Google confirms Gmail is “here to stay” amid speculation over plans to scrap the email service::Claims that Google plans to sunset Gmail were a hoax, so there’s no need to panic
Gmail is the gateway to their entire product portfolio; no way they’d kill it.
All it takes is one MBA with little foresight in the wrong position - the Gmail team is all expense (server hosting, labor), and no revenue; that’s the “Ads” and “Drive/One/Business” teams.
The MBA. The only graduate degree you can get by attending class 3 days a month.
How some of these MBA programs can be considered a “masters” degree is an insult to people who actually had to spend years on 40-70hour a week graduate programs.
The program cost for the executive MBA class entering in July 2023 was $205,897, which includes tuition, required electronic textbooks, hotel accommodations during immersion weeks and core course sessions in terms 1-3, administrative fees, and most meals during residence periods.
(Emphasis mine)
They are just straight up purchasing a degree at this price point.
Pretty much. There are cheaper alternative, but there are lots of ways to get a “masters” while still being able to hold down a 9 to 5.
No fucking way I could work while doing my masters in interaction design. Only way to way to do that was to take out a student loan because the program required even more commitment than full time undergraduate course work.
Remember. There is no such thing as free. They’re data mining the hell out of your email. You can rest assured that gmail is a revenue generator. Just in ways you don’t see.
This is the answer. Kinda surprised this is buried three comments deep TBH. The emails you receive and how you interact with them is a far better source for profiling than browser history.
You are awfully confident about a company that kills things like a Russian dictator. I think what perhaps you mean is there’s no way they’d kill it now. If they wanted to push users to some different type of platform they would certainly entertain the idea.
Howeeeeverrrr…
Google has been looking for the thing to kill email for a looooooooong time though.
Google getting rid of gmail would have to be hands down one of the biggest internet shakeups since its inception. Gmail has been the de facto free email service for almost two decades now. They have like a 53% market share of emails in the U.S.
Also the shitstorm it would cause, when you can’t access an account that you used Gmail to sign up.
Maybe it would finally force the surprising number of websites out there that don’t allow for email changes to change their policies. I recently switched every account I could to a personal domain and I couldn’t believe how many just don’t allow for it.
It’s a weird problem actually. There are valid reasons for blacklisting and whitelisting free email providers.
Some sites only allow registrations from private domains. They blacklist all the free email providers, which makes sure that mostly businesses, academics, etc. are signing up for their services, rather than randos who may have little to no value as a user.
However, some sites see the randos as the only valuable users, and sometimes see private domains as a threat since a bad actor could use one to spawn an infinite number of valid email addresses for registering accounts. Free providers make it much harder to create a new address, so they whitelist them.
That isn’t the problem I have though, the issue was how many websites don’t let you change you email address full stop. Never had one reject my custom domain (but some shitty ones do reject email aliases)
It’s likely because they use it as the primary/unique identifier for the account, which is just dumb. It’s like they’ve never heard of a UUID/GUID before.
I’m glad I got my own website years ago…it’s literally just a function email server for me…no bullshit spam and I can have separate emails for stuff that I don’t need to monitor.
OIDC is the future of this, logins tied to an account rather than a service.
With the terms of service for their “anti spam” and “productivity auto-sorting” features, they must gather SO much data about people by reading their emails - there’s no way they’d turn that off lol
Ugh, I’ve gotta switch from Gmail, any good email recommendations?
Fastmail is fantastic.
Agreed, it’s so good.
I love their app… it’s replaced the default iOS app for me it’s so good.
It feels like everyone hates Apple, but their hide my email service is bundled into their family plan, and it’s real nice just being able to give every site an email address you can then just delete if they spam you.
No one knows who I really am, and I’m good with that.I guess my recommendation is to find a service that lets you make throwaway emails.
And I think Proton does that. Mozilla has a service for that, but their new CEO has thrown some question marks into that mix. There are definitely others.duckduckgo does that with @duck.com email addresses too, I’ve liked using them so far
Get your own website and you too can have infinitely emails
disroot
I mean… I don’t expect them to scrap GMail, but their reassurance means nothing. IIRC they said the same thing about Stadia.
They make too much money from data harvesting to scrap Gmail, though.
Stadia was destined to fail though. I still remember the key note in which it was introduced. The CEO started with the lines "I don’t play many games, but … ".
The fact that the question is significant enough to deserve an answer means somebody somewhere got wind of something real.
It probably doesn’t mean a full cancellation of gmail but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they’re trying something like Wave again.
Here’s a wild idea - you can read the article and discover that the whole thing was a hoax.
Nah, wildly jumping to conclusions makes for more fun
Why would they voluntarily lose access to all my personal information?
They have enough to train an AI version of you and already predict your actions. Tracking real you is just boring now.
For the time being the compute required to simulate me is more expensive than tracking the real me.
Google+Nvidia : “we will fix that soon enough meat bag”
It’s funny that most comments here are debating this seriously when the article (that apparently nobody bothered to read) clearly says it was a hoax.
Doesn’t matter. It’s in the aether now that “Google promised Gmail won’t go anywhere,” so it will definitely be eliminated. People believing a Google product won’t be discontinued is the Google product kiss of death.
Fully agree. I find it surprising that Google’s public image deteriorated to a point where just mentioning rumors of them shutting down a service gets people upset with them.
