[evocatus]

Thanks for confirming that Google is no longer run by the same people I trusted (at least, somewhat more than I do now) over a decade ago.

I encourage everyone to make the leap to DDG or some other search engine that doesn't just treat you as a data cow to be milked for your precious, precious "insights."

Even GMail is no longer an attractive proposition - the risk of being locked out (perhaps, even automatically!) of an account that serves as your primary mode of recovery / identification to other websites, with little to no chance of getting an actual human on the line to address your issue, is too great. I would rather not have my finances and other important accounts be subject to the whims of the big algorithm in the clouds.

[gobip]

What do you use in replacement for GMail?

[tazjin]

I recently moved to Yandex 360. We previously had DNS, mail etc. on Google until an outage[0] occured. The outage was the classical story of "billing error in related Play Store (!) account nuked entire GCP setup", which diminished trust enough that I decided to move everything away from Google. I'm a Xoogler, but even then getting through to the right support channels is hard.

Yandex services are pretty nice (they have an equivalent to most Google things), but even more important for me is that - even on the lowest plan - you can talk to a real human in support within minutes, 24/7.

[0]: https://b.tvl.fyi/issues/155

[janoc]

Uhm, sorry but Yandex of all things? Given that this is a Russian company with Kremlin having a "golden veto" power in?

No, thanks. Google may be evil but moving my data from Google to the Russian government spooks is really not a solution.

[tazjin]

Yeah. I live in Russia and I trust this government more than e.g. the American one. It's always a matter of perspective.

[enriquto]

I don't get this point of view. If you live in Russia, of all places, you'd likely want to avoid Yandex. On the other hand, for people from non-Russian countries Yandex is probably a better and safer choice than Google.

[CWuestefeld]

I made this same point awhile back to some colleagues, about my AmazFit smart watch. They were aghast that I'd have a Chinese product like that, given the possibility/likelihood of Chinese surveillance.

But, although China could monitor me, why would they care about some random guy out of 300 million Americans? And even if they cared, what could they do that might actually affect my life?

In contrast, we know that many US companies have an open wire to American law enforcement and surveillance agencies. And these people do have an interest in monitoring me (even if I'm not doing anything wrong), and they do have the power to harm me.

China might be eviller in many respects, but the products of a Chinese company are harmless to me, especially in comparison to domestic ones.

(And I also use Kaspersky for security on my home computers.)

[tazjin]

I don't really understand your point.

[oceanplexian]

I worked for LiveJournal, which was owned by a Russian company and what our platform removed for “misinformation” was a nothing compared to what companies like Twitter do today. I know Navalny (A Russian dissident) account is still active whereas platforms like Facebook and Twitter have banned multiple elected US politicians. If you want to avoid censorship the Russian platforms are great places to go.

[belter]

Yandex has the best image reverse search algos of all the search engines. Dont take my word for it, just go and try it. If you live in the US what is the most dangerous for you? To be spied by your own government, or a government on the other side of the planet?

[tedivm]

I'm using Fastmail and have been super happy with them. I need to start looking into replacements for business suites though, since clearly Google Suites/Workspaces/Domains (whatever they're calling it this week) is making seriously unethical choices.

[irthomasthomas]

https://www.gmx.com/mail/create-email-address/

Or

Protonmail.com

[indymike]

An good old fashioned IMAP mailbox. It works fine, and my ISP has decent spam controls. Oh, and Fair Email (a client) on Android is awesome. Webmail is really slow when you get 300-400 emails a day that are not spam.

[nullify88]

https://www.migadu.com/

[nerdjon]

It may not be perfect, but I switched to MobileMe for my personal email a long time ago and continue to use iCloud.

Search is for sure hit or miss, but I pay for it and feel... a bit better.

For my "professional" email I use Amazon Workmail with a custom domain.

[kcartlidge]

I've not tried the new option myself so this isn't a recommendation, but if you are using iCloud for personal email yet are doing 'professional' email elsewhere because of the custom domain, then you may not know that iCloud now supports those custom domains.

Of course there may be other reasons why you want professional email separate, such as not having it at risk should Apple decide you've broken their T&Cs because poor AI/ML says so, and they close your account.

[nerdjon]

I think at the time I set it up that feature may not exist?

It isn't really anything sensitive, really more just when I am interviewing and related activities.

But I also want it to be a separate email instead of just an alias which I assume iClouds is. Could be wrong though.

Amazon's is just $5 a month so not really a huge drive to change it.

[benrapscallion]

Fastmail and HEY

[mjmj]

Hey, too rich for my blood

[names_are_hard]

There are many options, as evidenced by the replies here. I've used Zoho for a few years now, no issues.

[nerdponx]

Fastmail

[eirikurh]

purelymail (https://purelymail.com/) is great! Can't recommend it enough.

[bencollier49]

Fastmail is great.

[liveoneggs]

hotmail?

[diamondage]

DDG leaks data like a sieve. When you type a query it's present in the URL. Use an engine like onesearch.com which obfuscate this. (or get DDG to add this basic feature!)

[zinekeller]

If you're really concerned with that, turn off GET mode, which turns on POST mode (https://duckduckgo.com/settings#privacy or https://duckduckgo.com/?kg=p for a direct link).

[twofornone]

>When you type a query it's present in the URL

Why does that matter? Doesn't anything after the domain stay between your browser and the server you're communicating with, assuming https?

[ryeights]

With HTTPS this shouldn’t be a problem, no?

[scim-knox-twox]

It's visible in browser history

[vorejdajo]

You can change GET to POST in DDG settings > Privacy