It's weird that they are actively discouraging us from using external mail inside gmail. Like, you would think they want us sucking down all our scannable data into their system and staying inside the wall.
Before you do that:
Consider a more open and transparent email platform such as Proton, Fastmail, Runbox, Tuta, basically just reconsider moving from one evil, unaccountable platform to another. As you may find the evil, unaccountable platform may do evil and unaccountable things.
I'll say this for Apple Mail (the email service, not the email client): it's dirt cheap and works really well. You can bring up to 5 self-owned domains to it on the $1/mo iCloud+ plan. That price includes 6 users, and up to 3 aliases ("hackernews@example.com") per person. Even when Proton isn't helping the FBI identify protesters[0], their family plan is $24/mo if you pay annually.
I ran my own server for about 25 years. I put in my time and got tired of doing it. I've migrated my own email to Apple's servers mainly because it's the only reasonably priced family host I could find.
Proton is activity enshitifying and has introduced dark patterns to their onboarding process. Suggest you deprecate them from your recommend list until they come clean and step away from this dirty business we’ve been seeing.
(not parent)
their onboarding pushing is frequent, app is fine but web is popup-y with offers/perks
<rant>if i get popups slowing down my web visit it makes me less likely to upsell to, i'd rather a seperate pricing page that i have to manually click to see, my memory serves that most services ive bought have no popup modal (my memory is probably wrong statistically but right emotionally\
maybe op was a/b tested to something more irritating
> (not parent) their onboarding pushing is frequent, app is fine but web is popup-y with offers/perks
Fair. They do advertise plans to existing subscribers, even plans that aren’t even an upgrade from your current one.
However on the other hand they do offer a toggle to turn these off completely in the settings. One could argue that it should be opt-in rather than opt-out though.
I wouldn’t count this as a black mark against their reputation though as it’s not the product inherently getting worse.
Funny enough this has been pointed out a lot pretty frequently this past week.
- They decreased the number of visible digits of unread e-mails from four (untested past four) to three. This is one of the first things the user sees when opening the application.
- After providing feedback, was told "that exceeding the number of 1000 unread messages displays the number of the messages in the counter as 999+. This is expected behaviour."
- Soon after, a further update (7.7.1 and further) brought this value down to two digits.
- The mobile application attachment upload has unclear wording and stopped working like it used to.
- The wording for attachments are:
- "From your photo library" (does not offer third party application selection)
- "Take a new photo"
- "Import from..." (allows third-party application selection)
- It's unclear how one:
- Adds a different attachment type
- Adds a photo in-line, or as an attachment
- "From your photo library" is in-line
- "Import from..." is as an attachment
- This may be Android related but ProtonMail was the system that changed most recently for me.
- I used to be able to upload attachments using a third-party file picker (stock android file selection is not great); the latest version doesn't seem to offer third-party applications as a choice.
- Application behaviour caused crashes and duplicate drafts on a mobile device, it turned out they had a new version. I don't remember crashes happening until that point, using the same version.
- There is a newer Category view feature to roll out (or is in progress now) on mobile devices. Something had triggered this feature on my device without my consent (I assumed they were going through e-mails and adding categories based on content or sender or subject or something). An update was required to fix this. They said "Kindly note that you just got an early glimpse of what’s coming for a future update.".
- Meaning each time you'd have to log in then select e-mail (basically advertising their other products).
- I ended up asking them for a corrected link (https://mail.proton.me/login)
- Desktop notification banner; there is no option to disable notifications, this appears set as a cookie. The banner says it needs "Proton Mail needs your permission to enable desktop notifications." It does not need anything; I don't want these.
- In the web client: Fonts are inconsistent, and can change and adjust on you when typing, or when opening drafts. I had it consistently failing this way in Firefox and Chromium browsers; Tor works better but this is not a preferred solution.
Yes it is completely ambiguous stupid nonsense especially for emails which when sent anywhere outside of Tuta are not E2EE. How many emails are going to go outside of Tuta service 99%+?
So you got burned by a centralized proprietary mail service suddenly making user-hostile changes, and your first instinct is to move to another centralized proprietary mail service by a company with a long history of user hostile changes?
Truly modern consumer sensibilities are fascinating to me.
Personally I do not use any Apple or Google products. There are so many better choices!
Anyway, might I suggest services that run standard open source mail daemons that never restrict you, like Migadu.
Not everyone is interested in how the sausage gets made. Most people buy a drill to make holes, not to disassemble to learn how to build their own drill. And yes, I have a Migadu account. But I front many of those email addresses via Gmail.
