[izoow]

As much as I used to love Gmail, the past few years I've been getting increasingly more afraid to be reliant on it. I've seen way too many fuck ups from Google where people randomly got banned because some algorithm decided to, and appealing or getting to a human support is pretty much impossible.

[brudgers]

For me...

Banning by Google as a single point of failure seems less likely than the single points of failure in ordinary alternatives to Gmail.

For example, I relied on backing up Thunderbird profiles as an email archive for many many years. Based on my years of experience the probability that my old spinning disks in the box in the closet are unreadable is higher than the probability that I will get banned by Google.

Google hardware is more reliable than mine. Google's algorithms are more reliable than me. That's me of course, not you and your mileage can and will vary.

[fwn]

It also probably depends a lot on the footprint you create with your Google account.

If you only use it to receive email, your chances of being banned are probably very low.

If you are an active YouTuber, back up every photo to Google Photos, rely on Google Drive for heavy collaboration, and publish an app, your chances of being banned should be much higher, and increase with each Google service you use.

[Waterluvian]

I wonder what the actual stats are.

In terms of principles I completely agree. I don’t want to have that sword perpetually dangling above my account. But I suspect we’re practically just worried about being struck by lightning.

[cbolton]

That's my main concern with Gmail and Drive. On the other hand I've yet to see numbers on the probability of losing access to my email on Gmail vs another provider.

[fractalb]

> I've yet to see numbers on the probability of losing access to my email on Gmail vs another provider.

This is a great point. People often act as the other providers are 100 percent reliable without any numbers to back it up. Grass is always greener on the other side. To be fair, Google’s customer service is non-existent though.

[dudul]

Too true. I dont remember exactly what story it was, but I got my last straw a few years ago and eliminated google from my toolbox.

For email I went with FastMail.

[homefree]

Another happy fastmail user here. If you use a custom domain you also make it easier to switch going forward (though not as true for me because I use an email alias for each account).

The most tedious bit of the switch is updating all accounts, but if you use 1Password at least you have a list of them. Many sites have issues around changing your email and on some it’s even impossible (literally have to create a new account instead)

You can keep your old gmail account around with forwarding on to catch any stragglers.

There are a few companies that continue to email my old one despite me having updated my email (Microsoft/xbox is particularly bad about this), some just send me the privacy policy email each year which I’m guessing is tracked in a separate mailchimp or something that I can’t unsubscribe from.

For some this is even after using CCPA to try to have them delete profile content, probably only 80% of sites are willing or able to comply.

[jtbayly]

I finally managed about a month ago to switch off of gmail after meaning to for years. I guess I probably had my account for 20 years!

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I'm on the same boat but I can't find an email client that has a web version and a phone version that also doesn't force me to use their email server.

Closest you can get is thunderbird + K9 and it doesn't allow snoozing email on phone, which is a hard requirement for me