They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.
But it's expensive, complicated and time-consuming to maintain - and both a source of and recipient of endless waves of spam and scams. It's an endless pile of data to hold onto, FOREVER, as well.
I enjoy hating on Google when appropriate. But when it comes to Gmail, I understand what they're dealing with.
It's honestly why I believe the idea of free e-mail is just bad, fundamentally. You can't expect a free e-mail service to be good or have any kind of support. The fact that it still exists is more out of shear fear of the repercussions than any good will on the owner's part.
Just get a paid e-mail service. They're better, and offer a lot more peace of mind.
I’ll stop you here. Google offered it for free and, at the time, offered such an high amount of mail storage for free it sounded insane. At the time, my ISP gave me a 25MB or 50MB inbox and that was considered pretty decent, when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB.
They absolutely have a right to take ant steps they deem necessary to prevent malicious use of their product, and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free, but Google wasn’t forced to provide a free email service, much less one that went so far above and beyond their competition.
And I'll stop you here. It's less than obvious that there's no obligation. If you provide a critical service that folks rely on at a price less than your cost, you drive out competition, and it's a critical part of your own business model, dropping the service without warning is IMO on the border of what Google should be allowed to do.
This argument would have flown 30 years ago with Yahoo.
Since then we had Uber pumping so much money into a losing business until it drew the competition bankrupt.
And now we have AI pumping so much money into a losing business until they hopefully replicate Uber, only won't work and signs are all over the wall that they just burned a trillion dollars.
Which opens great prospectives for incumbents WHO LEARN FROM THE MISTAKES of the powers be at the time.
About time to start a "Don't be evil. FOR REAL." This time.
If in 30 years it's necessary to start "Don't be evil. REALLY, REALLY, REALLY this time" then so be it.
I'm starting the 2.0 version. Fuck AI. Fuck incumbents. Long live long life and freedom of choice!
Google has done nothing but be a wolf in sheep's clothing. I'm not going to shed a tear because they have to maintain an email service.
The G in Gmail was for a gigabyte and that was what I got in the noughties for "free", when as you say my ISP offered something like 5MB on the end of a POP connection.
To be fair you can cram a lot of ASCII into 5MB. However you can email piccies to a mailbox with a 1GB limit if your modem doesn't melt first.
Obviously, this was during the "don't be evil" days.
What you mean for free? First, they have all the data they get from you. They now track you even when you are not using your phone. They can/could know if you are doing your number 2 regularly or not only.
They control how the internet moves. Https? Sure can enforce. Trackers, etags ? Why not.
They sell every single bit of information on you for a good price. And now they are even more friends with a very good orange buyer. They have a TOS on you that they can chop and sell you whenever they want and you can't complain.
What you mean for free? Maybe for you it seems free, but people are paying them premium for lots of stuff.
Google used to be admired by the innovation and good ideas that shaped the world to a better world. Now they are still shaping the world, but not for everyone
And it's isn't even like they're struggling with profitability, either. It'll be hilarious if this forces common folks to switch back to IMAP since once a user has been burned into spending the trivial cost to set up a local mailbox sync they're unlikely to go back into Google's arms (especially given how cheap (in money and time) disk space and cloud backups are these days).
Not even remotely true. They regularly shut down products and services with impunity. If Gmail cost more than the data they directly or indirectly mine and sell from their users, Gmail wouldn't exist either.
Email marketing and campaign companies pay into these lists and they pass that cost onto their customers as well.
There has never been a email provider that accepts mass email delivery to millions of recipients for free.
A year or two ago they returned to full detail. I've always wondered if it was customer pressure or a backroom deal with Amazon was reached.
I kind of doubt that Google would cave to the former, right?
Maybe at some point in the mists of time, someone just wanted to offer people a good email service but at this point it's a pattern of behavior across every Google consumer product so I can't give them the benefit of the doubt.
No way they are doing it for free.
Basically they tied Gmail 1:1 to Android accounts. I have a Gmail mailbox for a few reasons: 1) self-squatting my usual handle, because they are a large email provider 2) it's my Android account and it's where I get documents shared on Drive 3) maybe it's the way I login to Google cloud but I don't remember. I used to have a customer with servers in there but it's long gone.
Anyway, gmail is their way to manage a part of the Android infrastructure and it seems they like running Android.
>Anyway, gmail is their way to manage a part of the Android infrastructure and it seems they like running Android.
I've deleted my Gmail mailbox and Android works fine, any document share notifications go to the email address on the Google account.
If anything it's better without a Gmail mailbox because those notifications used to only go to my Gmail no matter what alternative email addresses I set, now they all go to my actual email address.
