Last time I used Gmail app, it was showing multiple ads on the top. Now, it seems we are getting even more ads scattered throughout (since a few on the top were clearly not enough). With this pace, that day is not far when people will be complaining about not being able to find mails in their Gmail inbox.

Thankfully, this misery can be easily avoided by using alternatives such as K9 and FairEmail.

Same idea as here: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Gmail is being Enshittified.

Honestly, it's amazing how quickly Google got to the point where their corporate culture is so ossified that they can't build or maintain anything successful anymore and are resorting to extracting the tiniest bits of revenue no matter the reputational cost. Especially considering that this decline has been going on for a while.

Most big successful companies blow up and then spend decades on a plateau before they start the long, inevitable decline - it seems like Google just skipped that part.

I'm always baffled when I see people using a desktop web browser without an ad blocker. We have the technology to fix this, folks! It takes like two clicks! Use it!

https://ublockorigin.com/

Some of us believe that content creators should get paid. It's a pity that ads are the lowest friction method easily available to the general public to accomplish this.

I spend over $100/mo on Patreon. There are other options. IMO online ad-based business models are one of the biggest evils of the current age. Why does social media push the most outrage-bait content? Ads. Why is Google filled with SEO spam? Ads. Why can't non-ad business models get a foot in the door? Ads. We need to destroy online advertising as a viable business model. Using an ad blocker is the ethical choice.

YouTube would not exist. Not everyone is willing to pay for Premium, but everyone is fine trading their time watching ads for watching everything for free. And a small group of people, probably under 25%, will actually act on ads and sponsor spots in videos by buying said product. Maybe you don't think YouTube needs to exist if it can't survive off of direct payment, but there are quite literally billions of people who use it and would not be able to pay, which would destroys the reason most creators even choose to use YouTube.

> everyone is fine trading their time watching ads for watching everything for free.

Given that many people pay actual money in exchange for not seeing ads, I think this blanket statement is clearly false.

“Many” is not most, Premium only has 80 million subs[0], which is a lot, but not even 10% of of the global user base (they might also be counting family subscriptions as multiple users).

0: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-music-premium-8...

The problem is that consumers will pay twice: once with their time, and then again through the product which is now more expensive because of ads.

(And then again with their personal private information, and by buying not the thing they really needed but something that had more advertising budget behind it, ...)

The whole point of our current capitalist economy is that "velocity of money" goes up. So, especially if you put it like this, this is a very good thing indeed.

What the hell are you talking about? What does this have to do with ads in Gmail?

I can't subscribe to Pateron for every single website that I visit. It's just not practical. I'd be more than happy to shell out $100 per month to an aggregator if they could spread it out amongst 50+ websites that I visit in a month, but the only aggregator that does that with meaningful coverage is Google.

It's all about network effects, but how do you bootstrap an aggregator?

I'm just waiting for substack to realize that $60/year for every writer is too much, and make a curated bundle of writing, reinventing the newsletter/magazine.

Brave is trying to do that, but yeah coverage is an issue. Blocking as is a start.

Brave has connected the concept with cryptocurrency, though, right? That means that at least some people (or at least me) consider it a nonstarter.

Leave a one-time tip occasionally.

It makes a difference.

And I do occassionally, but the vast majority of content I stumble upon in a given month doesn't have a Patreon option for support. Patreon is great for what it does, but it is most definitely not a low friction option to support random web content.

Thank you.

Most people don't.

Creators can get paid in other ways. It's their choice to rely on something people both (rightfully) hate and are willing to block for revenue.

If a creator must make a living by throwing State Farm ads in front of me again and again, I can't say I have much sympathy.

Right?! Aternos, a free on-demand minecraft server host, makes your experience trash if you block ads. However, in my experience, it's still better than having ads enabled. The ads continuously pop over things I'm working on, play music and videos, and frequently have no clear way to exit them until they're done. I'd rather just leave my ad blocker on and let them do their weird torture moves it's still better than having the ads shoved into my experience.