Killing Gmail would be like killing search or youtube, they would NOT dare.
Yeah, I’d drop Fi, Pixle, and use of Google in a second. Gmail is the backbone of everything Google is. Had it since day 1 and will have it until it disappears, and then I will disappear into the woods forever.
Ain’t nobody killing off the golden goose!
I just now created a Proton mail account just minutes before seeing this. I think I’m glad I did.
I’ve been thinking about de-googling myself for some time now. After being with them since they created the Gmail service in the early 2000s, I practically have my whole adult life on Google. I’ve been using drive and photos as well for as long as it has existed. It’s going to be a lot of work to sort through all of this data and start over on a new service.
I don’t trust Google anymore over anything. Whether it’s privacy (though I was pretty naive to think I had any in the first place) or their ability to keep a service up long enough for anyone to commit.
It’s a shame because they started as a really nice company with their do no evil motto with great services and then everything went to shit. Even their killer feature, the search engine, has become complete shit.
Good for you. I degoogled in 2019. It’s been fine.
The biggest thing holding me to Google is Gmail and photos.
They scrap Gmail and I’m literally out. No more Google accounts, except to use an android.
Google offers very little value to the consumer these days
I bought a domain and started using it for all my email last year. It’s the best and I suggest it to everyone.
The combination of your own domain, Fastmail, and Bitwarden is powerful.
You can move email services by changing a few DNS records and Fastmail has an API that Bitwarden hits to create new masked email addresses using your domain so every site gets a different email address. Start getting spam? You know exactly who leaked/sold your info and you can now send that address right to the trash.
Is google photos free?
It’s free if you stay within the data limit. For anyone interested in self-hosting, immich is getting pretty mature these days.
Keep in mind the maintainers themselves advise that they make changes often and this should not be the only place you keep your photos.
I just started using it and the facial recognition feature works very well.
I’ve become obsessed with S3 compliant storage lately so I was going to suggest Wasabi, B2, or Storj as a replacement for Google storage.
Some services only accept whitelisted domains for accounts sadly.
I’ve been using a personal domain for over 20 years. I’ve never had a service reject my email domain.
I haven’t seen any issues with sending to google or Microsoft services.
I think I’ve heard of some admins blocking some of the newer ones like .xyz but they were getting lots of spam from those and knew they wouldn’t be getting business mail from there. Though I don’t know how much longer that will be true.
You don’t need a Google account to use Android.
Any of these large business coming out to explicitly say “this will not happen” is concerning.
Especially Google who is famous for randomly getting bored of developing and then suddenly cancelling services
I mean this would be insane. Gmail is probably the most used email service in the world, and even though I’m not a Google fanboy, it’s also probably the best.
What are people gonna use? Outlook? Fuck that. I only use that piece of trash because of my job.
Yeah a random website on a DDG search (ironically) that I just did said that Gmail has 30% of the email marketshare, which I’d definitely believe. It would be a HUGE shakeup and very disruptive if they were to stop it.
Same but with education. Fuck the dept. Ed. Qld
LOL they truly suck
gmail has a fine website but email is a commodity service, hundreds of replacements exist and could be used.
This is in direct response to a misleading viral social media post that claims that Gmail is going to be discontinued, which selectively quotes from a real announcement that Gmail is discontinuing the “basic HTML” browser interface for the service, now that pretty much every device has good performance on the regular browser interface.
Gmail is untouchable. That more than any other product has kept me tethered to Google since 2004. That being said I wouldn’t be surprised if some greedy, future regime at Google botches it up.
I already moved over to Proton in anticipation of Google charging for Gmail. It’s untouchable as far as longevity, but it’s going to be majorly enshittifiedto the point that leaving it will be more desirable than staying.
I am in the process of moving to Proton now. It’s way easier than I though it was going to be!
May I ask what steps you followed to make the transition smooth? I’ve been meaning to use proton + simplelogin, but I’m concerned it’ll quickly become a time sink to transition from one service to the other.
1: Register a new Proton account
2: Set up email forwarding from Gmail to Proton
3: Add a filter that labels all Mail incoming to Gmail with a Gmail label.
4: Whenever you feel like it, go to some of your Gmail labeled mail and change the registered mail to Proton etc.
I’d still recommend buying your own domain though, it took me less than 15 mins switching completely from Skiff to Proton, and I didn’t have to reregister anything. Only when you have a costum domain you’re truly serviceprovider-independent.
One thing that’s very clear to me is that when a tech company says something is “here to stay,” it doesn’t actually mean it’s here to stay.
I’m starting to worry Lemmy users read the article at a lower rate than redditors.
Next week: “Google scrapping gmail.”
I doubt it. It’s free data, they ain’t getting rid of that.
It’s not free though. Running an email service is not cheap.
Trust me they make way more money by running the service then it costs to run especially considering that everything is now in house. They own their own servers.
It’s absolutely not free like you said though.
It’s free for you. I have absolutely no idea what point you’re trying to make.
exactly my thought.
“They are saying its here to stay, which means people should get their data off it asap”
Of course it is. I know Google scraps a lot of things, but Gmail is for the most part liked and, far more importantly to Google, is an absolute treasure trove of personalised, easily parsable data, yet nowhere near as costly to maintain as, say, YouTube.
The fact that after making search, an email provider was their next big project, shows how serious they are about it.
