An update to storage policies across your Google Account(blog.google)
blog.google
An update to storage policies across your Google Account
https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/
426 comments
Wow, 4.3 petabytes a day. Operating at Google's scale these days is just nuts.
One of the advantages of being on an exponential growth curve is that this figure has been way lower in the past. Just go back 5 years and it's only a fraction of that. 5 more years and it's even lower. The gmail/drive/etc. data that come from Google's first decade of existence probably fit into those 4.3 petabytes.
The other implication of exponential data growth is that shortening retention periods is only a short term solution to storage costs.
I'd say it's the main implication. Google will have to use more drastic means soon. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I used to work on a certain Google product and I remember thinking a petabyte was big when our raw content store crossed that milestone. Now Linus Tech Tips can put that much storage in a single box.
I remember about ten years ago when 40TB of usable storage was a mid sized five five figure investment. That’s nas territory now.
I remember a time when 3mb of black market data was enough to get you out of the sprawl. Now you can barely get a Uber downtown for that.
Whoa.
Yep. Thats the flip side the the growth is that storage capacity keeps growing relative to price as well.
I spent $600 over a decade ago and put 7.5TB in my server. I spent $600 this year to add another 28TB.
I’m at nearly 40TB in my home server for maybe $1200 invested over the last decade.
I spent $600 over a decade ago and put 7.5TB in my server. I spent $600 this year to add another 28TB.
I’m at nearly 40TB in my home server for maybe $1200 invested over the last decade.
One problem that we run into though is that spindle count /random access capability is not increasing correspondingly. It's an interesting challenge.
I remember a bit over 20 years ago when we had a full 19" rack full of storage. It was about 500 GB if I'm not mistaken.
You can rent systems from Azure or AWS with 20 TB of RAM.
Thanks for posting that, most people don't realise how much compute/storage you can actually put on a single rack cabinet nowadays.
How is this an advantage?
Advantage in the sense that they have to store less. 4.3 petabytes times the age of Google in days is way way more than they actually have to store, as the time period when they were adding 4.3 petabytes daily is short in comparison.
So the advantage of being on an exponential growth curve is that today's problems are tiny in comparison to tomorrow's problems? That seems like a disadvantage!
That's mainly media. What's the deal with deleting emails of all things, as if they couldn't support that aspect indefinitely?
People use email as a sneaky method of storage
How prevalent is that? Some nerds doing this is a drop in the ocean. Rather my bet would be on Youtube as the hungry beast that can't get enough storage. There's a loooooooot of videos that have single digit views yet need to be accessible at any time, instantly. Video is large. Doesn't youtube even keep the original file nowadays?
In my experience, this is super common. Lots of average computer users send video clips, uncompressed 48 megapixel photos from their cell phones, PowerPoint presentations with embedded videos and 48 megapixel images, pdfs, and on and on. At the company where I work now several people have a 1MB gif of the company logo that they put in their signature.
Combine that with Gmail telling users for years that they had plenty of space, so there was no need to ever delete anything, and people believed it. Now you have a decade of emails with giant attachments or embeds that may or may not ever get looked at, and that keeps growing.
Combine that with Gmail telling users for years that they had plenty of space, so there was no need to ever delete anything, and people believed it. Now you have a decade of emails with giant attachments or embeds that may or may not ever get looked at, and that keeps growing.
Deduplication solves that problem. There is only one (or very few) instance(s) of that gif on Google servers. That's why encryption will not be available anytime soon. Storage requirement would explode.
You can do deduplication and encryption. The harder part is how to make it paranoid-level-privacy-friendly.
Sounds like we need a way to encode arbitrary data into video that can survive lossy compression. Youtube filesystem?
Sometimes it's the most practical way to share photos and documents, especially when iphones are involved.
We just use shared albums or text them to each other.
it would be nice if they allowed deletion (or even dedupe!) of attachments
Right! Maybe they are cutting email because it is not as profitable.
I agree with the other poster who brought up storage costs not keeping up with growth of stuff to store.
I wonder what this means for youtube...
I agree with the other poster who brought up storage costs not keeping up with growth of stuff to store.
I wonder what this means for youtube...
Email is the tightest grip Google has on me. Maybe YouTube.
But their Google music fail, their rising phone prices, their bait and switch photo storage, and low quality search results have caused me to change.
Any alternatives to Chrome, Firefox on both Android and Desktop are buggy, I want a different company?
But their Google music fail, their rising phone prices, their bait and switch photo storage, and low quality search results have caused me to change.
Any alternatives to Chrome, Firefox on both Android and Desktop are buggy, I want a different company?
If you're okay with Blink under the hood, take a look at Vivaldi. It's made by some of the same people who did the original Opera, and is very much in the same spirit - instead of the modern trend of bare-bones browser + third-party extensions, it comes with "batteries included".
Sadly, Vivaldi was sold a few years ago and no longer seems the ideal choice if you're focused on privacy and security.
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/iq33nv/brave...
When it was launched a year or two ago, Brave didn't integrate with the Chrome extension web store, but now it does (just like Vivaldi). Of course, also like Vivaldi, you may not need another adblocker since Brave has "shields" which are very easy to enable/disable (but it works fine if you install ublock origin, privacy badger, quick JS switcher, etc.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/iq33nv/brave...
When it was launched a year or two ago, Brave didn't integrate with the Chrome extension web store, but now it does (just like Vivaldi). Of course, also like Vivaldi, you may not need another adblocker since Brave has "shields" which are very easy to enable/disable (but it works fine if you install ublock origin, privacy badger, quick JS switcher, etc.)
You have mistaken Vivaldi for Opera.
Opera was sold to Chinese investment fund, they are scamming short term loans in Africa now.
Vivaldi was created by old Opera exec with same goals as old Opera. Their problem is not being scammy, neither is privacy. Their biggest problems are code quality - UI in javascript is sloow, closing tabs or fullscreening youtube video takes one full second. Then there is culture of secrecy - pretending open source by dumping uncompilable tar.bz2 code shreds from time to time and keeping bug tracker behind closed doors in order to not show how (not) many people work on it and what bugs they ignore for years.
Opera was sold to Chinese investment fund, they are scamming short term loans in Africa now.
Vivaldi was created by old Opera exec with same goals as old Opera. Their problem is not being scammy, neither is privacy. Their biggest problems are code quality - UI in javascript is sloow, closing tabs or fullscreening youtube video takes one full second. Then there is culture of secrecy - pretending open source by dumping uncompilable tar.bz2 code shreds from time to time and keeping bug tracker behind closed doors in order to not show how (not) many people work on it and what bugs they ignore for years.
Ok, that's fair, thanks for pointing it out, but I thought also that Vivaldi also had part Chinese ownership.
There's also this: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-open-source/
There's also this: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-open-source/
+1 for Vivaldi. I can promise you the people behind it just want to make a great browser.
I tried Vivaldi for a long time, but a couple of things drew me back to Firefox eventually. The biggest problem was that it kept signing me out of Google for some reason. I've seen threads about this elsewhere, so I'm not the only person facing it. Then, the containers feature in Firefox was very useful as I have multiple "identities" in different spaces, so I could isolate them in their own containers to prevent spillover.
I interviewed at G and eventually matched with teams writing software for core networking functions. In that process, the discussion came out that the software was responsible for roughly 11% of traffic...for the entire Internet.
I think the main issue is storage Moore's law has really hit a wall and it is no longer the case that the data Google stores grows slower than storage per dollar like in the early days. Google's freebie business model is going to have to drastically change if the two exponents have crossed paths and they'll have to do it fast because, exponents.
I wonder what kind of HDD setup they (and AWS, and Azure, etc) are using.
A reasonable price point is that of a 10 TB HDD, you would need 430 new disks of that size everyday.
Would love to learn about what kind of contracts they enter in with hardware manufacturers.
A reasonable price point is that of a 10 TB HDD, you would need 430 new disks of that size everyday.
Would love to learn about what kind of contracts they enter in with hardware manufacturers.
The storage company most willing to explain what they're doing is Backblaze. Their blog is great. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/category/cloud-storage/storag...
Is there any tutorial type doc on how businesses use the years old data? I understand the use or hot data, need for reports, queries, etc.
Looking to beef up my knowledge.
Looking to beef up my knowledge.
oh damn. I've created an account for my newborn son on my (free) google workspace domain and send him emails every few weeks with updates and photos. He'll receive the account when he's like 12. Will these be deleted too?
A policy change that sabotages an idea that Google itself gave many people just a few years ago.
Google's "Dear Sophie" ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhPklt9nYas
Google's "Dear Sophie" ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhPklt9nYas
I wonder how close that skirts laws around false advertising
Same with the Google Pixel thing, where Pixels had less storage than iPhones, but Google constantly ran ads saying that wasn't an issue because you'd have unlimited storage for all your photos and RAWs, forever, with no restrictions, as long as they were auto-uploaded by Google Photos from the Google Camera on your Google Pixel.
And now even compressed jpegs have a size and time limit.
And now even compressed jpegs have a size and time limit.
In fairness, they've persisted this policy for the given phones being advertised.
The OG Pixel said original quality for life, and that persists. Every other Pixel until Pixel 4 had a time limit on unlimited quality original uploads, and THAT persists. And even for Pixel 4 & Pixel 5, they're persisting the unlimited "high quality" storage option that they advertised the phones as having.
Don't get me wrong, I'm annoyed enough about them dropping unlimited original on the 4/5 that I download the 4k videos off of Google Photos and re-upload them over an old Pixel I have to get them to not count against my storage limit. But the ads have matched their current commitment, and they haven't reneged on any of the policies advertised for that given phone, at least.
The OG Pixel said original quality for life, and that persists. Every other Pixel until Pixel 4 had a time limit on unlimited quality original uploads, and THAT persists. And even for Pixel 4 & Pixel 5, they're persisting the unlimited "high quality" storage option that they advertised the phones as having.
Don't get me wrong, I'm annoyed enough about them dropping unlimited original on the 4/5 that I download the 4k videos off of Google Photos and re-upload them over an old Pixel I have to get them to not count against my storage limit. But the ads have matched their current commitment, and they haven't reneged on any of the policies advertised for that given phone, at least.
> The OG Pixel said original quality for life, and that persists
Mine was ended. I've got an OG Pixel.
Mine was ended. I've got an OG Pixel.
> I wonder how close that skirts laws around false advertising
At the time it wasn't fraudulent, though.
At the time it wasn't fraudulent, though.
That's a neat idea, but I'd be really, really distrustful of putting an effort of genuine feelings into a platform hosted by somebody else. That's a long time for Google not to screw it up, and it'll be sad when they do screw it up.
Yeah. I run a private wordpress instance on my NAS for this purpose.
Physical photographic album here.
Local NAS with offsite backup is far more resilient than any physical item onsite. One house fire and that album goes up in smoke.
Some years back, I tried to take photos out of a random family album to scan them. The album was built so there was a plastic sheet in front of the photos, to hold them in place / protect them. Well, that sheet ended up ripping bits out of the photos, and it's glossy enough that I can't scan the photos through it. Be careful with assumptions of how long physical products last.
Also, books used to be printed on better paper; modern cheap books will not last as long as the old ones did. I have a couple of collector's edition books printed on acid-free paper...
Also, books used to be printed on better paper; modern cheap books will not last as long as the old ones did. I have a couple of collector's edition books printed on acid-free paper...
:-) It's not like I'm using an old analog camera, or delete the files after printing.
It's just nice to a/ have an extra copy just in case and b/ it's more enjoyable/sentimental than looking at photos on a laptop, smartphone or TV.
At least my kids really enjoy it a lot. They liked to look at the albums my mom made from my pictures when they were between 2 and 5, still do today, even though they perfectly know how to navigate to all the photos on a tablet. That's when I decided to do it.
It's just nice to a/ have an extra copy just in case and b/ it's more enjoyable/sentimental than looking at photos on a laptop, smartphone or TV.
At least my kids really enjoy it a lot. They liked to look at the albums my mom made from my pictures when they were between 2 and 5, still do today, even though they perfectly know how to navigate to all the photos on a tablet. That's when I decided to do it.