Let me guess, your "other ways" include Patreon, maybe writing an eBook, or maybe spending 2 years to promote an affiliate product, or maybe spend 3 years building a product?

Maybe creators can add a "Buy me a coffee" button to their site, that should surely fix the problems?

There's a thing called stability and reliance on something. Ads is something you can rely on. It does not make you produce content and at the back of your mind think, "Am I going to pay my rent this month?". If you think everyone is out there making big bucks just because they opened a website and put some ads on it, you're wrong. Not only does it take time to build reputation and a following, people just don't out of the blue come and throw money at you.

A lot of people have this notion that there is too much SEO spam and too many ads, but what I think a lot of people are really saying is that, "All I want is just free content. Give me a raw white background with a slab of text centered in the middle of it and I will be on my way.".

That is not how this world works, and trying to argue about it just makes you look selfish.

> Ads is something you can rely on

Not necessarily, especially in the long term.

> If you think everyone is out there making big bucks just because they opened a website and put some ads on it, you're wrong.

I never said or implied that.

> Not only does it take time to build reputation and a following, people just don't out of the blue come and throw money at you.

Not my problem.

> what I think a lot of people are really saying is that, "All I want is just free content. Give me a raw white background with a slab of text centered in the middle of it and I will be on my way."

No idea what that has to do with anything.

> That is not how this world works, and trying to argue about it just makes you look selfish.

I don't care if I look selfish.

> Not necessarily, especially in the long term.

Last I checked, YouTube is going strong on 17 years with ads.

The topic wasn't about YouTube the company. As far as the qualitative statement of "going strong", it really depends on what you mean by that. YouTube is highly relevant today, but nobody actually knows whether it makes a profit. Before you go looking for their revenue statements, remember, revenue != profit.

To clarify my precious statement, just because ad revenue helps a creator early on doesn't mean they will get the same payout as time goes on, and YouTube has no qualms about demonetizing creators for any reason they see fit. To top it off, the same number of ads is likely to bring in less revenue as time goes on. Both YouTube ads and Adsense used to pay out a lot more than they do today.

> That is not how this world works, and trying to argue about it just makes you look selfish.

Ad blocking is a very common activity that is legal in every jurisdiction that I'm aware of. Since ad blocking is legal and many users consider ads an unnecessary distraction, a time waster, or a privacy-invading scourge, users have strong incentives to block ads.

No publisher is obligated to release content with ads, and nobody is entitled to have a sustainable business that runs on ads. The notion that ads should be "something you can rely on" for profit is not consistent with the reality of business, because there is no business model that inherently deserves to be successful. If a publisher wants to ensure that they receive payment for any content they create that is consumed, they can require that payment upfront with a paywall.

Trying to characterize ad blocking as immoral because it benefits users over publishers isn't a winning strategy for publishers. Publishers need to create an actual incentive for users to fund their content, directly or indirectly, if they want to get paid. Since advertising is a monetization model that degrades the quality of the publisher's product and users can easily bypass ads with an ad blocker, more and more publishers are finding out over time that advertising isn't "something you can rely on" after all.

> "All I want is just free content...."

Nope. All I want is a viable way to support writers, musicians, videographers and other creatives that doesn't involve some climate killing cryptocurrency and doesn't require a credit card transaction per view. Then I'll be on my way.

Selfish is profiting from mass psychological manipulation. Advertising makes the world a worse place.

> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

> You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

> Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

> You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

If you don't agree with creator's reward mechanism Simple then you can simply not consume their content.

Most "content" is not worth the bytes they are encoded in, so usually I don't.

Since I don't "consume" any "content", job done!

If you don't agree with people consuming public content in whatever way they like, including stripping unwanted parts, you are free not to make your content public.

Yeah, this. Term limits for politicians, no expectation of a career escalator for the public.

Before world wars 90% of the public were independent workers. 1945-now is an anomaly.

