A way out of Google

I can no longer identify with this company and its business practices centered on pushing the social network to all its services. I foresee a moment when I can no longer avoid Google+. Just recently I had to delete a Google+ account because it is now required if I wish to post a video or even comment on YouTube. It should only be a matter of time until public pressure will be insufficient or just not interested anymore in stopping Google from intruding the social network into all its services.

I have a gmail account I'm about to close or just start ignoring. I've been a user since their beta days, when you could still create a 6 letter gmail account. I still have their welcome email from August, 2004.

I'm trying to look for an alternative. But it's becoming hard. This is not yet the moment a company/service emerges that challenges the increasingly bad business of the industry. Google did this much back in 1998 when it challenged the Portal culture. Apparently it's someone else turn to challenge the Social Network culture and provide clean and free web services.

I'll be happy to know of your suggestions in alternatives to gmail. Please keep in mind I don't use social networks of any kind (don't even ever created an account on places like facebook or twitter) and that email is my most important means of communication bar no one. I require a service I can trust and of high quality that thinks of emails simply and just as emails.

Note: Yes, the best service is my own email server. But, I can't afford to run one since I cannot guarantee uptime of any kind from my current location.

>I foresee a moment when I can no longer avoid Google+.
Probably true.

>comment on YouTube.
This has simply destroyed youtube comments! I remember that I when I would go to a video and check the comments below, the 1st one, at least, with a big chance was a comment that you would enjoy reading!
Now, the g+ thing has made people to feel like that are oblidged to create a g+ account, which is bad, because you directly make the user feel he has no free will and he must create an account, to comment on youtube (two things that have NOTHING in common). One guy said me: "By this way you will see more comments of people that you may know..". For several reasons (most of them don't have an account), this simply doesn't happen and I no longer scroll down to the commens, since the top one doesn't exist or is not at the top!

I remember my friend from my uni telling me that G+ has made and it was going to get full of people and "wow, we need to create an account there".. So ok, I just created, because my friend told me. If I was "pseudo-invited" to create one, I am pretty sure I wouldn't! When G+ was created many people thought it would tear facebook appart. This isn't the case, until so far at least. Google sees that its loosing and starts "oblidging" people to create an account. Not good in my opinion!

About the gmail however, I do not have a problem. Well obvisouly std10093 you do not, since you already have an account.. :)) hihihi!

My dad uses yahoo mail. It might be good!

>The programmer’s wife tells him: “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”
>The programmer comes home with 12 loaves of bread.
I understand that this can be found funny by many, but the programmer MUST be that stupid to do this. Not so clever job in my opinion. :)

I opened a hotmail account in 1998, and it is still working.

One service that I have always been curious about is hush mail. For the free service you get 25 MB of storage, but you have to sign in at least once every 3 weeks. If you decide to pay for the service you can get more storage and IMAP/POP forwarding.

This is a bit of a different perk but the terms of service are also very nicely written.

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I require a service I can trust and of high quality that thinks of emails simply and just as emails.

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O_o

For the sake of argument, I'm going to assume you typed "and doesn't scrape my communication/address book for third-party advertisers".

Sorry, I don't know of any offering. I wish I did, but I know for a fact that many scrape addresses. (I used a "honey pot" name when I registered.) I just don't think you'll find anything good.

That said, if you do, please, please let us know.

Soma

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Note: Yes, the best service is my own email server. But, I can't afford to run one since I cannot guarantee uptime of any kind from my current location.

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How about a virtual private server? Some go for quite cheap. I pay $20/month and use it to host email, a website, VPN, and a few other misc things.

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Originally Posted by whiteflags

I opened a hotmail account in 1998, and it is still working.

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I had done this too, more recently, when MSN was hot. MSN got closed. Most of the people using MSN created a hotmail account. MSN is out of scope now, thus I wouldn't create a hotmail account now.

I don't know, man, have you ever used Chromium? It's pretty boss. Not the OS but the web browser. It's blue Chrome!

While I certainly object to Google's pushing of G+, my solution simply to register under G+ with a fake name (they haven't caught me yet!) and just ignore everything in G+.

Google doesn't have their users in mind, only their affiliates. Who can blame them? No one pays for GMail. The only way you'll ever be able to expect anything out of a service is when you pay for it.

Elysia said:
>they haven't caught me yet!
I do not think they ever will (bothet to do so). :)

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Originally Posted by phantomotap

For the sake of argument, I'm going to assume you typed "and doesn't scrape my communication/address book for third-party advertisers".

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Nah. Within reason, I'm not concerned about spam. This would reduce my option to a very probable 0 email services.