Apple Mail is a client, not a host. It's an old school e-mail program on your computer, which you connect to whatever server your e-mail is. Whether that's your own domain, Gmail, iCloud, Hotmail or Yahoo or anything else.
I have a domain and a contact email address for that domain that I have exclusively used through GMail, I guess this means I need to figure out a different path forward for that, then?
Since you planned ahead, it should be as simple as getting a new provider and updating the MX record. If you are looking for suggestions, I'm on Fastmail's $50/year plan and quite happy with it.
Unless you have insider knowledge, this seems incredibly unlikely. Do you really think most GMail users even understand what this functionality is, much less use it? Google is many things, but they're not suicidal. I'm sure they did the math of the ongoing cost of supporting this functionality, versus whatever revenue people who care about it (and are still paying nothing) might bring in and realized its a cost savings for them. Losing 0.3% of all users is likely in their interests.
> we occasionally have the difficult choice to discontinue features that require disproportionate maintenance resources.
Am I really expected to believe that the billions of dollars the company makes in pure profit can't sustain this feature? Am I really expected to believe the touted productively gains granted by Google's AI can't sustain this feature?
The flip side of this is that GMail's Send-As feature has seen virtually no maintenance whatsoever. It's buggy-as and I expect most people (like myself) have been putting up with it out of inertia because switching email clients is a pain.
> Right now you can forge email from any email address you can verify ownership
I find this sentence confusing. Do you mean “forge” in a technical sense of “this email came from a server unassociated with the domain”? I don’t really get it. I’ve know this feature existed in Gmail for 15+ years and have made regular use of it. Plus I’ve used it to help older relatives keep an old address alive.
Isn't this just using SMTP through whatever mail server you have connected to Gmail?
Either way, this is likely going to stop me from using Gmail as my mail aggregator, I've used this feature for nearly a decade to send and receive from 6 different addresses, Gmail recognizes the to address and automatically sets the from address to the correct account.
Is Thunderbird still decent nowadays? What's a decent mobile + desktop replacement?
What an odd choice of inflammatory language for a feature that uses standard email headers. It doesn't forge anything since it clearly says it was sent from the GMail account on behalf of the other email address in the headers.
> Do you get a referral bonus or is the astroturfing team over there just that aggressive?
The far simpler explanation is that it's a solid product. Go ahead, check my comment history: I haven't mentioned it previously (as far as I remember, not gonna check all my comments to verify).
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
I've been searching for email provider that's not purelymail, fastmail really seems to be the best reputable option.
(Looking to switch off purelymail because the new design blows and I'm really unsure about the new owner. Can't put my finger on it, but I just dont trust the guy.)
I moved all my custom domains to Fastmail five or six years ago and couldn't be happier.
My Gmail only exists to catch legacy messages and Google service notifications. I look forward to the day I can completely migrate out of all their products, but some organizations I work with who use Google for various things have made that a slow slog.
Apple is a good choice if someone doesn’t know which company to start with. A lot of Apple customers have iCloud+ but don’t realize email hosting on your own domain is included in the plan. If you’re already paying for it you might as well use it.
I was totally unaware of this. I haven't quite been ready to pull the trigger on something like FastMail or ProtonMail, but I have a few domains kicking around and figure it's worth a shot to try it out. Thanks!
…but make sure you keep on top of your domain renewals, make sure they can renew automatically, and make sure there is a backup email address that isn't on your domain that can be used to get into your domain registrar account.
(You probably don't need to ask how I know. I am very lucky that there was a grace period after my domain expired, where I spent a few days not realising why I wasn't receiving any email any more.)
I'll third this. A few years ago I set up both a website (cloudflare) and started using Firefox Relay (proxy email addresses, with a mozmail domain).
I did it to make gmail less sticky and control spam[0]. Then last year I switched to fastmail and it was so easy because I just had to point somewhere else.
Even if you keep Gmail I highly suggest people do this as it's helped with spam and gives me more control. Because I have catchall emails I can even make up an email on the spot, with pen and paper only.
[0] every website gets a unique email and a unique password. Think something like hn@foo.mozmail.com or hn@godelski.com (I don't own those domains, don't try to reach me there). Bitwarden even supports FF Relay!
I only use gmail for providing to services. I have a fastmail account that I use for stuff I want. I treat gmail as a PO Box and my fastmail as my private mailbox. It is rare that I actually need to read my gmail other than when services only offer 2FA via email. It makes a huge difference
I don't think I could ever go back to running an e-mail server again, given the continually evolving battle with convincing the major e-mail providers that your IP is legit (I'm looking at you AT&T!).