Only problem is I can never reopen the mailbox because the "Add Gmail to your Google account" screen has decided I've already used my mobile number before.
Not for free. Being monopoly is a huge reward. It isn't possible today to have a small email provider. While probably not having that intention from the start, Gmail played a huge role here as its existence allowed everybody to just ignore/block small providers.
They should let others do email. The more email service providers we have the better it is for everyone
I suspect what is really holding them back is the loss of data, and the loss of the assumption that ~everyone has a Google account that they are logged into, which means they can be traced around the web. Google also benefits from this, since its anti-bot tool will be more accurate and less fustrating to users.
I think approximately 95% of all Gmail users would leave. Regular people are accustomed to paying nothing for things like email. And if I have to pay for email, I am not paying Google for it, especially not twice the cost of Fastmail.
> Especially if they made it easy for people to move their account elsewhere?
Sounds mostly impossible.
> People are used to paying a lot more for things outside of tech.
They're not used to paying for an email account.
You have a point, but if you've ever seen how a gmail account behaves for the ordinary person once it reaches 80-90% storage capacity used (15GB free, some cumulative total of all emails and google drive content, google photos content), all of these free services exist to sell a perpetual monthly recurring subscription to users. And many people do pay. The default gmail web interface starts to have a big banner across the top warning about storage reaching maximum capacity with a link to the payment page.
Look at the workflow for a standard out of box android phone now that defaults to backing up all your photos to 'the cloud', which will almost immediately fill the 15GB free. Once your 15GB is full, then you're run through the payment/checkout workflow to enter your card and set up monthly recurring billing for some premium google service.
In general having a gmail account is the initial stage in the pipeline of getting someone to be a monthly-paid google customer for life. Whether it's just for more storage to hold all their google drive and photo content, or google workspace individual, etc.
Additionally, tying a gmail account to the primary-user android on-device account on any android 4.x+ device means revenue from google play store paid app sales. And then all those 'free' apps that the user installs where the app developer has implemented embedded small ad banners for google's ad network? More venue.
Isn't it the corporation which makes super-profits and gmail is just part of the equation?
I highly doubt that anyone would ever riot over loss of access to email, nor that it's some critical piece of infrastructure, there are dozens of other communication methods online today.
Not for one second, am I sympathetic to the firm, because it is simply a business acting on its incentives to minimize costs and maximize profits.
Google keeps it running because they make money off of it. Tech firms have profit margins unlike any prior industry; maybe feudal kings come close.
They make money off of it because they (like all tech) avoid investing in human heavy services like customer support / trust and safety. I have had google safety members vent about how they can’t get engineer attention. That when they do get it, engineers don’t want to help the moderators or the moderation software. Their incentives drive them to find a way to obviate the moderation process entirely.
People working to fix things and make it better for users are great. The firm? Heck no.
They CHOSE to offer it for free so they could monopolise the market. They got roped into absolutely nothing.
My tears started flowing when I saw this. Shouldn't we pay Google for using _our_ data that it shameless steals ? And I also think that 3 letter agencies do not get the data for free.
yeah ok, google maps is free, youtube also...
And you know why? Because every single one of their product is either a data harvesting tool or an ad delivery mechanism, sometimes both. Let's not pretend they do it for free, it's their entire business model lmao
I need to get off of this fucking website.
But man, I would hate to be the one dealing with Gmail. It's a nightmare for the reasons I listed above.
Someone can in fact hold both of those opinions.
I was also actively telling people to de-Google and go elsewhere for a mail service.
Does everything need to be black and white?
Google did it intentionally and pushed to make it happen. It killed whole lot of businesses who were selling email hosting in the process.
In exchange, Google gets to surveil half of the world's population, extract personal information from their email, and resell that information to governments and ad companies.
But it's also a valuable pot of data honey you can boost your wonder AI with, so where is the plight?
> For free
And without revenue sharing
> have any kind of support.
Check, not having support is what Google is famous for
They aren’t doing this for free
Just because they don't charge you directly, doesn’t matter it's not profitable for them.
And now they have a treasure trove of AI training data, for free.
for free? I guess tracking you to death and shoving ads down your throat does not count as monetizing anymore then?
Google used to literally have a counter inside Gmail showing how your account had a super huge and always increasing amount of storage. The courted their current market position. This isnt "Oh how did we get here with our big bleeding hearts" its just enshittification.
Lol, what? One of the biggest company on Earth is being pictured as a victim for creating services that siphon data out of half the planet's people? Don't take it personally but I can't fathom how you think this is FREE. It's literally the most lucrative business there is and it's only going to get worse—and not for them.