Adam Smith’s form of capitalism is one where workers move around constantly. That’s where the activity in the market should be, not Cramer shouting at us through TV.

So sad Hollywood stars might have to do local theater rather than have disproportionate buying buyer; but its about their art and craft… right?

Aligning our agency to the drum beat of linear productivity is a relic of the world war industrial production machine.

Humans need the diversity of experience or reality feels fractal and we go mad over preservation of outdated ideals.

Wait. If I send you an email, and Google shows you ads for testostropiod-max-coq10, then I get paid for the content I just created?!?

Where do I pick up my check?

Seriously though: Just pay the content creators directly.

If using patreon/etc is too hard, subscribe to apple news+ (the global market leader in this space).

If that is too click-baity, then set up a competitor that doesn’t objectively suck.

I'm explaining my reason for not running ad blockers in general. Every month I see interesting content that people have spend hours or days or weeks to produce, and the main way I have of supporting them is to let the ads on their site or youtube channel be displayed. I get that there are lots of reasons to run ad blockers, and my point is that there are also reasons to not run ad blockers.

Those same ad networks that serve up ads that "pay content creators" also serve up ads that contain malicious JavaScript and malware, or links to sites that perform all manner of malicious activity (click-jacking, XSS attacks... etc.).

Running an ad blocker is required for safe use of the web these days. The "consequences" of content not getting produced are of far less impact than the consequences of failing to block malicious code contained in ads. You're argument says "me getting paid is more important than you protecting yourself from identity theft and privacy invasion." I don't accept the trade-off.

Can’t you pay youtube or did they kill that feature?

I’ve noticed the “N trackers blocked this week” thingy on my web browser is trending down rapidly now that I only read news here and on apple news+.

(Though Apple News+ is turning into 100% clickbait, so apparently the economic incentives are nearly as bad there as they are at FB and ad supported sites.)

Wouldn't that mean using a paid email service that doesn't show you ads?

I already do, but in this case, I’m the content creator, not the email user.

I sympathize, I really do. Back when privacy respecting ad networks like The Deck were still around I kept them unblocked. But until ad networks stop acting like creepy stalkers and allow me to opt out of tracking it's not going to happen.

The problem is the ads were abused to the point of users being completely pissed by how misleading, intruding, and annoying and network intensive they have become.

I remember not using adblockers a long long time ago to keep supporting content creators - but once I saw the aggressive ad "shove-in-your-face" trend rising up, I could no longer go without an adblocker

Sometimes it's not just about getting rid of an annoyance. I've stuck to my guns with ad blocking to protect myself from malicious ad content. In terms of content creators getting paid, I pay for a Youtube Premium subscription to help with that (which, it's my understanding content creators get paid MORE by Youtube Premium views than ad supported views).

What percentage of online advertising revenue actually lands with content creators?

My gut feeling here is that it’s way less than 50% (corporations, not indie creators spend the most on ads) which would mean on average you are looking at or engaging with a corporation not an indie creator

Me too, but if someone ambushes me on the street and ties a bracelet around my wrist, I'm not going to pay them for that or keep wearing it. That's not an acceptable way to get paid for content you created. Make an offer and get consent.

I removed ads from my blogs years ago.

If you are reviewing stereo equipment or something like that, ads can make sense for all parties -- content creator, advertisers and audience. But for a lot of things, if you want your creative content to have real value, ads make no sense.

My most successful site is a resource for homeless Americans. They have little to no money to spend. Having ads on the site strikes me as tantamount to fraud because my audience can't reasonably be expected to buy enough stuff to make the ads make business sense for the advertisers.

You can whitelist specific sites if you feel like supporting them that way. Then you get the best of the two worlds: no ads anywhere except on the sites where you want to support the content creators.

Whitelisting creates friction. Maybe if there's a button in the browser to do that for a site / page it would work, but there really should be a low friction way of supporting content that works across the vast majority of sites one might stumble upon in a given month.