I would be surprised if they did this for Workspace accounts. Deleting data from a organization would be a disaster for Google. I.e. an account may be at a center of a lawsuit or subject to data retention laws.
Indeed, this says no:
https://support.google.com/a/answer/38173?hl=en
Indeed, this says no:
https://support.google.com/a/answer/38173?hl=en
Hmmm is my G Suite account different from a Workspace account? I got this email a few weeks ago saying I hadn't logged in for awhile and they were going to delete my data: https://i.imgur.com/XAEXQWb.png
This subthread is confused. Google will delete long idle nin-domain users and idle domains, but will not delete long idle users within an active domain.
Ah! That makes sense
It's the same product; G Suite was just rebranded to Workspace
Are you a paying customer?
No, this is a free account from way back when (2010 maybe?)
Google deletes legacy Google Apps domains if none of the accounts at that domain are logged into for a year or something.
I've received multiple warnings for some of my unused domains.
I've received multiple warnings for some of my unused domains.
This I believe only applies to the root/admin account of the GSuite domain. Extra users created in the account are just extra user slots for that account.
I usually don't use the admin account as my main working account, for security.
I believe the Google Apps "target for deletion" process only gets triggered if none of the accounts in a domain are logged into for a period of time.
I believe the Google Apps "target for deletion" process only gets triggered if none of the accounts in a domain are logged into for a period of time.
I have been writing a journal addressed to my son. It is just a markdown file. But this system has a flaw that is I go back and edit old entries.
I would never trust a 3rd party for this kind of project. But I like that you cannot edit your emails. It just feels more honest.
Now I am thinking of sending him hand written letters by mail. And just save them until he is old enough. I can add photos or his other favorite things in the letters. It would be a lot more fun to open these letters in the future instead of reading a text file.
I would never trust a 3rd party for this kind of project. But I like that you cannot edit your emails. It just feels more honest.
Now I am thinking of sending him hand written letters by mail. And just save them until he is old enough. I can add photos or his other favorite things in the letters. It would be a lot more fun to open these letters in the future instead of reading a text file.
Just use git. The history is there (unless you take drastic measures.).
I just wanted to say I love that idea. It's adorable. I hope you find a way to keep the account intact for him to open.
ProtonMail just launched an import/export tool that not only allows you to store your mails locally, but provides easy migration paths from Gmail, Yahoo, etc. Might be something to look into, and will also probably be a boon to privacy overall.
I don't know but I would suggest (at least) logging into the account and doing something (uploading a file, sending an email, etc.) every year.
I would also suggest yearly doing a full backup of the account:
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
Gmail backup archives are easy enough to load and read in other email programs, if google's storage ever becomes unreliable for you.
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
Gmail backup archives are easy enough to load and read in other email programs, if google's storage ever becomes unreliable for you.
Google even lets you schedule them every two months, which works nicely for me.
I do daily backups using the API.
Oh, clever. Is there an open-source solution for this that I could look at?
This is what I use.
https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back
https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back
It seems like only if you are over storage.
Regardless, all you'd have to do is log into it once a year to avoid this. You should probably be backing it up externally at least this often if you care about the content...
Regardless, all you'd have to do is log into it once a year to avoid this. You should probably be backing it up externally at least this often if you care about the content...
I used to do exactly this. However, a couple of years ago when my second child was born I got a family domain and gave them both local email addresses. Then it was just a matter of getting a cheap email host and migrating over from gmail.
I also have a regular ema backup script that backsup the inboxes so the emails are always available offline!
I also have a regular ema backup script that backsup the inboxes so the emails are always available offline!
I recently had an idea for a similar service that uses a storage account of your choosing as a backend. The plan was to market it as a “vault” for your emails and attachments.
Basically, you get an email address, and any email you send to it is streamed to a storage account of your choosing, with optional minimal processing (e.g., convert your emails into Markdown prior to storage).
I spent a while setting up the mail processing backend using Postfix + a mail filter written in Rust.
I ultimately ended up scrapping the project because:
A) It didn’t seem like there was a large enough market of paying customers.
B) There already are a few services that do something like this, but with a focus on attachments.
Basically, you get an email address, and any email you send to it is streamed to a storage account of your choosing, with optional minimal processing (e.g., convert your emails into Markdown prior to storage).
I spent a while setting up the mail processing backend using Postfix + a mail filter written in Rust.
I ultimately ended up scrapping the project because:
A) It didn’t seem like there was a large enough market of paying customers.
B) There already are a few services that do something like this, but with a focus on attachments.
You can sort of do this now by:
- dump your gmail to gdrive with "google takeout"
- dump your gdrive with rclone (to some cloud service or whatever)
https://forum.rclone.org/t/is-it-possible-to-directly-backup...
- dump your gmail to gdrive with "google takeout"
- dump your gdrive with rclone (to some cloud service or whatever)
https://forum.rclone.org/t/is-it-possible-to-directly-backup...
Not if you are a paid user, I dont think.
So maybe you could become a paid user, then add that account to your family account?
But certainly, you should back that account up. And consider moving to another service.
So maybe you could become a paid user, then add that account to your family account?
But certainly, you should back that account up. And consider moving to another service.
I'm not seeing the Inactive Account Manager on my paid Google Workspace account, so I don't think it applies there. If it does on legacy free domains, I'm guessing that you'll get a notice in one of the admin newsletters.
No it won’t, I manage gsuite accounts for non profits and I have multiple accounts which are inactive for two years and the data still remains.
It seems you need to actually use the tool, ie, this is a service they're offering, not something they (currently) do without active involvement.
On the other hand, they literally advertised this use case on tv. Kind of rude to make it not work.
It does work.
Someone did this but skipped the setting up an account and sent the emails to me.
I was very glad that they understood the mistake right away once I pointed it out.
I was very glad that they understood the mistake right away once I pointed it out.
[deleted]
Just dont delete the emails from your sent folder... But of course still back it up
Pay for your own hard drives
Time to print those emails and start using a binder from now on ...
Emails already counted against the 15 GB quota for free accounts. So no change there.
I have read about users who are receiving someone else's mail. They have some account that has been set to forward mail. It then appears that either (a) Google assigns the address to someone else (perhaps due to inactivity) or (b) someone else keeps inadvertently typing this email address. The mail gets forwarded to some other user.
If this is true, this calls the whole notion of "Gmail security" (and more generally large third party email provider security) into question. Now think about all the changes Google makes in the name of "security". One misspelling or typo and it is all for naught. The mail is sent to another user.
Does it really make sense to use a free third party email provider like Google for important purposes. It seems like we are making identity theft even easier (not to mention online ad services). One thing we know is Google will not discourage use of Gmail for important matters linked to a real identity. They want more personal information, not less. Meanwhile Google discourages automated creation of accounts not linked to real identities, which would be safer if compromised.
If this is true, this calls the whole notion of "Gmail security" (and more generally large third party email provider security) into question. Now think about all the changes Google makes in the name of "security". One misspelling or typo and it is all for naught. The mail is sent to another user.
Does it really make sense to use a free third party email provider like Google for important purposes. It seems like we are making identity theft even easier (not to mention online ad services). One thing we know is Google will not discourage use of Gmail for important matters linked to a real identity. They want more personal information, not less. Meanwhile Google discourages automated creation of accounts not linked to real identities, which would be safer if compromised.
Yes. I can prove that this is real. I had a Gmail account that I registered when I was younger and did exactly that - setup a forward to my alt (which over the years became my primary). A few years ago I started receiving emails for another person with my same name. Legit work emails, party invites and the like. Turns out that person was using my original email.
I never contacted anyone about this for fear Google would just delete both accounts to save their own asses.
Still receive those emails to this day.
However recent times have convinced me that it's time to move away from the big ol G. This is space issue is one of them.
mailcow anyone?
I never contacted anyone about this for fear Google would just delete both accounts to save their own asses.
Still receive those emails to this day.
However recent times have convinced me that it's time to move away from the big ol G. This is space issue is one of them.
mailcow anyone?
> Yes. I can prove that this is real
There's also at least two alternative explanations.
I also get a lot of emails to an account I own from someone who keeps using my email instead of theirs. You'd think they would have noticed they aren't receiving them by now, but apparently not. Are you also totally sure that it's not just someone else entering an email address they don't own for work and party invites?
And for a second explanation, are you sure it wasn't hacked/stolen?
There's groups of people out there that bruteforce and then sell OG accounts, such as short twitter handles and common firstname.lastname email accounts.
The fact that the forwarding rules are still setup and working actually leads me to think it's more likely someone else stole the account rather than that it was deleted and recreated, assuming someone else really has access to it.
There's other possible ways your account could have been compromised too, like having a backup email address for it on some other email provider or domain that did go under or get compromised, but a weak password or a re-used password from a leak seem most likely for the compromise route.
Do you have evidence somehow that the account wasn't stole in that way?
There's also at least two alternative explanations.
I also get a lot of emails to an account I own from someone who keeps using my email instead of theirs. You'd think they would have noticed they aren't receiving them by now, but apparently not. Are you also totally sure that it's not just someone else entering an email address they don't own for work and party invites?
And for a second explanation, are you sure it wasn't hacked/stolen?
There's groups of people out there that bruteforce and then sell OG accounts, such as short twitter handles and common firstname.lastname email accounts.
The fact that the forwarding rules are still setup and working actually leads me to think it's more likely someone else stole the account rather than that it was deleted and recreated, assuming someone else really has access to it.
There's other possible ways your account could have been compromised too, like having a backup email address for it on some other email provider or domain that did go under or get compromised, but a weak password or a re-used password from a leak seem most likely for the compromise route.
Do you have evidence somehow that the account wasn't stole in that way?
The emails aren't just one way. I don't see the emails in my sent items, but when the receiving party replies (his boss) I see the original email that was sent from my old email address.
The party invite was from a real person, not those evite sites.
I can no longer login to the old account and my recovery options no longer work.
While yes, the possibility of a hacked account crossed my mind, but Gmail is pretty loud when someone logs in from a new ip.
This has been atleast 2 years now.
Maybe I should call him. He isn't doing well with his realtor sales.
The party invite was from a real person, not those evite sites.
I can no longer login to the old account and my recovery options no longer work.
While yes, the possibility of a hacked account crossed my mind, but Gmail is pretty loud when someone logs in from a new ip.
This has been atleast 2 years now.
Maybe I should call him. He isn't doing well with his realtor sales.
Another explanation is the address changes Google introduced. I’m not sure when, but my [email protected] became addressable as [email protected]. Someone else originally created [email protected] and I get their emails.
Periods have always been discarded by Gmail when routing mail, as well as signing in. If you own [email protected], you've owned [email protected] all along, as well as [email protected] for that matter.
You're getting that other person's email because someone has the wrong address for them.
You're getting that other person's email because someone has the wrong address for them.
I also receive emails and invites for someone else but I actively use my Gmail account. I think it's just people misspelling email addresses.
I've got several of these for one active email in particular. I've always thought it was bad data entry. There is a cluster in the US south - Georgia, Texas and Alabama.
At first I tried to rectify the mistakes but gave up due to lack of response.
At first I tried to rectify the mistakes but gave up due to lack of response.
Google doesn't recycle Gmail addresses. https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/90016
What does happen somewhat often though, is that people receive other people's mail because it's been misaddressed by the sender.
What does happen somewhat often though, is that people receive other people's mail because it's been misaddressed by the sender.
Google suggests available addresses when signing up to Gmail. Perhaps they could try to address the problem of mispellings and typos by at least warning the user about the Levenshtein distance from similar, already registered addresses, and the potential for misdirected email as a result.
This would allow to guess existing email addresses which is not a good idea.
Curious if one would even receive the notification emails prior to content deletion.
Once you hit the 15gb limit, you stop receiving emails within 24 hours. 2 years is plenty time versus "Hey. You are out of storage. In 24 hours, we're cutting off communication." [1]
[1] https://imgur.com/a/fBrlu4t
Once you hit the 15gb limit, you stop receiving emails within 24 hours. 2 years is plenty time versus "Hey. You are out of storage. In 24 hours, we're cutting off communication." [1]
[1] https://imgur.com/a/fBrlu4t
The one time I ran out of quota in Gmail, because Google backup for MacOS has a serious bug, I did not receive the notice because the same batch job that disables delivery for your account is the one that sends you the email. I didn’t get the message until a week later when I figured it out and deleted some photos. Pretty dumb.
