Why be bitter at the people dealing with the shit, why not be angry at the people making the world shit? My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.

Ah, but who is really making the world shit? Google and their ilk? Or the millions of sheep who use their stuff?

Would Google be making the world shit if all its cloud services had only a few dozen thousand users?

What's forcing you to interact with Google isn't Google, but Google users.

How is your company forcing you to use gmail any worse than your company forcing you to use outlook? Is it your company that is making the world shit, or google.

Everyone dealing with gmail is doing so because they chose to.

Let’s not pretend this was done unto them. Anyone can stop using gmail at any time.

Indeed. I'd like to. Except Google also make it nigh impossible for anyone hosting their own email (the original-internet ideal) to get email into gmail reliably enough to be useful. I have my own address on my own domain, but can't rely on it (yes, DKIM and DMARC and SPF are properly set up) not to be marked "spam" for opaque reasons, so gmail remains my "main" address. It's a network-effect problem: once enough people are "captured", then everyone else is forced to join - or else be unable to participate.

It's a collective action problem: you'll have to persuade millions and millions of "normies", who have no idea what's going on, or what internet privacy is, or what's broken about the system, and who don't care to learn, and won't listen to us - or you'll have to impose regulation. Those are the choices. The second seems more possible than the first. Us nerds saying "walk away" is idealistic; we will, and always will, get squished, because the corps have the power and most folks won't (ever) care.

This used to be true, but isn’t now. I self-host and can deliver to gmail just fine without being part of the deliverability cartel.

OK, good to know. It's been a couple of years since the last time I made a serious effort. I may give it another try.

Who's your host, just in case that's the difference?

Hetzner.

No, not for all types of "dealing with".

If you're dealing with spam originating from Gmail, without any helpful action from Google, that's not really your choice.

If you're dealing with difficulties sending mail to Gmail users, without help from Google, that's also not really your choice.

If vast numbers of other people stopped using Gmail, those problems would mostly go away.

>Anyone can stop using gmail at any time.

Just going to copy/paste this part of the comment you replied to, because it seems like you may have missed it?

>My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.

GSuite/Workspace and consumer GMail is not the same thing in the slightest. They may use the same mail servers but that is about where the similarity ends.

I would recommend Google Workspace to any company because it gives them a ton of business productivity tools.

I would probably not recommend gmail as a users default personal email because frankly it's not that good.

The reality is most users have a Google account ans just use their Gmail account which is bundled.

Most of my circle which cares effectively use their Gmail account for sites that insist on it and never open that e-mail if they can get away with it.

> Anyone can stop using gmail at any time

True, and applies to many other things as well. Anyone claiming otherwise is shirking responsibility for their own actions. Every single sibling comment here suffers from this.

Arguments in the form of "other people do it, so I must also" are unpersuasive and pathetic.

GP Post: > My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.

Your post: > Everyone dealing with gmail is doing so because they chose to.

No, it's clear that not everyone dealing with Gmail is doing so because they chose to. Repeating your incorrect statement does not make it correct.

Further, everyone has to deal with its impacts on the email ecosystem as it's practically impossible for somebody who works a 9-5 to run their own mail server that Gmail will deign to not only accept mail from but also successfully deliver it to its intended recipient.

So even if I never use Gmail I still have to deal with replies going to / coming from it.

Except for anyone whose employer requires them to use Google services, since Google Apps (or whatever they call it these days) is a hugely popular offering for central company email/contacts/calendar/office suite. And frankly, it's better than dealing with Outlook and its unrelenting AI slop machine advertising.

Not me - it's work mandated.

Not my wife - her school board mandates it.

i think you underestimate the effort for change of the average user with a @gmail.com address.

The only thing that can stop a monopoly is a bigger monopoly, the government.

You're behind with the times, words have new meanings

Organizations I don't like = Monopoly!

Organizations I like = ...