The company that wilfully monopolised email somehow got involuntarily roped into running said email?
Do people love revising history like this?
Don't bullshit to us here, please.
Google scan billions people's emails (including very sensitive ones like medical record letters) to then show relevant ads AND sell the data to some partners (hundreds of them).
It's not called "public infra for free". It's the serious for-profit business. The surveillance capitalism on the march.
People pay for it dearly with their data for advertisement.
In fact, even when you _do_ pay, you still get ads!
You know, if it's such a bad deal they can stop owning it any time they want. They already lied about it - I was told I would never have to delete email, and turns out I had to.
I don't care either way, I moved to tuta last year.
More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665414
- using legitimate sites to bypass filters, like sending you a bill through a legitimate bill-creation site
- pretending to be a tracking service for something you supposedly ordered, then over the course of days pretending the package got lost on the way and offering a discount code for the 'purchased' amount, expecting you to use it on their phising site.
Gmail not only fails at spam classification, they classify these messages as important and nag you with first priority notifications and summaries.
The number of spam calls, texts, emails, iCloud account unlock requests, etc I’ve received in the last year is insane.
Email scanning and file scanning (on our computer) became acceptable when the level of spam and malware became intolerable. But it was at cost of our privacy. Today, Gmail scans all your mails and makes money from it. Both Windows and macOS have built-in anti-virus or malware scanners, and file indexers, and thus know all the applications and files in your system (which provides for more data on your profile with them). Now with both OSes, and even browsers like Chrome and Firefox, including AI, they will now use our own computers to not only collect our personal data, but even process it on our system and use it to build even better profiles to more profitably exploit us.
There’s a leak or someone is selling the data in a lot of the delivery companies in my country. I order something then without fail the fake text message pretending to be the delivery service. Only thing they screw up is claiming it’s failed to deliver too soon and the weird urls.
Messed up these companies are either selling it or being irresponsible with data.
I get, maybe, one actual spam email per year through gmail's spam filters.
I get more actual spam at my work email, which is not hosted by gmail, even though the email volume of emails sent from outside of my employer's network is orders of magnitude smaller than my personal email volume.
Why aren't these things opt-in? Ditto for every other thing that sends you email. I reflexively mark anything I didn't sign up for as spam on principle.
Does that XML get processed by a mailreader?
<ListBucketResult xmlns="http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01"> <Name>savelinge</Name> <Prefix/> <Marker/> <IsTruncated>false</IsTruncated> <Contents> <Key>winbridge.html</Key> <Generation>1775478745793193</Generation> <MetaGeneration>2</MetaGeneration> <LastModified>2026-04-06T12:32:25.871Z</LastModified> <ETag>"3616712a8e68db66062a3f514b5fb7c8"</ETag> <Size>626</Size> </Contents> </ListBucketResult>
So, pleas ignored, forward these recruitment scam emails to the legal/fraud/phishing teams of the impersonated brands. For a company without the appearance of caring (in my opinion), perhaps law firm letterhead can encourage necessary prioritization.
Some municipalities even make it opt-in so you'd need YES/YES to get mail without a name and address on it. (ie. not direct mail)
There are also laws to enable opting out of direct mail (with name and address).
In effect, junk mail is just gone once you slap a sticker on your mailbox. This is not an unsolvable problem if you just regulate things.
Does anyone have a better source of information than this one forum comment from someone who thinks scanning a QR code is enough to get your phone to send a text message?
EDIT: It’s just an SMS URI. It doesn’t automatically send anything, just opens a text message for you to send.
This is just the old phone number verification with a QR code convenience method.
It’s not something specific to a phone. It’s just a convenient method to enter your phone number.
So many companies - such as electric car charging stations - require this without considering failure modes and alternative workflows.
Like email, I'd expect recieving to be more secure since it uses hardware the user isn't in control of.
There are free sites offering recieve-only SMS numbers, but they're almost universally at their rate limit for most services.
Told the owners that if Google is already being difficult during signup, imagine being locked out later with client work on the line. Pulled up a few horror stories about Google lockouts to drive the point home. They ended up with another workspace solution.
These are actual quotes from support:
> Upon checking, I see that the storage is showing as 0 bytes, because of the upgrade that has been done from business standard to business plus. Not to worry as this is very normal.
> I understand your concern and how important it is for the storage to be updated due to the business requirements. > > To give you full transparency into what is happening: when a Workspace subscription is upgraded, our backend systems must first detach your previous Business Standard storage allocation before provisioning the new Business Plus limits. During this transition window, the quota temporarily defaults to zero.