Also, Gmail delivers an in-band message about your quota, but not in Inbox, Inbox for iOS, nor the Gmail app for iOS nor Gmail for mobile web. ONLY Gmail classic for desktop web. So I didn’t get those banners, either.
In other words I still find this quota system difficult to use despite the fact that I was the tech lead of Gmail delivery SRE for years.
Also, Gmail delivers an in-band message about your quota, but not in Inbox, Inbox for iOS, nor the Gmail app for iOS nor Gmail for mobile web. ONLY Gmail classic for desktop web. So I didn’t get those banners, either.
In other words I still find this quota system difficult to use despite the fact that I was the tech lead of Gmail delivery SRE for years.
It's high time for somebody to make an appliance running open protocols that behaves like cloud applications but that is owned and hosted at one's home. Maybe it's what NAS is turning into, but open, and more broadly conceived: for email, chat, etc.
Nextcloud Hub does all of this:
https://nextcloud.com/hub/
https://nextcloud.com/hub/
I imagine unreliability of home networks just makes this a bad idea for things like email even if you somehow managed to get around all the other obstacles like security/privacy/trust issues (spam, etc.)
But all of this is separable: storage at home, transport/computing provided by Google. So security and trust verification can come from Google (or any other provider) but emails stay home. Or photo processing provided by Google, but photos stay home. That would however relegate them to a pipe and service provider and possibly force them into openly competing, so they would never do that. Owning your data for the lock-in is the point.
Thats what the helm appliance tries to do: https://www.thehelm.com/
If you search HN there is a quite interesting thread on it.
If you search HN there is a quite interesting thread on it.
[deleted]
The original link should be replaced with this one. The original is clickbait
The same happened to my old "[email protected]" email, Microsoft deleted old childhood emails, still bitter about that.
Per https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail... , the limit is 365 days of inactivity.
Per https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail... , the limit is 365 days of inactivity.
Also a massive security hole. I needed to do a password reset on my old ebay account, but the hotmail account it was attached to was deleted, so I just created a new hotmail account with the same name, and reset my password. I've done this maybe three or four time, because I haven't used hotmail since high school, so they keep deleting it.
A lot of people also have password resets on gmail linked to their old hotmail accounts, so you can just re-create their old hotmail to hijack their current gmail.
A lot of people also have password resets on gmail linked to their old hotmail accounts, so you can just re-create their old hotmail to hijack their current gmail.
Definitely! A while back Yahoo! purged a ton of addresses and allowed individuals to signup with them to get unique/clean email handles.
I was able to grab [email protected]. The address looks neat.
Since I’ve had that address, I’ve received password reset emails, bank documents, airline tickets and what not.
Massive security hole is an understatement.
I was able to grab [email protected]. The address looks neat.
Since I’ve had that address, I’ve received password reset emails, bank documents, airline tickets and what not.
Massive security hole is an understatement.
The old yahoo chat days were my favourite internet days.
I used to have a great friendship with people in "Hackers Lounge: 1" and everyone used to be 1337 for cracking original names like you said.
I got my first name, and a few friends and I had illegals like \\//\\//estside and H a C K e R and .oO(d00t) which weren't compatible with the email service.
It's a pity that a generation later, the internet meant facebook and not the kind of inquisitive fun I experienced! (maybe I should have played more sport lol).
I used to have a great friendship with people in "Hackers Lounge: 1" and everyone used to be 1337 for cracking original names like you said.
I got my first name, and a few friends and I had illegals like \\//\\//estside and H a C K e R and .oO(d00t) which weren't compatible with the email service.
It's a pity that a generation later, the internet meant facebook and not the kind of inquisitive fun I experienced! (maybe I should have played more sport lol).
Omg, yikes. Email is the universal "password reset" mechanism for the whole web too. Re-using emails sounds like a bad plan just from the start, surprised services allow that.
I've gotten bitten by Google locking me out of an account because I hadn't logged into it in a long time, and the device that I used to log into it was stolen long ago. Even though I have full access to the recovery email address on that account, because it's an unknown device, Google blocks me from accessing it.
In a similar way but a different mechanism, I also had the same thing happen with some accounts which I had opened up using my mobile phone number. I have struggled with mental illness throughout my life, and one of the things that can happen through crises in particular that can have vicious consequences is having no ability to regulate your behavior, in particular your finances, so you easily and quickly wrack up debt, cash out retirement accounts and blow through all that money, and being unable to pay your phone bill (or any other bill) leads you to losing that phone number, and any account which you access through that number.
The systems that we use as a society to authenticate identity for access to digital services and systems, is incredibly punishing to people who struggle with mental health issues. It's a bit of an own goal, since some of the potential solutions to it are potentially technical in nature rather than requiring legislative or societal action.
That said, the difficulties presented by the digital world to people who struggle with mental illness pale in comparison to those they face in the physical world, and how ineffective the society, governments, and medicine are at helping those people, sometimes hurting them in that process through lack of training, ability, and the flaws in the design of the overall systems.
In a similar way but a different mechanism, I also had the same thing happen with some accounts which I had opened up using my mobile phone number. I have struggled with mental illness throughout my life, and one of the things that can happen through crises in particular that can have vicious consequences is having no ability to regulate your behavior, in particular your finances, so you easily and quickly wrack up debt, cash out retirement accounts and blow through all that money, and being unable to pay your phone bill (or any other bill) leads you to losing that phone number, and any account which you access through that number.
The systems that we use as a society to authenticate identity for access to digital services and systems, is incredibly punishing to people who struggle with mental health issues. It's a bit of an own goal, since some of the potential solutions to it are potentially technical in nature rather than requiring legislative or societal action.
That said, the difficulties presented by the digital world to people who struggle with mental illness pale in comparison to those they face in the physical world, and how ineffective the society, governments, and medicine are at helping those people, sometimes hurting them in that process through lack of training, ability, and the flaws in the design of the overall systems.
Not just for people with mental illnesses, think about our aging population and anybody in general: there are too many signals to regulate a modern functional life, saying that it is stressful by design would be an understatement.
To be fair, email account providers - and particularly free ones like hotmail/yahoo/gmail - never agreed to be your partner providing banking/military grade security to the rest of your online accounts. Same as how your telco never agreed to have SMS be a secure protocol for 2FA or password resets.[1]
Far from being surprised free email services "allow reusing emails", I'm way more surprised that orgs like banks and PayPal and crypto exchanges allow using email or sms as "secure reset or 2FA" protocols.
1: http://www.itnews.com.au/news/telcos-declare-sms-unsafe-for-...
Far from being surprised free email services "allow reusing emails", I'm way more surprised that orgs like banks and PayPal and crypto exchanges allow using email or sms as "secure reset or 2FA" protocols.
1: http://www.itnews.com.au/news/telcos-declare-sms-unsafe-for-...
You're actually talking about a different thing than parent. You can delete account data without recycling the account name. Nowadays, Microsoft still deletes inactive accounts, but they don't recycle the names.
Of course, phone numbers are recycled by telephone providers. So that'll be fun in a few years.
Of course, phone numbers are recycled by telephone providers. So that'll be fun in a few years.
I used to know somebody who would take stuff from old abandoned neopets accounts that way. They would often have their email address in their neopets profile, it would be expired, he would make it and reset the password.
That's an absolute blast from the past.
I don't think Gmail allows this. I explicitly deleted all my old gmail addresses and moved back to my own mail servers in 2013 (due to Snowden/domestic spying .. sad how so few people did anything due to that) and I remember reading that once I deleted the e-mail address, I could never create it again. I made sure I had moved over all the accounts I cared about to my new e-mail address first.
This is true of Gmail, once an address or account is deleted by its owner that email address is gone for good.
I guess my deceased dad's email was deleted(hotmail). I found an old email address of his and was trying to get into it just to reconnect since he died when I was a child. I get shouldn't see other people's stuff but still... would have been interesting as it was in the early 2000's that he was around. Would have liked to see how his mind operated. Afterall he was a successful person (eg. operating a 60ft yacht for several years) and he also referred to the handover of Hong Kong to China 1997 in recent context. I unfortunately did not inherit/learn that business savviness aspect. Seeing his emails would have been like time travel.
I had that Black Mirror thought to strip personality from data.
I had that Black Mirror thought to strip personality from data.
My reaction in a similar situation was to rather preserve his privacy. I don't know that mailboxes should be made available to relatives after one dies.
For those who actually want to do this on Google, there is a tool called the Inactive Account Manager (not available for GSuite/Google Workspace):
https://myaccount.google.com/inactive
(More info: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546)
This utility allows you to give access to a variety of data to another user when your Google account becomes inactive for a configurable long period of time. It also allows you to send certain emails or whatever.
I recommend everyone who uses a Google account checks it out at the very least. It's a hell of a tool.
https://myaccount.google.com/inactive
(More info: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546)
This utility allows you to give access to a variety of data to another user when your Google account becomes inactive for a configurable long period of time. It also allows you to send certain emails or whatever.
I recommend everyone who uses a Google account checks it out at the very least. It's a hell of a tool.
Yeah and it could go both ways. You can try to get something out of it or also what if you're tied to their problems(eg. debt) that would suck. But yeah TL;DR I don't really remember my own father so would be nice to see more of what his life was like.
My parents obsessively kept every family letter, the good, the bad, the sad, even the embarrassing. It's kind of a treasure trove for me. I get to see their take on events I remember. The letters go back well over a century.
Personally I think it would be fun if my son was interested in what’s in my emails after I’m dead. On the other hand, it’s all horribly mundane, so you’d quickly get bored.
My father also died when I was a child, so I understand where you're coming from. I am now a father, and currently dealing with a serious illness, which has made me think about these things. I can say that my child finding my emails after I'm dead is something I definitely do not want to happen. I'm not sure how to handle it yet.
> I can say that my child finding my emails after I'm dead is something I definitely do not want to happen.
That makes sense(funny?), I suppose it is different if you have a relatively active/recent relationship. Hope the illness is worked out.
Also yeah, it is your own private details I get that, I wouldn't ask my friend if I could see their email. Just in my case it was the only potential record of my dad's thoughts.
That makes sense(funny?), I suppose it is different if you have a relatively active/recent relationship. Hope the illness is worked out.
Also yeah, it is your own private details I get that, I wouldn't ask my friend if I could see their email. Just in my case it was the only potential record of my dad's thoughts.
That has to be why they call it office 365.
Do they have to change the branding on leap years?
I guess there is some measure of uptime every day?
In a weird way, it's kinda comforting that other people have felt this. I spent ten (!) years trying to recover my childhood e-mail address which got hacked when I was a kid (password was 1123456789, lol). It was only this year that I _finally_ got to a human support agent who could verify my ID and told me that the account was completely wiped.
It was a bittersweet moment, for sure.
It was a bittersweet moment, for sure.
"Amazing! I've got the same on my luggage!"
What a weird era when we record everything but also let it all get deleted/not be looked at. Maybe curation-on-creation was the right model after all.
Hmm.. that sounds like my password.
I should go change it.
I should go change it.
> I should go change it.
Too late!
(Seriously, folks, change your password first, then post!)
Too late!
(Seriously, folks, change your password first, then post!)
Ha! I came here to say the same. THE reason I have never used my hotmail for something serious is that they deleted a lot of my childhood memories in that deletion... I opened my Hotmail account around 1998, and they just deleted all of my memories.
They deleted everything after a long backpacking trip. I'm still bitter.
Nov 1, 2001 https://www.neowin.net/news/infrequent-hotmail-users-face-ou...
Nov 1, 2001 https://www.neowin.net/news/infrequent-hotmail-users-face-ou...
after 30 days!
I lost my personal domain from this. I didn't log in to my hotmail email for 30 days (2006) and they closed my account. Then they let someone else register my email, which they used to steal my domain. No recourse.
Haven't used MS services since then if I can avoid it.