> Whitelisting creates friction. Maybe if there's a button in the browser to do that for a site / page it would work

With uBlock Origin it's trivial, I do this all the time. You click on the extension toolbar button, then on the huge "On/Off" button and it remembers your setting for that particular site forever. Literally two clicks.

Until ads stop coming with tracking, I will whitelist nothing. There are no sites so precious that I'm willing to subject myself to surveillance for them.

I mean, then I don't see why what I wrote would somehow apply to you? Continue blocking ads everywhere, no need to announce it to the world, just keep on keeping on :)

Which content creator, specifically, is getting paid when I see an ad while trying to find a package tracking notification in my email inbox?

In this case it's the service provider. You are consuming a free service, which costs money to run, in return for adverts

The OP I was responding to specifically used the phrase “content creator,” which is popularly understood in the English speaking world to refer to artists, writers, musicians, video creators, and other such pursuits who generally have rather slim prospects at making a living without ads. In contrast to software developers and sysadmins, who seem to be quite good at making money regardless. If the argument is that google workers need to put food on the table and that is why giving you targeted ads in your email web client is necessary (or, rather, why blocking those ads is unacceptable), then don’t hide it behind sympathy for the folks who are much more poorly served by the current economic structure.

Those of "us" which think content creators should be paid buy music on BandCamp, donate to open source projects, follow folks on Patreon, or whatever. I submit nobody is actually consuming ads voluntarily. Its like stockholm syndrome. After a while, you find rationalisations for the weirdest shit.

There should be a law against forcing consumers to use just a single payment method, especially if that payment method involves giving up sensitive information or persuading consumers to buy more useless crap that just pollutes the planet.

I'm sure Google is crying over the lost cents of revenue.

Aside from the other comments mentioning better ways to support them, yoy can allowlist content crwators you want to see ads from, or alternately just use the extension on certain sites like Gmail.

It's not an all or nothing proposition.

Charge consumers then. If it's good enough they'll pay for it.

There are plenty of options for ad-free paid email, including from Google themselves

In my experience, ad-free paid email from Google aggressively pipes the content of your email to adsense/doubleclick.

They vehemently deny this, but I think the issue is that you can’t run with cookies disabled and also use the gmail web UI, so every time you click a link they track it.

Having said that, they seem to do a good job tracking my gmail (and nothing else) even if I use the IMAP gateway.

I am an extremely happy fastmail user, btw.

To be clear, Google does not provide an ad free email service to consumers, and I wouldn't expect the general public to create a Google Workspace account for a personal ad-free mail experience.

Why not?

https://workspace.google.com/intl/en_uk/pricing.html

> Some of us believe that content creators should get paid

do you really think ad money flows to creators?

Not all of it, but some of it does. That's better than nothing.

> Some of us believe that content creators should get paid. It's a pity that ads are the lowest friction method easily available to the general public to accomplish this.

It's also a pity that ads cause people to buy even more stuff, causing needless environmental harm.

I have no sympathy for ads as a monetization model.

Because ads are in your face, it's like advertisers having their hands already in your wallet.

I support small independent content creators.

What I don't support is Pichay's $220 million comp package at the cost of showing ads in the middle of my main productivity tool.

If they want to sabotage one of their products in this way - then I have no problem shouting from the rooftops for everyone to ditch google and adblock everything with impunity.

Content creators mostly don't get paid in the ad-supported model. Only a few do, and even they only get scraps left over after the middlemen take their cut.

Adblocking is one of the primary reasons I will always use the mobile site over the app. Why cede over navigation controls and privacy to an app when I can keep it all sandboxed in a familiar and (adblocked) place?

Any suggestions for ad blocking on mobile?

I've been using Chrome on Android, which is pretty much the experience you'd imagine (both pros and cons).

> Any suggestions for ad blocking on mobile?

Firefox on Android supports extensions last time I used Android, and uBlock Origin works on mobile.