I'm moving everything from Fastmail now but yeah those 10 years were good. Recent updates did the strange things to the UI but working with the identities became better.
This doesn’t affect me, but it certainly influences me. I’ve been holding off from leaving Gmail for years. They try to force you into their Gmail app on iOS, it’s the only way to get push emails from them. OK fine. So I switch from Apple Mail to Gmail. I write a relatively long email full of research to send to my great uncle who is a professor at a nearby university who I greatly respect. I type it up on the desktop, go to the app, add another sentence wishing him well and send it. Come to find out since my phone is in dark mode it changed the text from black to white. That’s Google‘s idea of dark mode. So I have to send another long email removing that text formatting and apologizing. Dark mode is something that Apple and Microsoft and everyone else can get. And they don’t let you change the app to light mode, it only tracks the phone. Their web dark mode is also terrible. Apple and Microsoft have no such issues. Even smaller players like Proton get these things right.
Maybe focus on delivering quality and value instead of trying to extract more out of your existing customers.
Google is pathetic and has been for a long time for anyone paying attention to all their quirks, terrible UIs, and canceled products. I have Gmail beta account from the earliest days. That 1GB was nice 22 years ago but it’s time for me to finally do the work and get off of Gmail.
Honestly i'd love to migrate off of google, but its been a pain. My family is a heavy user of google calendar so I either have to migrate them off or I have to keep my google calendar account.
I tried fastmail but honestly its not as easy to use as gmail.
Has anyone pulled off a migration like this? how did you do it?
Doubtful. It will reduce some user count, but most people won’t care. And they probably spend more supporting the feature than they gain from the Gmail users that actually use the feature.
Current headline on HN is incorrect - it's not custom domains, it's third-party email addresses, such as @yahoo.com or @outlook.com. Domains and other gmail addresses you own can still be used....
This support article gives more details here, even though it's still clear as mud that they are dropping support for custom domains _unless_ that domain is hosted via Google Workspaces:
Even more confusing, you _will_ be able to still send to a custom domain via the Gmail mobile app? This appears to be an anti-spam move I guess? Though personally, this is a big breakage for me...
The headline is not wrong, its intentionally worded that way to mellow down the message. Its for the people who use their own custom domains to send emails via google without paying for the workspace by verifying the domain ownership (its a extra cost that google bears now for free). The @yahoo.com or @outlook.com are just to give a face to what other custom domains look like.
The whole point is if you have custom domains then pay for the google workspace if you still want to use it. Couldnt find it right away, from what I recollect it used to be $6 or $8 per email address
Yeah, basically this is terminating the trick some people used where they host a domain elsewhere but want to use an free personal GMail address as the "mail client" for it. Google sells their own domain email product, they'd prefer you use that vs. paying someone else.
And let's be honest here: GMail remains the preferred email client for almost everyone, for a lot of boring but very good reasons (mostly down to reliability and spam filtering).
Basically: people who don't like Google and don't use Google won't be affected and won't care. People who pay for Workspace hosting won't be affected, as those domains still work via Send-As. The people complaining here are in category 1, there are a handful of people (I'm one) in category 2 trying to help explain, and unsurprisingly there are very, very few people here in the actually impacted category of "mail client for external domain" users.
Shrug. If you feel you can do better by offering free email with ad targetting and beat GMail in the market, feel free. As it is, Google clearly feels that offering "free mail client" functionality to external domains is a net loss, and would prefer not to do it. It's a proprietary product, they can offer whatever services they want.
Hmm I'm confused. I have my own domain that is totally not hosted on google. However, I use Google's SMTP to send mail as that domain (specifically the one email address that is enabled on my custom domain).
I'm similarly confused/upset, but it really does sound like they're discontinuing sending via SMTP:
> The “Send as” feature will no longer be available. This feature allows you to send email from a third-party address, such as @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, and others, using your primary Gmail account.
Ah well. Google helps me degoogle. Can't complain much can I?
Anyone has recommendations for send-only (or that allow being used only to send) email services? Not those that are used for commercial emails, even if legit.
As someone who uses their personal Gmail account to forward emails from custom domains to (via MXRoute and other email providers), losing the ability to "Send as" from the given adresses from Gmail means I will have to find an entirely new "home base" for email (and paradoxically start forwarding my peronal Gmail emails these instead?), right?
