The public beta started in like 04 or 05 IIRC, I got my Gmail account my freshman year of college. I guess you were one of the cool people that got in on the closed beta.
Fastmail is by far the best email/calendaring service available today. It has everything that Gmail has, plus custom domains, static site hosting. DNS (if you want/need it, I use CloudFlare) and more... All up well worth the money.
Don't self-host email, kiddos!
That's a terrible idea, as all your registered accounts on that mail address are now just one minimum wage customer service worker away from getting intercepted by a hacker. Just getting dns redirected is enough.
IIT: People who've never used Gmail complaining about how it's full of ads. They only appear in the "promotions" tab, which is where Gmail sends stuff that's already borderline spam. In other words you don't see ads unless you go looking for them.
I use gmail a lot on my phone, and I have seen ads, but I’ve never seen an ad like that. My point was I was mildly irritated that it gave me a sex line ad. It made me feel angry for the trafficked sex workers probably running a majority of those lines. I generally would imagine Google to be more choosy about their adds. This ad felt icky, which mildly irritated me.
I mean google is one of the companies that tracks you the most these days so it would be unusual for it to show you an ad for something you or someone with your ad tracking id haven't shown any interest in the past.
The times I turned off personalized ads, were the times google ads went really wild. This was both for regular website ads as well as youtube ads. So many cosmetic product ads...
I had to turn it back on again because they were at least partly interesting compared to "SiCk oF aCnE?! sIcK of pImPleS??!"
Yeah, I have turned off personalized ads and I mostly get these inappropriate dating ads. I guess it's their way of annoying me into enabling personalization.
I don't see anyone else here recommending K-9 Mail for Android, and I think that's sad because it's really good. Open source, supports viewing message headers, multi-account, hides remote images by default to prevent tracking...
Mailbox.org is pretty nice, I've been using it since a few months now, because it's compatible with basically all email clients (unlike protonmail) and they have a very cheap plan too.
Google knows what you like and these days they will take any ad because they fired all the screening staff. My ads are usually pretty average since I opt out of everything I possibly can opt out of and I use Startpage for search, so they aren't as targeted. That's one positive thing about Google. They started as a relatively ethical company for an ad company, so there's a lot of code and best practices in place for opting out of things. That is fading, but it's way better than others. Like Facebook showing ads for things I searched for a few seconds ago on Amazon and stuff like that.
Facebook has crawlers that follow you around the web. It's not that Amazon is sharing info, it's that Facebook is tracking your browsing history (if you let it).
the ads only appear in the "Promotions/Ads" tab, which is an email category for junk and ads. (ones that don't include any useful information but come from legitimate companies and don't qualify for the "Spam" tab)
It CAN be disabled (together with the whole sorting feature, which is spyware anyway (enabling it automatically grants google permission to look at your emails))
and also i think the decision to add their own ads there is actually pretty clever lol.
It would be clever if they fit and I might actually click on them.
Honestly, I did the whole “inbox filter tabs” thing a long time ago, and it was real useful before when I had a few spammy, usually “news letter” or “promotion” email that I might use. But at this point it’s just where the email I don’t really want but don’t want to deal with go to die.
I appreciate the info, though, and I’ve already turned it off, but I might just turn it back on because idgaf about the ads really since I barely look at that tab/section of my mail anyway. At his point, I’m prolly just going to go to proton mail for now and just update my email with my important contacts. I’ve been trying to get away from Google for a while, I just haven’t had the time to complete the transition on all services.
Spark Mail (ignore the "AI Email" thing in the store listing, it's not intrusive or even a major part of the features) is a nice app and works with multiple providers. It even syncs which accounts you have added across devices.
It's... okay. I've been using it a lot, and at first it was claiming to be the spiritual successor to Google Inbox. I feel that, but it's also not that. I can't put my finger on it but it feels like it's evolving too fast and I just want its features to settle down so I know what I'm getting.
Use private dns on your wifi settings and input dns.adguard.com into the dns setting. Sometimes this can cause connection problems tho. It's a bit hard overall to block stuff on iOS, too strict of an OS