Haven't used MS services since then if I can avoid it.
Likewise, so many amazing memories lost. I wish I could look back to how naive and childish I was at the beginning of my time online.
To give a little perspective, I basically don't have any pre-Yahoo/Google email history. So maybe going back 20 years or so and not much in the way of digital archives before about 10 years before that. Essentially nothing from BBS days, email on various proprietary systems, etc. Some shards here and there from the 1980s and a few things that were digitized prior.
I'm not sure if it's good or bad (probably a bit of both) that much of my early time online is largely gone--and I didn't have a significant time "online" before I was about 20 or so.
I'm not sure if it's good or bad (probably a bit of both) that much of my early time online is largely gone--and I didn't have a significant time "online" before I was about 20 or so.
I have email from when I got my college email address in the late 90s, but I still can't find email from earlier, when I had a couple different addresses that I'd gotten from my local dial-up ISP. I was always -- even then, when hard drive space was expensive -- pretty good about keeping old data as I moved from machine to machine, so it really bums me out that I can't find that old stuff.
I have a collection of Eudora backups still kicking around (an old Mac OS9 and earlier vintage mail client). I don't have a _good_ way to read them any more (but at least I can grep them when I want to hunt an old email down... I've done that maybe twice in the last decade...)
For the 2000s, I do have an Outlook .pst somewhere I could probably find for work email. But I've probably pretty much exported any docs I care about from that era and likely wouldn't go to the trouble of digging anything else out.
I think I dumped a backup of my Juno emails (90s offline dial-up email for kids with parents too cheap to shell out for internet) but it's probably on some obsolete media like a Zip drive somewhere. Probably for the best.
A short time ago I finally found my Geocities webpage (from 1999) in the archive just by chance [It is in Spanish]:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010718195237/http://www.geocit...
It was a blast from the past for me, amazing times for the internet.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010718195237/http://www.geocit...
It was a blast from the past for me, amazing times for the internet.
> I wish I could look back to how naive and childish I was at the beginning of my time online.
This is the video that comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoUrLbHg5z4
This is the video that comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoUrLbHg5z4
Yeah, at the time I archived a bunch of MSN messenger chats, and looking back at those now is fantastic. Unfortunately it’s the only thing I have left. There must be a DVD somewhere with my my documents folder from 2004, but it’s lost to time.
When Outlook.com was first made available as a mail domain back in 2012, I immediately went and registered a few accounts, figuring that it would become a high-profile service pretty quickly. One of them I have almost never used, and in its eight-year lifespan it's received...(checks)...7 emails. All of which were from Microsoft.
That account is still up, though, and I don't believe I've checked it from the website itself in years, although it is one of the accounts I've linked to my Outlook app. So the mere act of polling an account for email might be enough to be considered "active".
I haven't checked what would happen if I did the same polling but only used Thunderbird instead.
That account is still up, though, and I don't believe I've checked it from the website itself in years, although it is one of the accounts I've linked to my Outlook app. So the mere act of polling an account for email might be enough to be considered "active".
I haven't checked what would happen if I did the same polling but only used Thunderbird instead.
If IMAP only usage was considered inactive I’d have lost my gmail and hotmail accounts over a decade ago.
Startup idea: SaaS that you register you email addresses and periodically does an IMAP request to keep them active. Premium tier would provide actual archiving of your emails.
Startup idea: SaaS that you register you email addresses and periodically does an IMAP request to keep them active. Premium tier would provide actual archiving of your emails.
Yuk. What use is a SaaS for archiving when it's just going to "sun set" in 6 months after the owners sell it to Google?
If it wasn't for the "this service would need access to my email account creds and therefore to all my mail" showstopper...
A distributed service where a group of people all have their own service to "ping" their personal "important accounts", and which accept federation with friends or other users of the service, so if your server/vps/serverless/whatever platform instance goes down your pings still happen from your connected servers.
Elevator pitch: "Like IPFS, but for cron jobs calling curl."
A distributed service where a group of people all have their own service to "ping" their personal "important accounts", and which accept federation with friends or other users of the service, so if your server/vps/serverless/whatever platform instance goes down your pings still happen from your connected servers.
Elevator pitch: "Like IPFS, but for cron jobs calling curl."
I still have an old @msn.com email address, I remember at the time you could choose from @hotmail.com, @msn.com or @passport.com. Haven't used it for email for at least a decade, but I do use it for OneDrive so my account stays "active".
Ha, passport.com. Thx for the memories.
Never trust cloud providers for archival data I think is the lesson. Keep your own storage for that.
Same with Fastmail, which used to have free accounts, but (permanently) deactivated them after 120 days of inactivity:
https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service...
I just found that I can re-register my deactivated username at Fastmail if I want to. That's not cool.
https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service...
I just found that I can re-register my deactivated username at Fastmail if I want to. That's not cool.
I lost my free Hotmail account of almost a decade when the limit was 30 days.
Yeah, that 30-day window was ridiculous. I lost my hotmail in 2006 after exclusively using gmail for 6 weeks. I'd like to know the origins of the policy. Who decided that if someone goes a few weeks without checking their email that they're either dead or no longer interested in using the internet?
It was a different MS back then, cloud services were still new, and companies were still figuring it out. Maybe the reasoning was to keep people afraid from using hotmail alternatives in fear of losing their accounts.
Or less charitably, they were trying to sell the premium accounts where that doesn’t happen.
Found this source from Nov 1, 2001 https://www.neowin.net/news/infrequent-hotmail-users-face-ou...
Microsoft sold my minecraft name to some xbox live player because I didn't play the game for a year.
That's something I paid for!! It matches my HN name, my domain, the alias I use on IRC and discord etc. I'm still pissed about it.
That's something I paid for!! It matches my HN name, my domain, the alias I use on IRC and discord etc. I'm still pissed about it.
That's funny because I moved from Hotmail to Gmail because they did exactly that to my account. Luckily, I know better now and pay $$ for my own mail box and storage.
When Yahoo bought rocmketmail the same happened to me but I think it was 6 months
M$ used to delete HoTMaiL emails after 2w inactivity in the early 2000s. Back when the limit was 20MB.
The name "Hotmail" was chosen out of many possibilities ending in "-mail" as it included the letters HTML, the markup language used to create web pages (to emphasize this, the original type casing was "HoTMaiL").
Heh I remember when they changed the 6MB limit to 2MB
It can be worse. I got a letter recently from a mutual fund saying I'd done nothing with my account for years, and if they didn't hear from me soon, they were going to hand it over to the government.
(I'm a buy and hold, hold, hold, hold, investor.)
(I'm a buy and hold, hold, hold, hold, investor.)
Same. I've been handed over to the "where is this investor" support team a couple of times. Sometimes they are just trying to sell me additional services.
Now, I make a point of logging into all my financial accounts a couple of times every year. Easy to forget retirment/mutual fund/insurance accounts.
1. Verify balances and look for any sign of fraud.
2. Verify contact information (address / phone / email).
3. Titling: As you get older, make sure you understand how your account is titled. Individual / POD / Joint / Joint WROS / Trust / etc. Each of these has specific consequences to you.
4. Beneficiaries: Similarly, make sure you understand the significance of submitting beneficiaries on your accounts.
Example: I missed updating an older account to include my new wife.
This is a good place to start: https://store.nolo.com/products/estate-planning-basics-espn....
Now, I make a point of logging into all my financial accounts a couple of times every year. Easy to forget retirment/mutual fund/insurance accounts.
1. Verify balances and look for any sign of fraud.
2. Verify contact information (address / phone / email).
3. Titling: As you get older, make sure you understand how your account is titled. Individual / POD / Joint / Joint WROS / Trust / etc. Each of these has specific consequences to you.
4. Beneficiaries: Similarly, make sure you understand the significance of submitting beneficiaries on your accounts.
Example: I missed updating an older account to include my new wife.
This is a good place to start: https://store.nolo.com/products/estate-planning-basics-espn....
In Australia they changed inactive bank accounts from 7 years to 3 years and had to change it back to 7 years and 3 was way too short.
https://asic.gov.au/regulatory-resources/financial-services/...
https://asic.gov.au/regulatory-resources/financial-services/...
I have one fund I invested in 25 years ago and have had no communication with them for 20 years. They just send me 1099s and I pay the taxes.
Wow, this seems like one of those name and shame cases. A login shouldn't be expected here.
if this is in the USA, it is most likely an "unclaimed property" law of their state. it isn't so much a name and shame, the company likely followed the state's policy and sent a notice to determine if the property should move to the state. but you can always file a claim for that and have the property returned. most states have a free website to search if you have any unclaimed property that the state is holding on your behalf, and then you get to fill out paperwork. i just searched for myself and I have about $80 from State Farm from 2001 and about $30 from Google from 2014. i know the state farm was a premium refund after i moved out of state and i guess they were not able to find me (although i was still with state farm in the other state, but i'm guessing in 2001 that wasn't easy for them to cross reference and possibly state farm is legally a different company in each state). no idea what the source of the Google money was, and also baffling why they couldn't find me as i've been an active customer since way before then, but also likely a scenario where one division doesn't talk to another and they still have to comply with the law.
There are state laws that require financial institutions to do this actually. Their hands are tied here. It's called "escheatment".
https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answersescheathtm.html
https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answersescheathtm.html
I can’t think of a more apt sounding term. (After theft)
There's a great Planet Money episode I listened to recently about this.
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/24/799345159/episode-967-escheat...
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/24/799345159/episode-967-escheat...
This is actually standard practice (in the U.S.), and there are official procedures to recover unclaimed assets. See: https://www.usa.gov/unclaimed-money
Don't you need to interact with them somewhat every year to pay taxes?
I’m often the first to criticise Google but what they’re doing here isn’t exactly unprecedented. Free online mail providers have been removing inactive users since the 90s. Cloud storage providers remove inactive free users. A lot of companies even have a far more aggressive time line (pretty sure 90s Yahoo Mail was in the region of months rather than years) so 2 years seems pretty generous to me.
At the end of the day if you’re neither paying for nor even using the service, then why should they keep your account active? They have no obligation to store people’s data indefinitely at their own expense.
At the end of the day if you’re neither paying for nor even using the service, then why should they keep your account active? They have no obligation to store people’s data indefinitely at their own expense.
Part of the reason everyone switched to GMail is because, unlike the other free online mail providers, they didn't do this kind of bullshit.
Maybe? It certainly wasn't why I switched. The gmail interface was so much cooler and faster than any of the other providers, and gmail's spam detection actually worked. The amount of storage available was nice, but I certainly gave no thought to the notion that Google would preserve my stuff indefinitely if I didn't use it.
People switched because in a time when mail providers were giving you 5-10MB of space, Google offered 1GB. And the spam filtering was way better than other offerings.
Yes, and the reason why that was a breakthrough is because you no longer had to clean up your server-side inbox - you could just leave stuff there, and it'd always come up in search. It was this combo - enough storage to never delete anything, and search good enough to find things in the resulting heap - that made it so much better than all alternatives.
And I distinctly remember Google emphasizing the storage / never-delete part of it in their ads and outreach. I very much doubt it would be actionable in any legal sense, but it's certainly a change of paradigm for them to do this.
And I distinctly remember Google emphasizing the storage / never-delete part of it in their ads and outreach. I very much doubt it would be actionable in any legal sense, but it's certainly a change of paradigm for them to do this.
Really? I don’t recall that being the motive of any of my mates who signed up (I was still happy with Yahoo Mail at that time so was a late arrival but had plenty of friends who switched early on, many in the beta stage). From what I recall most switched because it was new, prettier and backed by a, then, trendy brand.
Those guys certainly didn’t think about retention periods because they were checking their mail regularly anyways.
Those guys certainly didn’t think about retention periods because they were checking their mail regularly anyways.
A premise one hears fairly often is that online advertising sucks, but it's a necessary evil to get all this cool free stuff from Google. So if the cool free stuff is less cool and less free that raises questions about whether there should still be online advertising. I don't actually subscribe to the above, it's just something you hear again and again.