I concur.

Can't remember when I've last seen an add on mobile and I use exactly that.

Firefox with uBlock Origin on a cheap ass Motorola phone with not very much memory.

Brave or Firefox with ublock origin

I use https://nextdns.io/. Blocks ads in most apps, not just browsers.

Second this. If you’re on iOS you can also do NextDNS + 1Blocker to block ads both at the browser and network level.

I use Blokada 5 (Blokada 6 sends your info to the cloud). Uses a VPN to block all app ads.

uBlock Origin works great in Firefox for Android.

iOS: AdGuard — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy/id1047...

Android: AdAway (works best with root access) — https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.adaway/

Kiwi browser, is Chromium without extensions disabled by Google https://kiwibrowser.com/

Brave, hands down.

It looked from the screenshot in the article that they're inserting ads that look like regular messages — similar to how HN puts ads in the feed which look like regular posts. I'm not sure uBlock would catch those, though I both run uBlock and have never seen these ads, so maybe it does.

It does.

Thankfully consumer protections are only mosly nonexistent and advertisers still have to mark their crap as ads. They try to make that marker as invisible as they can get away with and obfuscate it from ad blockers but it still has to be there.

Been using 1Blocker on iOS in combination with my home adguard dns server

I see ad blockers as theft, and highly unethical. I strongly oppose them.

You view advertisers right to display to your eyes and ears as absolute?

I see forced ad viewing as theft of attention. I see online trackers as truly insidious behavior.

How’s it forced? Nobody is forcing you to use Gmail.

I see advertisements as theft of my attention, and highly unethical. I strongly oppose them.

I see them as something to be negotiated, like most things in society. I don't like them, but I also don't want to pay for something with actual money out of my bank account unless I really believe in it.

Since most people are like that, there's a monetization barrier for a lot of content that could make it difficult for a lot of talented creators to keep the lights on.

Ads can be done in very annoying and unethical ways, but they can also be relatively benign.

I would welcome a better model less prone to abuse. Maybe a ubiquitous micropayment service. Like Patreon, but more available, like a little tip jar button that regular content creators can add, and more micro-er to cut down on transaction fees.

You are paying with actual money out of your bank account when viewing ads. Only indirectly. The average you anyway. If ads weren't profitable they wouldn't be there.

One of those really great & powerful things about webapps being built on the DOM. The DOM is flexible & malleable & we can sculpt our own experience.

It's a broadly pro-user capability that native apps categorically lack. That humanity can actually participate in & have say on the computing medium is an incredible wonder. One, alas, that many people see as a weakness!!

I'm baffled people are still using Gmail

Or pay a few bucks a month for an email service that has an aligned set of incentives.

Then add some version of the Steven Black /etc/hosts blacklist, and you're golden. The nefarious web, or most of it, simply disappears to almost anything running on your computer.

I have been using Gmail since 2004 and I haven't ever seen a single ad there.

Edit: I just checked and it seems that the ad blocker might be blocking them. What's interesting is that I did not install that ad blocker myself, and I'm using Chrome. Does Chrome come by default with an ad blocker that blocks the ads in Gmail?

You won't see them if you disable the tabbed inbox, which I recommend anyway because the classification of threads into tabs is surprising and inconsistent.

...and adds no value even when it works, just adds one more step

Yes, I've always been baffled by this. I like the idea of it, but when you actually use it and think about it, it actually makes the experience worse.

Indeed. I never understood the point of it. It made sense in Inbox because Inbox would only show you the Promotions bundle once per day (or at your preferred frequency) but after they shoved the feature into Gmail it stopped making any sense.

I think it makes sens for people who get themselves signed up for all kinds of newsletters they don't really want and then can't find anything in their inbox. So really it's just another anti-spam filter and comes with the same downsides.

Chrome does not come with an ad blocker.

Sorry, non-native english speaker here: what does “wriled” mean? My “Google-Fu” is failing me.

