This is an wake-up call for everyone to migrate to other email service providers. Google only cares about invading our privacy, showing ads and making money. Thre's no reason to use products from a company like that.
unfortunately as long as you’re sending email to other people you’re subject to Google’s filtering rules, so it may be easier to work with a provider that operates at a scale google cares about… it’s all a racket if you ask me… their algo can doom any individual self-hoster to perpetual spam hell and they’ve got zero service
Definitely not just you; privacy concerns were a very (very) small part of this (when Google has all of your data, they have more than the sum of the individual parts). In general, if I want more privacy, I'll say, use PGP instead of switching email providers.
This was about not relying too heavily on any one service provider. Plain and simple.
The problem with “email is email” is that people can’t easily change email addresses, so once in gmail they can’t leave, no matter how egregiously google abuses the data.
Exactly, as long as pretty much everyone I know uses Gmail, there's really no way to keep your emails away from Google. Encrypted mail would be an option, but it is such a hassle to set up for most people.
This is quite a flippant response. These requirements are being put in place against (some) users' will. Simple changing email providers isn't exactly easy and maybe they need to access that account. Maybe Google should allow users to turn this off?
My privacy is important, that's why I'm not using Gmail. Great that you take privacy serious, but building a service that only works with Gmail doesn't really help with privacy.
I'm sure it's not a popular view here, but why would you want to? I moved mail, etc. to Google; gmail is by far the nicest mail client I've ever used. I use it for my business and private e-mails, I move other businesses to Google because it's just so convenient. Why would you want to do all that yourself for €4 a month? I really don't think anyone at Google would want to read my e-mails but even if someone would, do I really care? I'm all for a bit of privacy, but I've seen no evidence of data abuse at these large mail providers.
Google has no interest in end-to-end encryption: It would put them out of the loop. It would be contrary to their mission to analyze the customer data to deliver better ads.
Gmail is a big privacy problem. Even if you don't use it yourself, nowadays a large percentage of your emails will end up there. And why? It's all about lazyness and low friction.
Computer literate persons (that's you, right?) should really consider to get off their butts and host their own email. It's not hard, it's not expensive and it's not a lot of work to maintain either. It can even be fun and informative. By sticking to gmail, you're no longer credible when complaining about the erosion of privacy on the internet.
I usually try to stop myself being overly protective of privacy. But - I already thought about leaving GMail several times to make sure that I don't rely on a big company that knows a lot about me.
Now Facebook, that would be an alternative. Uhm - wait a minute!
I do think they're going to pull this off though. Lots of people I know are still (happily) using the "older" services around, local free email providers, hotmail, whatever.
A sexy webmail client, promoted by the site they use heavily? Sounds like a dealbreaker. Lots of non-technical people don't know Google as something other than a field to type searches into (or even rely on the browser search fields). Facebook could "educate" those to switch quite easily, I guess, given a good marketing strategy and some neat "integrate your mails with your status updates" features.
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