People (majority) hate both - paying for a service and advertising. They are a business after all. If you compare it with Apple, Google's storage is still a lot cheaper and offer more free storage upfront. Sure, Apple probably doesn't make money by scanning the content for advertising, but you're already seeing another (sibling comment to yours) calling it 'Bullshit' because they would now start deleting content of inactive users for 2 years.
Gmail doesn’t provide a way to delete the big emails. They just let you go over limit, you don’t know what is consuming resources, and you get charged for it.
So, like AWS.
So, like AWS.
Gmail search is very powerful. Try searching:
has:attachment larger:10MB
has:attachment larger:10MB
Ok but there’s no way you actually understand how attachments are counted against your quota unless you’re a google insider or they radically improved the UI since I last did this.
This post goes into how there's now a storage management page: https://one.google.com/storage/management
Sometimes you want that email address to forward somewhere because you used it for years. Maybe Google should consider allowing a permanent email forward and then more people could delete that gmail account they don't use.
Forwarding still costs Google bandwidth and storage.
It’s also not a great long term solution for yourself as you’re introducing more moving parts into your content delivery that can fail. Really it should be seen as a short term strategy for deprecating old addresses rather than a solution that runs indefinitely. And that’s just good practice irrespective of Google’s retention policy.
It’s also not a great long term solution for yourself as you’re introducing more moving parts into your content delivery that can fail. Really it should be seen as a short term strategy for deprecating old addresses rather than a solution that runs indefinitely. And that’s just good practice irrespective of Google’s retention policy.
Company giving you tons of free shit gives marginally less long lasting free shit. And its only if you're OVER the storage limit for an entire 2 years. And you can choose to pay for more storage if you'd rather keep the data. It's really not that bad...
I think sometimes people hold Google to insanely high standards. They gave us so much free stuff that people get mad when they try to charge for it. Others say to move to paid services where you're the "customer not the product", but people would absolutely lose their shit if Google started charging for Gmail, Maps etc.
I can't help but empathize with all the founders who warn about how difficult it is to raise prices.
I think sometimes people hold Google to insanely high standards. They gave us so much free stuff that people get mad when they try to charge for it. Others say to move to paid services where you're the "customer not the product", but people would absolutely lose their shit if Google started charging for Gmail, Maps etc.
I can't help but empathize with all the founders who warn about how difficult it is to raise prices.
Google has a slightly different problem. It has trained users into believing that shit should be free (and maybe supported by advertising) and over the years it has accumulated a significant chunk of users who either wholly believe in that mindset or are simply unable to pay for xyz reasons. Of course, people are going to raise hell when they start charging for something that was free for a decade. Google sowed the seeds on this one.
This was before the rise of the GDPR - I think it's fair to say now they are getting their teeth into tech companies Google is realizing they can't rely on the same avenues to make money - they can't use data in the same way in 2020 as they could in 2010.
Cue a shift in business models as Apple et al (and probably Google itself with Android) limits what data can be accessed at any time.
Cue a shift in business models as Apple et al (and probably Google itself with Android) limits what data can be accessed at any time.
so kind of a problem here though. I pay for what was google g suite for the "unlimited" storage. I'm at around 13TB stored, it's mostly just backups so not really a huge deal if I lose it. The problem is there's no real way to pay them for this. The new workplace plans are vague about additional storage.
I don't get why companies selling storage cant offer higher and higher plans in say 2tb chunks.
I don't get why companies selling storage cant offer higher and higher plans in say 2tb chunks.
Set a reminder every 3 or 6 months to use Google Takeout. Download a full copy of your data to a hard drive in your local possession.
If you’re really paranoid, download a 2nd copy and put it on a hard drive that you then leave unplugged from all computers and the internet until the next time.
Simple solution for anyone with broadband, and then if you ever lost your cloud data due to subscription lapsing or inactivity you have 1-2 local copies for you or your family.
If you’re really paranoid, download a 2nd copy and put it on a hard drive that you then leave unplugged from all computers and the internet until the next time.
Simple solution for anyone with broadband, and then if you ever lost your cloud data due to subscription lapsing or inactivity you have 1-2 local copies for you or your family.
sadly my google takeout never completes. i try about once a year to see if whatever the issue is has resolved itself for maybe the last 6-8 years. i can get some services to takeout if i go one by one, but not the data i really care about.
Google Takeout doesn't seem to work for me. Any time I setup an export, they appear to be scheduled, but never run. If I go to takeout.google.com now, I see:
"Export 1 of 1 will start on 18 November 2020"
Any idea what I'm supposed to do about that?
"Export 1 of 1 will start on 18 November 2020"
Any idea what I'm supposed to do about that?
Wait, what's the danger of keeping your backup on an internet connected machine?
Things that communicate with the web are susceptible to malware and exploit. Offline storage of course can also suffer bit rot/theft/damage, but it erases the possibility of malicious access over the web and makes it that much more secure.
Use the 3-2-1 backup method (3 instances of data, 2 of them not the original (backups), 1 of them offsite). I use cloud backup(s) for my offsite(s) and the remaining backup lends itself to being an external harddrive (or a very well firewalled NAS if it must be on the network).
Use the 3-2-1 backup method (3 instances of data, 2 of them not the original (backups), 1 of them offsite). I use cloud backup(s) for my offsite(s) and the remaining backup lends itself to being an external harddrive (or a very well firewalled NAS if it must be on the network).
Ransomware, for one. Bugs. Accidents.
In general, it's good security practice to keep a set of backups offsite, and disconnected.
In general, it's good security practice to keep a set of backups offsite, and disconnected.
Ransomware
This is what I do. (With the extra step of also encrypting the data.)
Is there an automated version of this?
Perhaps, if it can recognize traffic lights and crosswalks.
Yes, you can set a scheduled download (I think for up to six months) within takeout and specify the downloads to go to Dropbox or a couple other storage providers.
As someone who does this every month, the downside is that there are often glitches in the export (which they usually catch) and you'll need to set up a new export to get them to try again. In the worst case, I've needed to re-export three times to get them to green flag it as a clean collection without any errors (which sucks when it's a couple days for them to prep it and then another while to actually download and store 300GB of data).
As someone who does this every month, the downside is that there are often glitches in the export (which they usually catch) and you'll need to set up a new export to get them to try again. In the worst case, I've needed to re-export three times to get them to green flag it as a clean collection without any errors (which sucks when it's a couple days for them to prep it and then another while to actually download and store 300GB of data).
Headline seems inaccurate/ misleading to me. Quote from Google in the article:
> If you're over your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos
Honestly that seems far more generous than I’d expect — why should Google (or any other company) be expected to store your data indefinitely if you stop paying them?
> If you're over your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos
Honestly that seems far more generous than I’d expect — why should Google (or any other company) be expected to store your data indefinitely if you stop paying them?
Because the reason I signed up for GMail in 2004 was that they promised that they keep my emails forever
They promised 1GB, had a counter that slowly increased and thens settled at 15GB, as I remember.
They started with 1GB, and promised it would grow with you and that you would never run out of space.
At that point, it was just email, though, and not other files.
Despite that, I still managed to run out of space a while back and had to start deleting emails that I didn't care about. I was quite disappointed in them.
At that point, it was just email, though, and not other files.
Despite that, I still managed to run out of space a while back and had to start deleting emails that I didn't care about. I was quite disappointed in them.
> you would never run out of space
You do see how that can't possibly applying to literally everyone, right? You can't use the argument that "they said it would grow with me" to store 1TB of emails and be surprised when they start charging you.
15GB is a lot. Even if you receive 5 emails with 1mb attachments every single day, that's still almost 10 years. With normal text emailed, you will never run out until you die. Most cloud providers give 5GB. It's fair to say that it has grown with you to a reasonable storage size. If you need more than 15GB, it's fair to say you're beyond that.
You do see how that can't possibly applying to literally everyone, right? You can't use the argument that "they said it would grow with me" to store 1TB of emails and be surprised when they start charging you.
15GB is a lot. Even if you receive 5 emails with 1mb attachments every single day, that's still almost 10 years. With normal text emailed, you will never run out until you die. Most cloud providers give 5GB. It's fair to say that it has grown with you to a reasonable storage size. If you need more than 15GB, it's fair to say you're beyond that.
> With normal text emailed, you will never run out until you die.
I have an account that received only LKML. So just text, not a single attachment. And all written by humans (although many of them and some copying.) The account run out of space after ~ 7 years of LKML.
(Need to check whether the limit is really 15 GB. I think it stopped growing at 4 or 6 GB.)
I have an account that received only LKML. So just text, not a single attachment. And all written by humans (although many of them and some copying.) The account run out of space after ~ 7 years of LKML.
(Need to check whether the limit is really 15 GB. I think it stopped growing at 4 or 6 GB.)
Well, it's 15GB shared with Photos and Drive, so if you do use those other products, then yes you do have less space total.
I checked. It's really 15 GB of textual emails, from 2012 until December 2018 when it hit the limit.
Admittedly I don't know many cases with such a traffic.
Admittedly I don't know many cases with such a traffic.
So I cleaned up that 15 GB mailbox a bit. I had previously deleted all messages over 500KB in size. Still several millions of messages left (all from 2014 to 2018.) Don't even know how to count them, because Gmail counts only conversations. Maybe it can be done via IMAP or the API, but I'd expect hitting limits on the way, so I did not spend any time trying.
The irony is that Gmail cannot delete more than a couple of thousand messages from Trash/The Bin in one go. It says "All messages deleted", but when you refresh you see that it's not true. You need iterations. I guess they are using something what AWS calls a lambda to empty the bin (don't recall the Google term) and that job hits a limit.
Yeah, I don't use that mailbox for anything serious at the moment. Just an experiment...
The irony is that Gmail cannot delete more than a couple of thousand messages from Trash/The Bin in one go. It says "All messages deleted", but when you refresh you see that it's not true. You need iterations. I guess they are using something what AWS calls a lambda to empty the bin (don't recall the Google term) and that job hits a limit.
Yeah, I don't use that mailbox for anything serious at the moment. Just an experiment...
I don't recall ever seeing a promise like that made. But supposing it was, there's a time in everyone's life where they have to learn that nothing is forever. This is especially true of promises made for no compensation.
Sure, but I’m right now paying for 1TB space, and I can easily forget for example if a credit card expires. Google makes enough money from my subscriptions to at least write my data to a tape when I stop paying, so that I can access it again even 10 years later when I start paying again.
Isn't the opposite also true, that some people would expect them to delete that data?
Seems a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.
Plus, unless that was part of the contract, why do you expect it? They're a company, you get what you pay for.
Seems a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.
Plus, unless that was part of the contract, why do you expect it? They're a company, you get what you pay for.
Forget and never logged into an account for 2 years? If you don't need to log into an email account for 2 years you don't need the data.
Not true. You might need all kind of information years later. Bills, account statements and then of course photos. Recently had to arrange a funeral and noted we didn't have a photo of the deceased. Of course many had been taken years ago, but we couldn't find any.
There's no way they can justify devoting resources (i.e., staff, machines, tapes, storage space) and maintaining processes to do this when they're delivering services for billions of users, especially given that, as someone else has said, for privacy reasons people would assume/expect that expired data is automatically deleted.
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1150/
That time, Google's motto was "do no evil" .
Because we got used to that. They trained us to be this way. It’s their fault. Why did they have to give us free stuff and then take it away? It’s not fair. It’s been free as air. Not free as water.
/rant.
/rant.
They stop your gmail from receiving inbound emails if you don't pay to upgrade for storage [15gb]. Within 24 hours!
I just reached that, and the first alert I see on my email [1] feels quite threatening. It's like I came home, and there's an unexpected eviction on the door.
IMO, this is way worse that account inactivity. Who remembers that ever-increasing ticker on the gmail homepage that advertised "Your storage with us is always growing", and it was like 10gb + the counter was increasing live.
Ridiculous.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/fBrlu4t
I just reached that, and the first alert I see on my email [1] feels quite threatening. It's like I came home, and there's an unexpected eviction on the door.
IMO, this is way worse that account inactivity. Who remembers that ever-increasing ticker on the gmail homepage that advertised "Your storage with us is always growing", and it was like 10gb + the counter was increasing live.