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Originally Posted by cyberfish

How about a virtual private server? Some go for quite cheap. I pay $20/month and use it to host email, a website, VPN, and a few other misc things.

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Currently I'm just looking for a free web mail service.

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Originally Posted by whiteflags

One service that I have always been curious about is hush mail.

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The 25MB limit killed it for me. I mean, It's not like I need gigabytes. But their free 25 MB offer is frankly low.

I will keep looking for something.... Thanks everyone.

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Originally Posted by Mario F.

I will keep looking for something.... Thanks everyone.

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You discarded yahoo mail I suggested?

Yes. Yahoo and Hotmail (now outlook.com) are miles away from what I want. I want a web mail service. And only a web mail service.

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Within reason, I'm not concerned about spam.

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O_o

Well, spam isn't my issue, but fair enough for you.

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The 25MB limit killed it for me. I mean, It's not like I need gigabytes. But their free 25 MB offer is frankly low.

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Well, I was going to recommend a cloud service (That is, you'd run your own email server using cloud hardware.), but you seem to have an unspecified limit on funds so until you provide those numbers I can't suggest anything.

[Edit]
To be clear, the offering by "Hushmail" is $50.00 (USD) a year with 10 GiB, but you only referenced the free service so I'm assuming the cost is the problem for that level.
[/Edit]

Soma

Maybe this is a silly question, but why is posting videos on youtube or commenting about such videos important enough that you would create a google+ account, despite your other objections?

For me at least, youtube just up and switched it one day. You use google+ now! Oh, okay...

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Originally Posted by grumpy

Maybe this is a silly question, but why is posting videos on youtube or commenting about such videos important enough that you would create a google+ account, despite your other objections?

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I haven't created a Google+ account. Ever. But one day I simply had one. With full username and password associated with my gmail account too. Simply because I had a always empty youtube channel and would comment occasionally on Crusader Kings II videos and Chemistry/Mathematics educational videos. I since deleted that Google+ account. But by doing so, I can no longer use my YouTube channel (which I rarely did, but it was there just in case) and I can no longer make comments on Crusader Kings II or educational videos. So, to answer your question it isn't important.

So it's the business practices of this company that I can no longer stand. My relationship with Google has been deteriorating through the years. On a few occasions I have looked hard for alternatives (from search engines to mobile OSes and email). There really isn't much. The company that once took us out of our relationship with bad business, is today bad business. And there doesn't seem to exist another Google in the horizon to free us from it. In any case, I'll take subpar services, spam, my email sold to third-parties than one more day with this company.

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In any case, I'll take subpar services, spam, my email sold to third-parties than one more day with this company.

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O_o

Well, I'd say "Dreamhost". They actually have decent, if not great depending on the branch, services with similar support for those services. The only issue I have is related to third-party security.

Full disclosure: I've now been a "Dreamhost" customer for a several years, and yes, you absolutely will find plenty of horror stories. I'm not here to make excuses on their behalf because I don't care; if you aren't technically competent with "GNU/Linux", you will probably have a bad time with "Dreamhost" support.

Soma

What email protocol do you want to use?

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Originally Posted by fnprintf

What email protocol do you want to use?

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Since I'm after a web service, it pretty much doesn't matter. I never made use of IMAP or POP3 features on web email and probably never will.

I use my own domain for one of my non-pseudo email addresses.

Last few years, I've had email for the cost of the domain registration around $7 per year. Currently, it's registered at godaddy. They have their basic email account included for free. I believe it's no longer free?

Most of the time, I can find some decent deals that make domain registration and hosting less than $10 per year. If there are no deals, I'll just point my domain to a free web hosting provider and turn up my spam filters.

Nah. I'd rather use a VPS if it was the case I made a move towards hosting services. Web hosting email servers are out of my control.

EDIT: Anyways, I'm currently reevaluating gmx.com. I don't trust 1on1 one bit, but what the heck. I really want to pull the plug on google.

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I only have a Google+ account for my blog, but I can't stand it when I'm reading through the YouTube comments out of general curiosity, and there's "insert name" has shared this video on their Google+ page.

The google+ issue is clearly for making users create g+ accounts! So far, I have seen the "quality of the comments" and the general idea to have been severed damaged.

I hope posting 4 weeks after the last post doesn't constitute resurrecting an old thread here, but a quick search using a well-known search engine took me here:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/1...email-accounts

Actually, I searched on "duckduckgo email" but they don't do email, as they state here:
https://duck.co/help/features/email

But they do provide links, one of which is to that EFF article.