> Now please turn ON user storage limit nor shared drive storage limit. Once you turn ON, please wait for 5 minutes and then please turn it OFF.
^ That last attempt to try to force storage quotas to reset faster didn't work, btw. Still took hours.
The sheer size of Gmail means I have zero chance for support even though I pay for a service. The risk is too great to be acceptable.
What does this mean? The scanning a QR code and sending a text message from this article, or something else?
This last year however, I've started to hear complaints from staff of annoying popups about AI stuff people don't want to use
Which workspace solution did the client settle on?
I generally have rooted for MS over GOOG on this type of thing, so I am not saying this out of fanboyism.
Have you actually tried both?
1. Personal/Child/Business
2. First/Last
3. Pick email
4. Date of Birth
5. Backup email / Skip
6. Password
7. Enter phone number
8. Confirm with 2FA code
9. Done.
I just made the email testregistrationflow@gmail.com and have since forgotten the password. So that’s one burned. But feel free to try testregistrationflow1@gmail.com and see if it works without a QR code.
The headline is clearly a misstatement of what is a specific flow for someone to make many Gmail accounts programmatically.
Very risky, either of you gets banned (it's a risk given now ban happy Google are) you'll both lose your accounts.
Google is probably doing A/B testing or they are using some sort of ML algorithm....
Every account having the ability to invite an only small finite number of new accounts is one way to thwart scammers.
Well I was about to say destroy scammers, but I just realized that they would send out spam to places where you could gamble your invites for Real Cash(TM) or just straight up buy them.
This would lower the creation of accounts, but then they would be rarer and worth more to spammers, since a spamming gmail would be rare.
And we would hear sob stories of people getting their accounts closed for inviting spammers.
The fact that they're introducing QR/SMS/MMS/whatever they want is actually an interesting signal, because it will harm the customer experience, which might result in the growth of responsible paid email services.
It is good to realize that it has never been "Nice Uncle Google" and always an advertisement moloch offering tools to hook their product. All that trust that was bestowed was never warranted.
Apart from people who are knowledgeable or at least curious enough to search for alternative options, I suspect many people don't even know what a domain is or that they could register one for them to use. The jump from "why pay for email if Gmail/Outlook is free?" to "register a personal domain and use it for your emails" is too big.
I don't have the ideal solution but what I've suggested to friends and relatives is they should consider paying for their personal email accounts. Most of them don't care but some do and, as a result, at least try to understand what they want or need and are willing to pay for.
You still need to register with someone like google, or Proton, etc.
2FA has become the wedge to break privacy into a million shards.
I don't really see the point of a privacy-preserving workflow when it comes to a Google account. It's not like they need to know your phone number to track you.
My phone number - which I've had for about 15 years and have only ever used for personal purposes (minimal SMS, mainly just an iMessage/Whatsapp ID) - is apparently "not eligible" to create a new gmail account. Which is quite strange.
It's like saying that the government has outsourced burger making to McDonalds.
And of course their database is leaked in real time.
Both can ban you right away because they had to ramp up their anti-spam protections. Pretty much everyone already have an account, so most people creating new ones are just that, spammers.
These large companies seem to be at the point where they don't want any new users anymore. Or at least they can afford to lock some people out.
We should be way more vocal about this so the idea that "everyone has / can make a (google|microsoft|facebook|whatever) account" dies out.
Years ago IIRC there was a "bug" where the Android emulator allowed you to create real Google accounts. This was found and I'm sure millions of these accounts were created. There's a whole black market for Google accounts. Whereas I lost a Google account I'd created for a relative because it hadn't been used in awhile and it was tied to a mobile number I no longer had.
I don't see how this ends without registering for a service like Gmail being tied to your government ID.
(I run an ad blocker, so the ads will not be displayed either way, but I see more agent blockers on ad free sites than ad supported ones anyway.)
And if you don’t want to share your phone number with Google, which I totally respect, there are a zillion other email providers. Contrary to popular perception, Gmail != email.
I've paid for email nearly forever (Earthlink, not the most high tech provider but good enough) and get nearly zero spam. Their price went up again recently, but apparently if you mention Fastmail they'll match the cost.
I was listening to the local TV news a few weeks ago and the reporter talked about an SMS scam insisting that you owe unpaid turnpike charges. He said "most of us have seen them". I'm thinking, I've never received anything like that!" and then realized it could be because I don't give out my phone number to just anybody who asks. And tend to push back when they do.
What happens if Google pulls the plug on your account and you have no offline archive?