Ridiculous.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/fBrlu4t
How is it unexpected, you pushed your inbox to limits, its not like it happens overnight, if you think google is lying use an IMAP client and check it yourself, also google storage is spread across all the services, check if you are backing up your phone or photos(unknowingly).
This is reasonable.
Delete some filter emails won't take you 10 minutes
Delete some filter emails won't take you 10 minutes
It's not that easy. I have 15 years of emails, including deeply personal stuff. I've deleted all the unread mailing lists. I've deleted the big files. I've gone through numerous social and advertising emails and mass-deleted. Yet I'm stuck on like 14.98 Gb and every time I hit the threshold, Gmail starts bugging me to do more. How can I even tell if I have that much email? They could just be saying "oh, you have 14.98Gb".
Did you empty the trash? Trash counts. Same for Drive.
If you have deeply personal stuff in your email box, you shouldn't be storing it unencrypted in gmail forever where they can give it to the state on demand without a warrant at any time.
You have deeply personal emails that are the size of 1/3 of whole Project Gutenberg library?
> How can I even tell if I have that much email?
You could fetch everything using IMAP and check size locally.
You could fetch everything using IMAP and check size locally.
Agreed. Just more peeved that it upon registration, this would be the last exit I would have imagined from the product.
The marketing to acquire users versus to keep them is annoyingly polarizing.
>> Hey! Free growing memory. Choose gmail! Look! A counter that is incrementing in the browser real-time!
>> Much later... Nope. You reached the limit + we stopped your emails from coming in. Goodbye.
I'm definitely on the way out, just have been lazy about it.
The marketing to acquire users versus to keep them is annoyingly polarizing.
>> Hey! Free growing memory. Choose gmail! Look! A counter that is incrementing in the browser real-time!
>> Much later... Nope. You reached the limit + we stopped your emails from coming in. Goodbye.
I'm definitely on the way out, just have been lazy about it.
Thank you for alerting me to this! I'm not sure why, but the impression I've had since those early days of gmail was that users would be unlikely to ever need to delete an email again
From the email I got from Google a few minutes ago:
> Summary of the new policies (effective June 1, 2021):
> • If you're inactive for 2 years (24 months) in Gmail, Drive or Photos, we may delete the content in the product(s) in which you're inactive. Google One members who are within their storage quota and in good-standing will not be impacted by this new inactive policy.
> • If you exceed your storage limit for 2 years, we may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos.
Is Google running out of storage?
> Summary of the new policies (effective June 1, 2021):
> • If you're inactive for 2 years (24 months) in Gmail, Drive or Photos, we may delete the content in the product(s) in which you're inactive. Google One members who are within their storage quota and in good-standing will not be impacted by this new inactive policy.
> • If you exceed your storage limit for 2 years, we may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos.
Is Google running out of storage?
If the users are inactive they aren't seeing ads. Google isn't a charity, why would they pay for storage that isn't being used?
Also, somewhat morbidly, dead people don't really need their photos and emails hosted perpetually.
Also, somewhat morbidly, dead people don't really need their photos and emails hosted perpetually.
They don't, but as a society we would all benefit from some way to archive at least some of that. Future historians will curse us for not leaving behind letters, photos, etc. (which is especially ironic given how much more of them we're each generating).
If you're worried about your data evaporating, consider using Google Inactive Account Manager to set up a way to automatically gift your data to a family member. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en
There's already enough publicly-shared content online to keep historians facepalming about this era for centuries to come, without digging into everyone's non-public files.
Heh, now try to win the privacy debate that’s on the other side of your argument.
One argument I've heard is that you can encrypt your data now to gain privacy while you're alive. Then by the time the data would be useful for historians they'll probably have enough compute to break 21st century encryption.
People can choose whether they want their data retained after death. A default opt out sounds good.
They're not even checking if the entire user account is inactive.
And it can be very important to people for the public galleries of dead people to stay up.
And it can be very important to people for the public galleries of dead people to stay up.
I was also thinking about how this is part of their new policy to not provide unlimited image uploads to Photos, even for active users.
In the blog post they mention that they store over 4PB of data every single day, I can't blame them try trying to rationalize this a bit.
I'm really curious to know how much data they'll be able to expunge on January 1 2023, when the 24month deadline expires. It might end up being the biggest "rm" in computer history.
I'm really curious to know how much data they'll be able to expunge on January 1 2023, when the 24month deadline expires. It might end up being the biggest "rm" in computer history.
[deleted]
That 4PB is likely heavily compressed into TBs
> If you're inactive for 2 years (24 months) in Gmail, Drive or Photos,
Maybe it's the engineer in me, but doesn't that imply that even if you're active in Gmail and Drive, they'll delete your data because you are not active in Photos? i.e. shouldn't that be an 'and' instead of an 'or'?
Maybe it's the engineer in me, but doesn't that imply that even if you're active in Gmail and Drive, they'll delete your data because you are not active in Photos? i.e. shouldn't that be an 'and' instead of an 'or'?
I couldn't find the direct quote, so they may have adjusted the sentence you're referring to. It's clearer now:
> If you're inactive in one or more of these services for two years (24 months), Google may delete the content in the product(s) in which you're inactive.
> If you're inactive in one or more of these services for two years (24 months), Google may delete the content in the product(s) in which you're inactive.
Historical data probably isn't as rich in detail as the new stuff they are collecting. I bet the old data is too coarse grained to be effectively joined across a variety of newer data tracking sources.
Nah, the data has already been harvested and used so it isn't worth storing it anymore (except to you of course).
> Is Google running out of storage?
I guess is all about money. COVID disrupted ad chains as companies over the world revised their spending budgets. Some brick&mortar closed down for weeks thus they likely canceled ads completely. Ad income is fremium fuel. Cost cuts!
I guess is all about money. COVID disrupted ad chains as companies over the world revised their spending budgets. Some brick&mortar closed down for weeks thus they likely canceled ads completely. Ad income is fremium fuel. Cost cuts!
I’ve gotten a flurry of “your unused firebase database will be deleted” for tiny hackathon projects from years ago. Guess they’re running some global cleaning.
Maybe machine learning stuff needs a lot of space?
Maybe machine learning stuff needs a lot of space?
I am guessing as there have been alot of policy changes related to storage. Maybe not fully but unsustainable amount
No, they're trying to monetize you.
Yahoo Mail does the same with only a 1 year threshold and regardless of how much data you use. Don't log in for 12 months = lose everything. Sadly found this out the hard way - most of my childhood email accounts were wiped :'(
Now they're also disabling email forwarding for free users which I've been relying on for a decade to catch occasionally relevant emails. Might really be forced to shell out the $3.49 a month for their paid option...
I guess this is kind of inevitable with the scale of storage these kinds of companies work with. Probably someday Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. will have similar plans as the older data they store starts losing its value.
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/11/05/yahoo-mail-drops-email-for...
Now they're also disabling email forwarding for free users which I've been relying on for a decade to catch occasionally relevant emails. Might really be forced to shell out the $3.49 a month for their paid option...
I guess this is kind of inevitable with the scale of storage these kinds of companies work with. Probably someday Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. will have similar plans as the older data they store starts losing its value.
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/11/05/yahoo-mail-drops-email-for...
If you are using gmail, you probably could use "Check email from other accounts:" under "Settings / Accounts and Import". It fetches new mails periodically using POP3 or IMAP.
If you host your own mail server, you could use https://www.fetchmail.info/fetchmail-man.html instead.
If you host your own mail server, you could use https://www.fetchmail.info/fetchmail-man.html instead.
Thanks for the tip! Will definitely look into how that works.
I just yesterday set up fetchmail[1] to fetch e-mail from yahoo over POP and deposit them in a self-hosted mailbox (for my partner's longstanding Yahoo e-mail address). It may be worth a look; it can fetch from IMAP or POP and spit them out to LMTP or SMTP. (N.B. it didn't work with IMAP on Yahoo for me, but using POP was no problem).
edit: Perhaps my /etc/fetchmailrc file can be a useful starting point for someone[2].
[1]: https://www.fetchmail.info/
[2]: https://hastebin.com/raw/ororunutev
edit: Perhaps my /etc/fetchmailrc file can be a useful starting point for someone[2].
[1]: https://www.fetchmail.info/
[2]: https://hastebin.com/raw/ororunutev
I've had Yahoo Mail since 1995. A year or two ago I noticed all my emails before 2001 were no longer there. Such a great service! /s
I still use that e-mail for online shops, etc. (a bad idea, because I also use it for Facebook, so all the online services that uploaded their customer data onto Facebook has my details courtesy of Zuck). Nowadays Yahoo's web interface keep moaning that I should turn off my ad blocker, and as my little "Fuck you, Yahoo" I keep clicking "No"..
I still use that e-mail for online shops, etc. (a bad idea, because I also use it for Facebook, so all the online services that uploaded their customer data onto Facebook has my details courtesy of Zuck). Nowadays Yahoo's web interface keep moaning that I should turn off my ad blocker, and as my little "Fuck you, Yahoo" I keep clicking "No"..
Dupe from a month ago, with multiple 300+ comment threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25060973
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081350
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25060882
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25060973
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081350
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25060882
Those stories only mention Google Photos though. For those who only use some of Google’s services, it’s much more alarming to hear that the new storage policy also applies to Gmail and Drive.
HN crowd feels like they are on a jihad against Google. Pretty much every other email provider does it. This is a free service that they are not paying. But yet they like to keep bashing on Google.
What about Gmail accounts that forward email to another account? It's an account that is actively used but I never log into such account.
I have this and have been unable to login since 2015 with no ability to recover my account (I know the password, but it's flagged as "unrecognized device"). I also can't turn it off or delete the account.
Good question. I'd be fine if that account stopped storing mail as long as the forwarding kept working.
I do the same thing but I think it's all the same for Google, if you don't actively log into Gmail they can't know for sure that it's still being used. We'll just have to remember to log into the service once every other year.
I hope they'll bother to send a warning email at least.
I hope they'll bother to send a warning email at least.
Wow, so everyone who's in jail or going to jail will lose their accounts
What's another good email provider?
I am starting to feel really nervous about storing my life in Google. It's not that I wouldn't pay for these things...it's just that I worry one day I'll lose access and fall into the pit of "trying to get Google to help a single human regain access" that sounds horrible.
I am starting to feel really nervous about storing my life in Google. It's not that I wouldn't pay for these things...it's just that I worry one day I'll lose access and fall into the pit of "trying to get Google to help a single human regain access" that sounds horrible.
Backups and self-hosting! These threads keep coming up where [Cloud service] deletes someone's data, bans their account, or otherwise denies service suddenly, and someone always asks "What [other cloud service] should I utterly rely on?" Maybe the answer is to not rely on cloud services to store the only copy of something precious or important to you.
Any specific packages you recommend for setting up email?
I would think there is some docker container I can run in a VM and go about my business.
I would think there is some docker container I can run in a VM and go about my business.
I have my own domain, and run exim+dovecot on a low spec Linux machine. This setup has run solidly for years. I serve E-mail for family and friends. When I first set it up, I had some deliverability problems, but once I had DKIM and SPF set up, it's been rock solid. No experience with containers or docker or any of that stuff, sorry.
I've used this for about a year, and it has been stable. Hosted on my home computer.
https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver
My emails get rejected from @comcast.net but nobody else as far as I can tell. I haven't figured out a good way to debug the issue. As a result, I am not completely off of free Gmail. If you need your emails to be 100% received on the other end, I would recommend paying a hosting provider.
https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver
My emails get rejected from @comcast.net but nobody else as far as I can tell. I haven't figured out a good way to debug the issue. As a result, I am not completely off of free Gmail. If you need your emails to be 100% received on the other end, I would recommend paying a hosting provider.
I’ve been very happy at Fastmail for the past few years. Their customer support has been quick and very helpful for me. It’s paid so I know that I am a customer and not a product.
When I signed up I just forwarded my old gmail account to it. Now it sounds like I should finally update my email address for all the services still using it!
When I signed up I just forwarded my old gmail account to it. Now it sounds like I should finally update my email address for all the services still using it!