Similarly to losing Inbox many years ago, this really sucks.
But yes enshittification has hit gmail and workspace in a huge way and seems to be accelerating. I'm also looking for a new home after being a heavy user since 2005
Regarding the outrage in this thread: Am I missing something? DMARC/SPF/DKIM enforcement makes third-party relaying fragile and likely to cause deliverability failures. Discontinuing it seems like progress towards reducing abuse. Where am I wrong on this?
1. want their email on their own domain (for professionalism and portability)
2. Want to use Gmail (it is actually a pretty nice service to use)
3. Don't want to use Google Workspace (either because of how cobbled google features are on workspace, because they don't want to migrate google accounts, or because of it's cost)
Google just killed the ability to meet those three requirements. There's lots of people facing either a) showing the world a gmail.com address, b) switching to a different mail solution or c) paying for workspace and accepting it's flaws. It's totally fair for people to be mad about that.
If the "new" infrastructure doesn't support a common and reasonable use case, then perhaps it needs more work.
I am not technical. What does this mean for one who migrated to Proton but has their old Gmail account forward to a new Proton address? I am guessing that's unaffected and it's just outbound from Gmail as a third-party email domain?
> third-party email addresses, such as @yahoo.com or @outlook.com.
Unfortunate choice of examples as it doesn’t make it clear whether it applies just to other free web email providers or also to e.g. my own custom domains.
118 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 14.5 ms ] threadI ran my own server for about 25 years. I put in my time and got tired of doing it. I've migrated my own email to Apple's servers mainly because it's the only reasonably priced family host I could find.
[0] https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonym...
Trust eroding on proton sadly.
<rant>if i get popups slowing down my web visit it makes me less likely to upsell to, i'd rather a seperate pricing page that i have to manually click to see, my memory serves that most services ive bought have no popup modal (my memory is probably wrong statistically but right emotionally\
maybe op was a/b tested to something more irritating
Fair. They do advertise plans to existing subscribers, even plans that aren’t even an upgrade from your current one.
However on the other hand they do offer a toggle to turn these off completely in the settings. One could argue that it should be opt-in rather than opt-out though.
I wouldn’t count this as a black mark against their reputation though as it’s not the product inherently getting worse.
Funny enough this has been pointed out a lot pretty frequently this past week.
- There is a newer Category view feature to roll out (or is in progress now) on mobile devices. Something had triggered this feature on my device without my consent (I assumed they were going through e-mails and adding categories based on content or sender or subject or something). An update was required to fix this. They said "Kindly note that you just got an early glimpse of what’s coming for a future update.".
In the desktop/web client:
- Their original link to e-mail login (which I had bookmarked) was then turned into a General Proton login (https://account.proton.me/login, now https://account.proton.me/mail)
- Desktop notification banner; there is no option to disable notifications, this appears set as a cookie. The banner says it needs "Proton Mail needs your permission to enable desktop notifications." It does not need anything; I don't want these.- In the web client: Fonts are inconsistent, and can change and adjust on you when typing, or when opening drafts. I had it consistently failing this way in Firefox and Chromium browsers; Tor works better but this is not a preferred solution.
Truly modern consumer sensibilities are fascinating to me.
Personally I do not use any Apple or Google products. There are so many better choices!
Anyway, might I suggest services that run standard open source mail daemons that never restrict you, like Migadu.
https://www.fastmail.com/how-to/email-for-your-domain/
Are you looking at a real mailbox provider, or trying to keep Gmail somehow?
It seems like they're removing POP/IMAP support from the web client?
Am I really expected to believe that the billions of dollars the company makes in pure profit can't sustain this feature? Am I really expected to believe the touted productively gains granted by Google's AI can't sustain this feature?
Maybe GCP. It's like saying the tiger had no prior history of violence.
Seem Google don't feel the need to market to hackers and early adopters anoymore..
* https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
I bet most people complaining about this change don’t even know this feature exists.
Right now you can forge email from any email address you can verify ownership.
Most of those emails will end up in a spam folder.
This doesn’t affect email addresses that Google controls DMARC records for.
I find this sentence confusing. Do you mean “forge” in a technical sense of “this email came from a server unassociated with the domain”? I don’t really get it. I’ve know this feature existed in Gmail for 15+ years and have made regular use of it. Plus I’ve used it to help older relatives keep an old address alive.
how can you "forge" something if you verify ownership? when you own something, it's not "forging" to use it.
i think the point you're trying to get at is that the mail might fail dmarc requirements?