Note that "scanning a QR code and sending a text message" means, for the most part, a smartphone. One could do so via a tablet too, I suppose, but most who register will do so via their smartphone device. For some reason accessing the www is increasingly tied to "identify now!". This is a huge contrast to the freedom of the 1990s. I don't think we should accept that.
(In many countries, including soon the USA[1], you can't get a phone number+sim without showing ID, also.)
[1]: https://reclaimthenet.org/the-fcc-wants-your-id-before-you-g...
You can bypass this if you have a passkey, but phone and password isn't enough. No idea why they opted to do that, it's not like passkeys are indicative of any device binding.
(EDIT: TFA didn’t clear it up for me, but it sounds similar.)
I also want to share a comment that someone (Velocifyer) added on my comment:
"If you make a blog post, make sure to also comment on how the audio reCAPTCHAs are nearly impossible and are blocked on public VPNs. The visual reCAPTCHAS have vauge instructions (they say “Select all squares with busses.” when they mean “Select all squares that have a bus or part of a bus and do not select any other squares.”. For 2 years I could not figure that out so I had to use the audio captchas but then Google blocked them on public VPNs and also made them almost impossible. I could only figure that out when Google Gemini clarified it for me."
Also another fact that I had discovered but to upload youtube vidoes more than 15 minutes you have to do this verification with sms and I found that its system of sending sms was quite finnicky and (too much limits is actually just one try)
Google and other tech giants's recent changes/lobbying are really impacting the open internet and it feels to me like we as people who have knowledge about these topics must do something to reform things as I simply cannot ask people who are technically unaware about these topics to fight for these changes unless we advocate and educate them about it
Most people just have simply way too much of other issues to fight for these things that they have almost taken for granted, but this to me means that the responsibility is on us people who are technically sound to fight against the attacks on open internet if we wish to preserve it.
I think my point is that we all might be waiting for other people to protest against these tech giants but I think that the world is looking at us people for such protests, Let's hope that we are able to educate more people and the open internet is preserved.
Our small steps might mean a lot in the future and so to not be dis-illusioned to make small steps thinking that they might be too small but we have to fight tech giants if we wish to preserve open internet. Every step is meaningful no matter how small
We need to prove it's really you, they posited. Simple enough I thought. I'll just use the same password I've used since 2001.
Oh, I must authenticate with a text, you say? Certainly not a configuration I've made myself, but they're holding the cards on this one, so be it.
I enter the confirmation code.
We still need to prove it's really you, again.
Shucks. I try again. And again. And again.
Sorry, but you'll now have to fuck off. Why? Because we've locked your account for complying with our security theater.
Fuck. I'm in a disaster zone. I need to get things done!
Google cares.
But thankfully, so did the FCC, which I registered a complaint with, arguing from the perspective of interference with emergency communications.
The FCC actually sent the rascals a letter. The leviathan complied and unlocked my account, and suddenly my password was secure again.
Thank you FCC. Although I doubt I'd get the same results with current adm...
I wonder if there is a single engineer at Google who actually understands the whole registration/verification flow and all the edge cases?
That's like saying you need to "scan a QR code" to open a train door, not mentioning that the real requirement is linking your phone to your payment data so they can bill you. It's not the ability to turn a data matrix into bytes that Google is verifying here...
had this happen several months ago already when trying to log into my google account (at their local hq!). it is a damn shame that they are happy to use special, 5-6 digit numbers, to send this message. it might incur additional charges, and may not even go through if traveling.
from this and asking to "verify" my age when the google account itself is 20 years old for antigravity, it has been horrible using their accounts.
- Permissionless email (i.e. for agents, empowered users who can program now)
- Pervasive email allow listing
Wonder if these can both exist at the same time, i.e. having a "public" email that is read first by AI (let's imagine we're in a world where prompt injections weren't so possible) and heavily filtered, along with one that is private and allow-list gated (via some easier-than-gpg-to-use identity marker).
People already assume that your "google name" is your official name, so much so that I had to patiently explain a delivery man once that the funny nickname he had for some reason in the delivery notice did not match my ID because that was an old google account from a time when it was usual to use any funny handle for your account.
Protest this by using a paid email provider. My $60 yearly payment just went through today, is that honestly too much for the typical person around here?
Meanwhile the amount of spam from Gmail I'm getting goes up and up and up.
It’ll happen with social media accounts and other things too. The account creation date is going to become an even bigger heuristic in their spam models.
Google really need to get it together. Their sender reputation bypasses all the normal spam filters, but if it was up to me…
Try Tuta, or Proton, or Fastmail, or Zoho.