FastMail is probably the best among the bunch but it's still worse than GMail:
- There is no "always display images from this contact" option if you don't want to load images automatically. You have to click on "show images" every time you read an emai, even from a trusted contact.
- There is no "open mailto: links on FastMail" option on desktop.
- Spam filter is too aggressive. I've missed too many legit mails while trying it.
- Contact list manager is too barebones. There isn't even a "find and merge duplicates" option.
- There is no "always display images from this contact" option if you don't want to load images automatically. You have to click on "show images" every time you read an emai, even from a trusted contact.
- There is no "open mailto: links on FastMail" option on desktop.
- Spam filter is too aggressive. I've missed too many legit mails while trying it.
- Contact list manager is too barebones. There isn't even a "find and merge duplicates" option.
They will also delete your data if you stop paying. So, if this got you to quit gmail, fastmail is not your destination.
https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/accountexpired.html
https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/accountexpired.html
You can configure fastmail to show remote images from all your contacts, but it’s all or nothing: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/remotecontent.html
Is this what you are asking about for mailto links? https://www.fastmail.com/help/send/openemaillinks.html
The spam filter can be customized, but I agree that it isn’t nearly as good as gmail’s. I have it configured to move messages with a score higher than 3.5 to spam which prevents all false positives for me, but 1 or 2 spam emails a week still get to my inbox. https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/spamchecks.html#cust...
I agree that the comment manager is barebones. Fastmail does support CardDAV so you could use a different contact manager but I haven’t had the need.
Edit: I swear I am not a Fastmail shill. Just a happy customer!
Is this what you are asking about for mailto links? https://www.fastmail.com/help/send/openemaillinks.html
The spam filter can be customized, but I agree that it isn’t nearly as good as gmail’s. I have it configured to move messages with a score higher than 3.5 to spam which prevents all false positives for me, but 1 or 2 spam emails a week still get to my inbox. https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/spamchecks.html#cust...
I agree that the comment manager is barebones. Fastmail does support CardDAV so you could use a different contact manager but I haven’t had the need.
Edit: I swear I am not a Fastmail shill. Just a happy customer!
> There is no "always display images from this contact" option if you don't want to load images automatically. You have to click on "show images" every time you read an emai, even from a trusted contact.
Oh man, this is one feature that I've really missed from Gmail, which actually gives you the best of both worlds by proxying external images from their own servers so images can load automatically without compromising privacy.
Can't blame a small-time email provider like Fastmail from not offering something like this given the resources it'd likely require, but I'm using Microsoft's "enterprise" solution (Exchange Online) and they really have no excuses other than poor prioritization.
Anyone aware of other providers offering this feature?
Oh man, this is one feature that I've really missed from Gmail, which actually gives you the best of both worlds by proxying external images from their own servers so images can load automatically without compromising privacy.
Can't blame a small-time email provider like Fastmail from not offering something like this given the resources it'd likely require, but I'm using Microsoft's "enterprise" solution (Exchange Online) and they really have no excuses other than poor prioritization.
Anyone aware of other providers offering this feature?
Fastmail has also proxied all images since 2014: https://fastmail.blog/2014/09/16/better-security-and-privacy...
You can configure images to load always, or just for contacts, or always manually.
You can configure images to load always, or just for contacts, or always manually.
Most of this stuff is irrelevant once you start using a proper email client.
(except for the aggressive spam filter)
(except for the aggressive spam filter)
FastMail / ProtonMail are good. But even they won't just store your mail forever for free.
I chose FastMail + domain (standard plan, one user) after spending way too long weighing all the provider options this year; so far it's been great for me (email only, files/data went elsewhere).
The hardest part is dealing with all the websites who (a) don't let you change your email, (b) require you to contact Support to change your email, or (c) break when you try to change your email. FastMail migrated everything (contacts too) from GMail with one click and set up an IMAP poller against it while you work on the long road to convert. $0.02
Edit: just to cover my bases, a 10-year registration of the domain was < $100 USD at Namesilo.
The hardest part is dealing with all the websites who (a) don't let you change your email, (b) require you to contact Support to change your email, or (c) break when you try to change your email. FastMail migrated everything (contacts too) from GMail with one click and set up an IMAP poller against it while you work on the long road to convert. $0.02
Edit: just to cover my bases, a 10-year registration of the domain was < $100 USD at Namesilo.
I had two grandfathered free Fastmail accounts. They got deleted for inactivity [1] when I was at a bad point in life.
Never using Fastmail after that. :)
[1] https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service...
Never using Fastmail after that. :)
[1] https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service...
I'd pay. But mostly, I'd pay to know the customer service would respond to me. Customer service at Google is like trying to cancel Verizon service - endless transfers.
“If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” :)
FWIW I’ve contacted Fastmail’s support once and they were excellent: they helped through a funny DNS issue that was my own doing within an hour of contacting them, and didn’t bat an eye at the question. It was one of the few times I’ve contacted support and thought “this person knows what I’m trying to do, why I messed it up, and how to fix it” at a deep level.
They’ve either made great runbooks or hire great people, but the result is the same.
FWIW I’ve contacted Fastmail’s support once and they were excellent: they helped through a funny DNS issue that was my own doing within an hour of contacting them, and didn’t bat an eye at the question. It was one of the few times I’ve contacted support and thought “this person knows what I’m trying to do, why I messed it up, and how to fix it” at a deep level.
They’ve either made great runbooks or hire great people, but the result is the same.
If you pay for Google One they have live chat and email support. Usually I think they also have phone support but not currently due to COVID.
https://i.imgur.com/cXeu1HB.png
https://i.imgur.com/cXeu1HB.png
ProtonMail is great - the company also seem like they’re trustworthy and worth supporting. I was particularly impressed by ‘Help us defend democracy and freedom in Hong Kong’(https://protonvpn.com/blog/hongkong/), a political stance that most other companies were afraid to take.
More important than the current email provider you happen to use is controlling your email _address_, and this means using a domain you control.
It enables for a surprisingly pain-free email migration experience as I found out not too long ago, where all you have to do is point the DNS records to the new provider and do an IMAP import from your old email provider, and everything will just work as you'd expect.
If I wasn't already sold on the power of federation, that would definitely have sold me.
As for the actual email provider, I'm currently using Microsoft's standalone Exchange Online plan, which costs $4 per month: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...
No major complaints so far.
It enables for a surprisingly pain-free email migration experience as I found out not too long ago, where all you have to do is point the DNS records to the new provider and do an IMAP import from your old email provider, and everything will just work as you'd expect.
If I wasn't already sold on the power of federation, that would definitely have sold me.
As for the actual email provider, I'm currently using Microsoft's standalone Exchange Online plan, which costs $4 per month: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...
No major complaints so far.
Yes, you can get a domain, but it would depend on yet another email address, right? And if you ever forget to renew it, you will lose it.
It is a best practice to separate your registrar email from a domain you have, yes.
Fastmail makes this easy for me: I have an @fastmail.fm email from them that I have only ever provided to my domain registrar and I’ve set my MUA to scream and shout loudly if it ever gets mail.
That + using Fastmail for all my domains makes this seamless for me.
> And if you ever forget to renew it, you will lose it.
I’ve had one gmail account nuked by Our Benevolent Overlord’s AI for no rhyme or reason. At least it was unimportant, but it still happened - and I have zero recourse to get it back.
Losing control of my domain or a paid email service? That’s entirely on me ;)
Fastmail makes this easy for me: I have an @fastmail.fm email from them that I have only ever provided to my domain registrar and I’ve set my MUA to scream and shout loudly if it ever gets mail.
That + using Fastmail for all my domains makes this seamless for me.
> And if you ever forget to renew it, you will lose it.
I’ve had one gmail account nuked by Our Benevolent Overlord’s AI for no rhyme or reason. At least it was unimportant, but it still happened - and I have zero recourse to get it back.
Losing control of my domain or a paid email service? That’s entirely on me ;)
I did a writeup recently on just this, and how to deal with it:
https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/
https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/
Like everyone else is saying: fastmail.com. If you pay for 3 years up front it is like $3 a month.
LuxSci is pretty good. They're oriented towards HIPAA-compliant solutions, but they're fine for anyone who doesn't want Google rifling through all their emails (of course, if the other party uses Gmail, you're out of luck either way).
"What's another good email provider?" - an alternative is to run your own mail server. I used to do that and the harddrive with all the mail (and a backup copy) is not going away because some company changes policy..
No, it's going away because of bad sectors or Flash memory. Or you lose it, or accidentally format it. Or forget to backup. Keeping your data safe is a hard task.
I wish I could find this company again I saw online. It was a family owned "google photos" that was pay for, specifically and only sold photo storage for securing your family pictures. Dammit! Someone help!
I recently switched to FastMail and couldn’t be happier.
fastmail.com
Hey.com , protonmail, bith are great
Google encouraged opening a Gmail account for your kid and emailing it memories as they grow up.
So now once they turn 13 and you hand over the password, it'll be deleted?
So now once they turn 13 and you hand over the password, it'll be deleted?
You could log in to the email account you haven't given your kid yet?
This is really not a big deal, just login to the account and you’ll be fine.
That's what I thought for many services before. Some day you just don't keep up with your reminders because you will it tomorrow. And then next week. And suddenly it is too late.
This presents a really unfortunate new ending to the famous "Dear Sophie Lee" commercial.
Google is tidying up all of its services to be healthier profit wise?
Deleting old data, increasing ads on YouTube, ...
Deleting old data, increasing ads on YouTube, ...
They advertise this inactivity manager. The problem is you can only use it if you provide a phone number.
So I guess that's a way to enforce that users have only one account (or a small number).
I have a dozen accounts. I don't really use most of them a whole lot. And all but 2 of them have very small amount of data stored. I created them mostly to isolate them in their tracking, not to get a huge amount of free storage.
No idea what the conditions say about multiple accounts. I don't waste my time reading them. I understand that their lawyers have spent a lot of time to reserve all rights to them and leave nothing to me. That's the price of free services.
So I guess that's a way to enforce that users have only one account (or a small number).
I have a dozen accounts. I don't really use most of them a whole lot. And all but 2 of them have very small amount of data stored. I created them mostly to isolate them in their tracking, not to get a huge amount of free storage.
No idea what the conditions say about multiple accounts. I don't waste my time reading them. I understand that their lawyers have spent a lot of time to reserve all rights to them and leave nothing to me. That's the price of free services.
IMO, all software should be like this. If you’re inactive for X time, they send an email letting you know your account, and all associated data, will be deleted if you don’t log back in. Probably sending a few such emails to be safe, but ensuring there’s some sort of automated inactive account cleanup.
So many people have defunct accounts, filled with personal data just waiting to be hacked. I’d be totally up for legislation to enforce “must automatically delete inactive accounts”, it’d reduce the efficacy of hacking shitty old services with bad security, who are probably storing your password in plain text or md5ed.
So many people have defunct accounts, filled with personal data just waiting to be hacked. I’d be totally up for legislation to enforce “must automatically delete inactive accounts”, it’d reduce the efficacy of hacking shitty old services with bad security, who are probably storing your password in plain text or md5ed.
What if I use only imap clients? Is that considered "not logging in"? Haven't seen them address this
They deleted my youtube vids. Now there is guy in California that claims he invented what was shown as an invention in one of my videos. Got $10 million in startup capital for it. Video was 2009.
I wonder if it is legal for someone to inherit a Google account, since it is personal. The same for Amazon account or any other. Can someone inherit a Google account for the Email and Photos history, as well for books on Google Play and any other purchase? Can someone inherit a Kindle Account? Of course they can have access with user and password, but if these companies are still on the market 50 years from now I wonder if they will start deleting accounts from people supposedly with 110 years and over.
Tangentially (is that a word?), I remember when I was sold on buying a macbook, the plastic white one, back when I was young (2009?) and innocent. I had also purchased a one year 'me' email account. Then a burglar broke into my home and stole among other things the laptop, it was around one year after the initial purchase date. And when I reacted the subscription was expired. I never could recover my hardware or my data. Good old times.
I'm glad they have a policy to deal with this scale of storage growth. I'd rather pay for Google one than see Photos RIP like so many other Google products.
