perfect Google Reader clone, but with more powerful features like multiple filters per feed and subscribing to Twitter feeds.