Google deleted my email account to save a few pennies

[objectinspace]

For more than 10 years, I've used for my email. Some of you dorks will hopefully recognize this as the evil corporation from System Shock. Apparently someone set up a mailserver through google apps and let whoever sign up to it. It's simple to remember and easy to tell people, and it looks slick having. 've Put it on business cards, my linked in, signed up to countless listserves with it, etc. I say this freely and without fear of angry spambot reprisals, because apparently that's all over now! Tried to log into my email tonight to be told that it has been deleted. No warning, no nothing. For no reason, even, accept that one of the richest software companies in the solar system wants to charge for the incredibly onerous task of forwarding email to custom domains with more than 50 people. The pettiness here is beyond the pale. I can't decide if I should be impressed or enraged that They found a way to fuck me over I never even considered.

[AArdvark]

They don't care about us as individuals. We exist as a hive entity to them, to make money flow into their coffers

[objectinspace]

Soooo does anybody have any cool email provider suggestions? Right now my short list consists of Proton and... Proton.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

What happened, Drew? Someone stole your email domain? Or they just shut down some aspect of it?

I have been using Protonmail for stuff and it's been great.

[objectinspace]

Yeah sorry, I used some real addresses in my post which got removed, rendering my explanation somewhat unreadable. Also it was 2 in the morning and my tiny body was filled with rage. I'll try again.

I have three email addresses: my work email, a gmail that I use to sign up to websites (and thus gets all the spam so the inbox is unmonitored) and the email I actually read and tell people about. That email was drew at trioptimum dot com. Trioptimum is a fictional corporation from a game; someone grabbed the domain and set it up as a hosted gmail server through google apps for members of the TTLG/systemshock.org fan community. At the time I was looking for work and thought I might be taken more seriously with an email address that was just my name at some domain that wasn't hotmail/gmail, so I was thrilled to sign up! The hosting is free, but Google later limited the tier to 50 signups. Since there were already a few hundred active accounts, we were grandfathered in, but they instituted a policy that your account will be deleted if you don't log in for six months. Not that I knew any of this until 48 hours ago! I was in fact using my account regularly, but I was logging in through thunderbird. I can only assume that TB stores the session in a way that does not phone home to Google, and/or Google has a bug in their IMAP implementation that they can't be assed to fix because they hate IMAP. The thing that upsets me the most is that they had my email yet they never sent me any warnings that this was a thing I'd need to watch out for. Decades of correspondence and branding gone, in the blink of an eye. I'm still kind of processing the implications.

[objectinspace]

I am also hearing good things about "fast mail!" Does anyone have any experience with this "fast mail?" How does it compare to Proton? Which is less likely to delete my data and burn me forever as a customer because they hate poor people?

[objectinspace]

The ferst result for "fastmail VS. Proton" on google and duckduckgo is, well, not an unbiased source: https://fastmail.blog/privacy-security/ ... rotonmail/

But let's go with it!

Fastmail’s dynamic development enables our app to keep up with the most recent iterations of the operating systems.

I don't care about your shitty app, I'm happy with Thunderbird and I refuse to do anything other than read occasional important emails on my phone.

ProtonMail’s interface is simple and plain—no one should have trouble navigating it. Compared to the more fully-featured Fastmail, though, ProtonMail is a basic encrypted email client with a few additional features.

Wow. Quite a bit of condescension here for people who like simple interfaces, Fast Mail. As a member of the simple interface preferring community, I'm not exactly won over with this sales pitch. Speaking of which, "fast mail," I've read quite a bit of this post and I still haven't got to the part where you break down your price tiers.

ProtonMail also features a mobile app that works on both iOS and Android, but because of its encryption, cannot be used with any other apps unless you also install another piece of software that decrypts the mail before passing it through to the mail client (Whereupon you’re no longer end-to-end encrypted as there’s a decrypted copy being stored on your computer).

Hmmmm. Good catch, FastMail! This brings up an interesting question. Is FastMail end-to-end encrypted?

*Checks the internet*

It isn't?

Well, then.

Guess I've made my decision!

I hope this process was instructive.

[pinback]

I've used gmail since 2005. It's great. Just use gmail.

[Jizaboz]

I've used gmail since 2005. It's great. Just use gmail.

Same. I've used it since 2004 and never really had a problem at all. Google for Biz is a slightly different story. While it does work and all, I found the UI for administrating users and such to be pretty stupid.

[objectinspace]

Somehow, objectinspace at protonmail dot com is already taken. Go on, JoltCountry! Pick my email address.

[objectinspace]

Update: Getting set up with proton hit a huge road block almost immediately! In order to use third party clients, you need an app running to decrypt the messages. That app, it turns out, does not work with screenreaders on windows. In particular, the app generates a password you need to send to the client in order to log in with it, and this cannot be read. Hilariously, their linux app is commandline-based, which would be perfect, but presumably they expect windows uers are too stupid for that. So I'm fucked, until they do something about it.

So I sent them a support request! The response was, basically, that yes, it's broken and yes, we know it's broken. We're working on stuff to fix it but no, we can't give you an ETA. Thanks for playing, feel free to check out the gift shop!

I can work around this as I have a light slave who can read the screen, but it has now become about the principle since they did not offer this solution themselves. After roudly berating them, they begrudgingly offered to do a remote session next week. Honestly though, who even uses E2E encrypted email? If they are going to make it this difficult them I don't see the point, and about 75% of me wants to cancel just to punish them.

Is it me? Am I the problem?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I lost my zombieworld account for the same reason.