Either way, this is likely going to stop me from using Gmail as my mail aggregator, I've used this feature for nearly a decade to send and receive from 6 different addresses, Gmail recognizes the to address and automatically sets the from address to the correct account.
Is Thunderbird still decent nowadays? What's a decent mobile + desktop replacement?
I saw 5 mentions of it in this thread so far and no mention of any other provider.
The far simpler explanation is that it's a solid product. Go ahead, check my comment history: I haven't mentioned it previously (as far as I remember, not gonna check all my comments to verify).
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
(Looking to switch off purelymail because the new design blows and I'm really unsure about the new owner. Can't put my finger on it, but I just dont trust the guy.)
My Gmail only exists to catch legacy messages and Google service notifications. I look forward to the day I can completely migrate out of all their products, but some organizations I work with who use Google for various things have made that a slow slog.
(You probably don't need to ask how I know. I am very lucky that there was a grace period after my domain expired, where I spent a few days not realising why I wasn't receiving any email any more.)
I did it to make gmail less sticky and control spam[0]. Then last year I switched to fastmail and it was so easy because I just had to point somewhere else.
Even if you keep Gmail I highly suggest people do this as it's helped with spam and gives me more control. Because I have catchall emails I can even make up an email on the spot, with pen and paper only.
[0] every website gets a unique email and a unique password. Think something like hn@foo.mozmail.com or hn@godelski.com (I don't own those domains, don't try to reach me there). Bitwarden even supports FF Relay!
Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45439670
Google is pathetic and has been for a long time for anyone paying attention to all their quirks, terrible UIs, and canceled products. I have Gmail beta account from the earliest days. That 1GB was nice 22 years ago but it’s time for me to finally do the work and get off of Gmail.
I tried fastmail but honestly its not as easy to use as gmail.
Has anyone pulled off a migration like this? how did you do it?
Maybe a problem if you send calendar invites, I guess?
Obviously, can't close your account and still use their calendar, but whatcha gonna do.
it'll lose them some tech folk, but it's hardly "suicide".
> This change does not affect Google Workspace aliases or other Gmail addresses you own.
to me, implies that you need to set up Google Workspace for that domain before it'll work.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213
Even more confusing, you _will_ be able to still send to a custom domain via the Gmail mobile app? This appears to be an anti-spam move I guess? Though personally, this is a big breakage for me...
The whole point is if you have custom domains then pay for the google workspace if you still want to use it. Couldnt find it right away, from what I recollect it used to be $6 or $8 per email address
And let's be honest here: GMail remains the preferred email client for almost everyone, for a lot of boring but very good reasons (mostly down to reliability and spam filtering).
Basically: people who don't like Google and don't use Google won't be affected and won't care. People who pay for Workspace hosting won't be affected, as those domains still work via Send-As. The people complaining here are in category 1, there are a handful of people (I'm one) in category 2 trying to help explain, and unsurprisingly there are very, very few people here in the actually impacted category of "mail client for external domain" users.
It’s part the model they use your emails to target you with ads
Are they discontinuing that or something else?
> The “Send as” feature will no longer be available. This feature allows you to send email from a third-party address, such as @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, and others, using your primary Gmail account.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213?sjid=2314716...
Anyone has recommendations for send-only (or that allow being used only to send) email services? Not those that are used for commercial emails, even if legit.
Similarly to losing Inbox many years ago, this really sucks.
But yes enshittification has hit gmail and workspace in a huge way and seems to be accelerating. I'm also looking for a new home after being a heavy user since 2005
I ended up building my own solution (Mailyond) to have all my product domains under one place.
What solution are you looking at?
I’ll now be actively enacting plans to move on and be sure to support family and friends, even non tech savvy ones, to do the same.
When you think they can’t fall further, they do.
That's all.
1. want their email on their own domain (for professionalism and portability)
2. Want to use Gmail (it is actually a pretty nice service to use)
3. Don't want to use Google Workspace (either because of how cobbled google features are on workspace, because they don't want to migrate google accounts, or because of it's cost)
Google just killed the ability to meet those three requirements. There's lots of people facing either a) showing the world a gmail.com address, b) switching to a different mail solution or c) paying for workspace and accepting it's flaws. It's totally fair for people to be mad about that.
If the "new" infrastructure doesn't support a common and reasonable use case, then perhaps it needs more work.
Unfortunate choice of examples as it doesn’t make it clear whether it applies just to other free web email providers or also to e.g. my own custom domains.