> My “Google-Fu” is failing me.

FWIW, I tried asking a chat LLM, ("explain the word '<blah>' in '<sentence>'") and it was able to catch it.

That's another tool to consider.

Seems good for misspellings and slang. (e.g. ChatGPT was able to help me with "Explain the Vietnamese slang "ieu" used in sms messages").

Looks like a typo for 'riled'

riled: informal make (someone) annoyed or irritated

Damn. I do not want to migrate off gmail, but this is going to force me.

Gmail supports IMAP, right? Would changing to a different desktop/mobile client make the ads go away?

For now. Wouldn't surprise me if Google forces API only at some point.

Google isn't evil they wouldn't do that

/s

Haven’t seen ads in Mail on iOS. It was hard to move at first, but at least I’m not harassed with prompts to download chrome anymore.

No ads in Thunderbird, K‐9 Mail, or any of the other mainstream open‐source IMAP clients I’m aware of.

I switched to Proton two years ago and I'm pretty happy.

It helped to get a custom domain before the switch. That way, I could stay on Gmail while switching all accounts to my new domain and later just transfer the domain from Gmail to Proton.

I did the inverse. I migrated to protonmail and setup email forwarding from GMail to proton. Then, every time I received an email that was forwarded, I’d go in and update that vendor or unsubscribe. After a few months, the only thing still coming from GMail was spam and I shut off the forwarder. Basically a classic strangulation strategy used by service migrations.

I did setup a private domain, but just for configuring a catch-all. Now each vendor gets their own email address. Originally did it to cut down on spam and track where it was coming from. But it turns out my personal email doesn’t get much spam. My gmail accounts get hammered with it. Seems like gmail has a unique spam problem.

Also a good idea!

The only thing stopping me from full proton is the clunky calendar integration.

The last time I checked there was no way to get calendar support on android / ios / macos like with gcal. There's a custom calendar app but it lacks the usability of an iCal integration

Yes, I still use Google calendar.

As annoying as this is, I was mildly amused at the irony that this article itself has ads shoved between paragraphs.

Well, one is a blog/news site, the other is an email client. That's pretty different.

One needs terabytes of storage and hundreds of servers and other other needs few megabytes of storage and relatively miniscule server.

It's kinda weird. I remember switching to gmail because it had working spam blocking. It was basically all emails.

Nowadays my gmail inbox is virtually only advertisement. Advertisement from google, and various form of spam emails, mostly in the form of newsletters I've never signed up for.

Meanwhile my off-gmail inbox, an email address I have literally in my hacker news profile info as well as printed in plain text on my website, doesn't get a fraction of the spam.

IMO, it's a scaling issue. Filtering email is relatively expensive, it's cheaper to just let a good chunk of it through, especially if the service isn't necessarily making tons of money with every user given how many people block ads by default.

>Nowadays my gmail inbox is virtually only advertisement.

It's almost as if Google is an advertisements company. :)

The next step is for gmail to disable other clients to force you to use theirs so you can’t get away from the ads.

"I went to the Promotions tab and saw ads" is a hell of a take.

That's not what the article is saying at all. They mention Promotions always had ads (expected), but now they're showing up in Updates, and in the middle of the list to boot, which never had ads before.

In fact, the main usefulness of the Tabs for me has always been the filtering of crap to Promotions and no ads in the other tabs

I don't understand this kind of rant. Google's revenue comes from ads. Google will place ads on all products wherever possible. If Google doesn't put it up, the shareholders will ask to put it up.

Oh, the article has too many ads.

So when are they disabling 3rd party IMAP clients?

In the name of security of course!

* * *

<looks at his apple mail showing google>

Seems to still work here...

Basic Fastmail is 3$/month. My com domain is ~12$/year. That's 50$/year for one of, if not the most important internet service tied to your identity.

Sorry to put it this bluntly but pay up or shut up and take it. Or do the work and host it yourself. Or make friends with some IT people and have them host it as a favor. Or whatever. You are not entitled to both free and good services. Google has to make money, what a surprise.

Whenever there's talk about privacy, support, ads, etc about a product or service here everybody's saying that they would pay for the clean thing. Well for email you absolutely can.

Name an Android email client that doesn't have ads, isn't hot garbage in UI or UX, and has features like email templates.

Fastmail does not have ads, has good ui and ux.

I don't even know what email templates are. But name a HN user that is smarter than me, his name begins with trab and ends in nt00.

Email templates are canned responses. E.g., if you get many emails asking about x, give them the boilerplate response in a couple taps from your phone.

FairEmail is probably the best. K9 is more hit or miss, but is usable.

K9 doesn't have something as simple as as "snooze send". FairEmail has a less than stellar UI

Outlook? (Assuming an Office 365 sub.)

Fairmail and K9.

TBF I have both a gmail account and a paid-for email account that I use extensively. I haven't migrated everything away from gmail primarily because of inertia - recreating all my workflows outside of gmail is probably a couple solid weekends of effort, which is way more than $50 worth of my time, and as I don't use the gmail web interface (or the gmail apps), I never see ads anyway.

I have migrated to https://www.fastmail.com/, it was quite painless. Happy to pay for it, happy to have email on my own domain. Can recommend. (No affiliation, just a happy user.)

This might be the endorsement that finally gets me to move to fm

Ditto here. Fastmail is worth every penny. The product is better and they actually have support.

Does their iOS app work well?

It's great IMO.

another happy user here for many years. It is worth it

....and you can forward your gmail to your fastmail account, and have fastmail respond using the right address

Yup. Fastmail is very no-hassle email experience.

I don't even how they stack up to the competition, but they're good enough that I'm much happier to just pay them $50/year than go out and comparison shop for email providers.

I am also an extremely happy ex-paid-Gmail user that is now paying Fastmail for a far superior experience in Email.

One benefit has been the ease in which I can handle spam and undesirables. Everything is now coming to one inbox and anything that is interrupting me without being useful is being unsubscribed to, or having the one-off email removed.

What a relief it has been. Thank you Fastmail!

I self-hosted my own email for about 15 years, but, managing an email server, even with just a single user, requires an insane amount of dedication and time. It got to the point where I just didn't want to deal with it (IP rep, gmail, outlook, spam, l33t h4x0rs, backscatter, joe jobs, any of it) anymore.

I looked at a few different hosted email options and settled on Fastmail. I'm now hosting all 12 of my domains with catch-all and redirects. I prepaid for something like 3 years. And it's so great... After initial setup, I've had to do zero admin. And the initial setup was pretty easy, they imported all my email from my email server, I moved all my contacts from iCloud, and linked in my iCloud calendars.

I'm not getting paid for this, I know I sound like an Ad, but I'm not. I'm just incredibly happy and relieved. Also, a shout-out to their support, before giving them any money I harassed them with a bunch of questions and they were super responsive.

FastMail is life <3 simple, consistent, affordable. Will pay them till death.

another enthusiastic +1 comment here.

Moved to them from gmail, set up *@firstnamelastname.com and the ability to send and receive emails from my old gmail, then moved all my accounts over (pretty easy if you have a password manager)

Works amazingly :)

So, free service needs way to pay for infrastructure to provide service? Knock me over with a feather.

That doesn't quite explain it for me. Recall that they haven't shown these ads for the last 19 years. They were certainly analyzing your data and using that information the whole time, likely to improve their ads business. But until recently, that was enough, and now it's not. That is what is interesting.

Gmail has always been an ad vehicle first and foremost.

When it launched in 2004, Google was reading all your emails so they could target ads. This was entirely public knowledge and there was debate about whether it’s a good idea to give a tech company that kind of access, but hey, they promised to Do No Evil and had a colorful logo so it was all fine.

They finally stopped the practice 13 years later [1], but it shouldn’t be a surprise that Gmail’s product design is driven by the needs of ad display and data collection.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/4041720/heres-why-it-took-gmail-...

> Gmail has always been an ad vehicle first and foremost.

I don't think that's really true. The original point of gmail was to get users to log in, so they would get better search quality. Before gmail there was no reason to log in to Google at all.

Is the point of getting users to log in to give them better search results or better targeted ads? My impression is that the two have always gone hand in hand at Google.

I know this isn't necessarily relevant but as an old person when I saw your >2004 and then >13 years later my brain laughed like "ahaha no way it's been 13+ years since 2004" Nope. Brain. Sorry. It's been 19 :( lol

I really hope this trend doesn’t end with ads in my text messages too. It’s sad to see an email service that partly became popular because they had such a great spam filter, now injecting spam.

Uh, so for how long can I keep accessing my inbox through IMAP?

I'm frequently reminding people that Google is not an email provider nor a search engine nor really anything else it pretends to be, but that it's a data harvesting and ad company.

Thankfully I've been becoming less reliant on my gmail inbox. But also, it appears my various efforts for blocking malicious content may be blocking these ads because I don't see them on my home network.

What are you relying on in place of Gmail? It's never been the email service itself I've liked, it's the web app and Android app, I use the External Accounts feature to drag in all email accounts into one place.

I have my own domain attached to icloud mail at the moment. But primarily, I have my own domain and can move it to wherever I need it. Icloud mail isn't the best thing in the world, still, but it's more cost efficient than trying to run it on a personal O365 or some other service for now. I don't really have need for the enhanced security/privacy of some of the other providers available, at least for now, but having my own domain means migrating to them later, should I need it, shouldn't be difficult.

I will note the icloud mail web interface is utter garbage.

This is making me want to switch to Nextcloud Mail's web app. I wish there was a companion Android app to go with it.

gmail discouraged me from using it a few years back when they insisted on scanning my emails for "purchases" and then would log these items somewhere in my history graph. interestingly enough, you could delete almost all history but the purchase history. what especially rubbed me the wrong way that it would list some medicine on there, and even though i didn't even purchase it through google they insisted on keeping that record in there permanently at their discretion.

i immediately moved over all 10+ of history to a new provider, set up an OOO and an auto forward to the new email. all "real" people would read the OOO and write to the new email, so now whatever's in gmail is a bot infested ad stuff.

I recommend to use Mimestream app https://mimestream.com for gmail, until you can migrate off gmail and Google

I would be willing to tolerate ads if I could be sure they didn't come with tracking.

do ads pay just by looking at them? one needs to click on them and generate at least a lead if not a conversion, no?

--an adblock user since adblocking is a thing and bandcamp/patreon user

Yes. Many ads are cost per impression.

Wow! Google saves me so much time. I don't even have to subscribe myself to junkmail lists anymore!

If you're ok with html-only, enjoy a throwback: https://mail.google.com/mail?ui=html

I'm not sure the ads would be in that UI.

It used to be clearly separated what ads were and what not.

On Outlook they show up as an email. On top.

Same with Reddit. The advertisements keep on becoming less and less obvious.

DuckDuckGo on my iPhone has a FULL page of advertisements when I click 'Products'. And they look exactly the same. There's only a header.

Advertisements should be extremely explicitly marked.

Agreed, the advertising industry has been tring to skirt around consumer protection laws and is long due a hard slap through their face.

Throw'm a bone. Click on gmail ads, keep gmail alive as long as possible. Yes issues, yes privacy, yes a lot, but gmail is one of the best things on the internet. So good at spam, especially the real nasties. Worth a few clicks.

Thunderbird. K9. Come on.

I find it weird that people on HN complain about ads in Gmail. If you're not paying for a service, someone else has to cover the costs you generate by using the service.

A Google Workspace subscription is not expensive. You can run it behind your own TLD, and you won't see any ads.