Never get in captivity without Internet access for more than 2 years ;)
Future headline: I was captured as a sex slave for two years and when I finally sneaked internet access Google had deleted all my contacts
such as prison
I had more in mind things like "Cast Away" or poor souls who were held in captivity in a remote foreign country by the government there or local pirates or terrorists. When you return to "normal" life you even loose your email, photos and everything just because you could not log in for 2 years :(
Might be a blessing at that point. I'm damm near in a cold sweat thinking about how bad my email backlog would be after two years.
These posts bashing Google are getting tiring. No sensible free email service will hold your emails forever, especially if you're not using your account.
I'd invite people without knowledge of running a business to take the time and think this through before jumping in the outrage bandwagon.
I'd invite people without knowledge of running a business to take the time and think this through before jumping in the outrage bandwagon.
While I would normally agree with you, Google has advertised unlimited, free storage forever for things like photos and email. They should not have made that promise and I understand why they are breaking the promise now, but if you break a promise it seems reasonable for people to be irate about it.
All you've got to do is log in at least once every two years and use the account so it isn't inactive. If you have data stored in an account you haven't touched for 2 years, how important is it really to you?
The problem is that everyone treats gmail like it's a component of internet infrastructure. When your personal emails go to your friend's spam folder regardless of how conformant and well behaved your mail server is and they think its your fault for not using gmail, that's a problem.
I've had google lock me out of my account due to their bad password reset heuristic (which is a social scaling problem due to the above) which means I'll completely lose my address in a year (currently forwarded to my own domain.)
There are similar social network effects with eg. Facebook, iMessage etc. although the abuses and problems are slightly different.
I've had google lock me out of my account due to their bad password reset heuristic (which is a social scaling problem due to the above) which means I'll completely lose my address in a year (currently forwarded to my own domain.)
There are similar social network effects with eg. Facebook, iMessage etc. although the abuses and problems are slightly different.
There's nothing in this article that's bashing them. It's useful information about a policy change.
You probably have missed reading the comments in this very same thread.
Fair point, there are commenters complaining. I was just looked at the article and a couple of the top comments.
> Over the past decade, Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos have helped billions of people securely store...
This writing style is hard to read any more. My eyes skip over whole paragraphs to get to the one or two sentences that really matter, then my fingers hit cmd-W out of habit.
This writing style is hard to read any more. My eyes skip over whole paragraphs to get to the one or two sentences that really matter, then my fingers hit cmd-W out of habit.
I have google one. but honestly, nothing beats having a 1tb external ssd. Better if you've more. The data is yours. & you can plug it any place. no need for internet connection. and you can bury those in the garden for backup.
I'd like to point out https://Permanent.org/, ahem. It made the front page here a while back (not posted by me), and it's relevant here: you pay a one-time payment for permanent storage -- that's right, your stuff will stay right there even if you're "inactive for 2 years".
(Disclosure: My company does some consulting work for Permanent. When I received the notice today from Google of their storage policy change, I realized that the reason it sounded weird to me was that I'd gotten accustomed to Permanent's model.)
(Disclosure: My company does some consulting work for Permanent. When I received the notice today from Google of their storage policy change, I realized that the reason it sounded weird to me was that I'd gotten accustomed to Permanent's model.)
That's nice. #TIL , and I visited the website.
Qn. Does it allow a paid user to delete their uploaded files ?
Qn. Does it allow a paid user to delete their uploaded files ?
I mean it seems reasonable for Google to expunge inactive accounts, but does this mean not using your account (damn near unavoidable these days, esp. with chrome wanting it), or is just not using photos/gmail sufficient?
I guess Google needs to figure out whether it gives services for free in exchange for data collection and ads or it completely kills ads for paying customers. It shouldn't overload paying users with ads. It shouldn't display even one single ads for those who pay. But it's not the case.
The sad truth is that the whole thing is not about storage. Lately Google just decided to start milking users much harder and basically torture users with insane amount of ads along with a forced movement of their data to monthly paid services like YouTube Music.
The sad truth is that the whole thing is not about storage. Lately Google just decided to start milking users much harder and basically torture users with insane amount of ads along with a forced movement of their data to monthly paid services like YouTube Music.
Well, I guess this is the kick in the arse I need to finish changing email addresses from gmail to my "new" email address in the approximately 9 billion websites where it exists.
Good luck. I did this earlier this year and it really helped to use saved passwords in Chrome to figure out which accounts are the most important ones.
Deadman switch activated. Let's just say Google doesn't delete your data they just orphan your access to the data with the assumption that you have abandoned the account, this is the great culling. All the people who have died their data must have been absorbed enough that Google doesn't think keeping the emails around is worth it.
Will someone build us a way to heartbeat our Google accounts to keep them prevent them from timing out?
Will someone build us a way to heartbeat our Google accounts to keep them prevent them from timing out?
Hmm good point, Google would never actually delete data. Goes against their whole business model of "mine a huge pool of data with ever more sophisticated ML algos and sell the results to whoever will pay".
In a way I think this is a good thing. When someone dies their history will be cleaned up automatically. Leaving less burden on their family to clean it all up. It's a big problem nowadays, because the processes to get someone's accounts closed aren't simple at all.
I wouldn't want my emails to be around forever. And while I'm alive I will definitely check it more than once a day, let alone once every 2 years :P
I wouldn't want my emails to be around forever. And while I'm alive I will definitely check it more than once a day, let alone once every 2 years :P
This seems like a feature not a bad thing. But will they actually delete their copy? Seems like google sucks up all the data about you they can.
Google is a monopolistic behemoth of a company, which spies on you and profiles you up the wazoo, sharing its information with US government agencies and who knows who else.
It also biases, manipulates and censors searches and recommendations on its main websites, in various contexts which have been reported here on HN.
So, please try to avoid using any Google services, in particular their file storage.
It also biases, manipulates and censors searches and recommendations on its main websites, in various contexts which have been reported here on HN.
So, please try to avoid using any Google services, in particular their file storage.
With profits at $160 billion in 2019 and a user base of $4 billion people, they make roughly $40 per user per year.
If a 14TB hdd costs them $200/year to run, 15GB of storage would run about $.21/year. Does that sound right? If storage was that inexpensive I would think think they wouldn't be restrictive.
If a 14TB hdd costs them $200/year to run, 15GB of storage would run about $.21/year. Does that sound right? If storage was that inexpensive I would think think they wouldn't be restrictive.
Not defending Google but I believe at least once Google has restored emails for a lot of users from tape backup. I imagine 15 GB for the user is at least three times as much from Google perspective. So sixty cents, not twenty?
I'm assuming Google's paying about 5x what the hdds alone cost, which I guess would cover backups, infrastructure besides the hdd cost, power, and software. But it could be more than that. 15x the cost of hdds seems high, but storage could be that expensive for them.
If you'd like to free some of that 15GB, you can bulk remove some attachments from your Gmail with Unattach. It's free and open-source: http://unattach.app/
Full disclosure: I'm the author of Unattach.
Full disclosure: I'm the author of Unattach.
With the recent MS to Google hires, I would expect a lot of Microsoft like price squeezing to start happening on google services as they bring cost out of the business. The photo storage changes bring familiarity to the unlimited storage option ending on Onedrive
Great idea, hopefully this helps nail the coffin on "everything should be in the cloud"
[deleted]
This is speculation, but I wonder if this is not the outcome of legal compliance efforts with respect to defined data retention periods in various pieces of consumer privacy legislation over the last few years.
From Recital 39 of the GDPR:
"This requires, in particular, ensuring that the period for which the personal data are stored is limited to a strict minimum. Personal data should be processed only if the purpose of the processing could not reasonably be fulfilled by other means. In order to ensure that the personal data are not kept longer than necessary, time limits should be established by the controller for erasure or for a periodic review."
In the context of F500, I've seen compliance efforts around this that have mandated deletion in the case of inactivity for consumer applications that most people would have reasonably assumed would have been kept around even if they didn't log in.
This is hinted at in the article "...to better align with common practices across the industry, the company said on Wednesday." And if we're going to take a cynical view, wouldn't it be that Google would never delete user data (the source of their revenue) unless they absolutely had to?
From Recital 39 of the GDPR:
"This requires, in particular, ensuring that the period for which the personal data are stored is limited to a strict minimum. Personal data should be processed only if the purpose of the processing could not reasonably be fulfilled by other means. In order to ensure that the personal data are not kept longer than necessary, time limits should be established by the controller for erasure or for a periodic review."
In the context of F500, I've seen compliance efforts around this that have mandated deletion in the case of inactivity for consumer applications that most people would have reasonably assumed would have been kept around even if they didn't log in.
This is hinted at in the article "...to better align with common practices across the industry, the company said on Wednesday." And if we're going to take a cynical view, wouldn't it be that Google would never delete user data (the source of their revenue) unless they absolutely had to?
This doesn't really apply here, this is about data which is stored by the users on the services for being stored on those services according to the ToS of Google. So, it the purpose is only expired when a user decides to delete the data.
In general, the consumer data privacy laws in regions where Google has significant regulatory exposure do not permit indefinite data retention of PII. My speculation is that Google sees an across the board, 2-year inactivity period as the best option to mitigate regulatory exposure because a plain reading of, for example, Rec. 39 is that a maximum retention period must be defined as a policy organizationally.
This is a weird interpretation of privacy law and makes no sense to me. If I upload a file to Google Drive I expect them to be there as long as I don't delete the file. You could argue, that emptying the bin after 30 days would be needed to fulfill those requirements. But having an inactive account shouldn't. These privacy laws mostly deals with all the other data Google is collecting about its users while they are using the service.
i do think it is fair if it is a free service for there to be some limit for how long the data is stored. my question is, do they also delete any related metadata that they use to improve their targeted advertising in reference to me?
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-priva...
> As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.
No data from your uploaded content is used in targeted advertising (and there's not much metadata they could really use to target based off of that - who would target based off of "visited Google Drive every other day this week" in terms of adwords customers).
> As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.
No data from your uploaded content is used in targeted advertising (and there's not much metadata they could really use to target based off of that - who would target based off of "visited Google Drive every other day this week" in terms of adwords customers).
so if I have registered MyChildsFullName @ gmail to prevent anyone else from taking it, I now need to make sure it gets at least one email every couple years to prevent them from deleting it before my child is old enough to use it?
> it gets at least one email every couple years
Receiving emails does not seem to have anything to do with it. You need to login once every two years.
Receiving emails does not seem to have anything to do with it. You need to login once every two years.
Who are you trying to prevent from taking the handle? Seems like it's either a) adults - that have a legit use for it now, b) soon to be adults that will have a legit use for it sooner than your kid does.
It's a very unique name combination, no one else on earth would have a legitimate use for it. It's more a matter of just making sure I own and control it so I can give it to them later. I'm thinking more of a situation with spammers/scammers registering the address or something.
There are a lot of mailing list and spam operators that wouldn't mind helping you out with that
The recent changes to Google Workspace effectively increased my per seat cost by 70%. Im doing 2021 budgeting now and I can save about $200/head by killing Google entirely (and Slack and Asana) and just using Microsoft 365.
Sort of an interesting related question around privacy policy updates maybe?
If a user hasn't interacted with your platform in multiple years, it becomes hard to validate that they've consented to any data-use changes you push out.
If a user hasn't interacted with your platform in multiple years, it becomes hard to validate that they've consented to any data-use changes you push out.
Always make sure you have strong single point of failure on the web.
Also weigh the cost of doing local backups against that point.
Also keep in mind that everything will be lost at some point..
I used to tell my relatives to use Google Photos, so we wouldn't all lose their photos.
I no longer tell them to use Google Photos.
Edit: Some of my relatives are growing old. There's a lot of talk of backups & storage. But none of that is going to preserve the digital memories we have shared, after they die. All the old URLs that have been shared will, not rot & wither, but one day just up and vanish. Up to the big log-off in the sky.
I really thought a dozen GB of storage from Google to each individual in the world was pretty reasonable. That there is plenty enough resources. But no, in to the garbage file society goes. Throw out all the past. It was the promise, but it's not sound business.
I no longer tell them to use Google Photos.
Edit: Some of my relatives are growing old. There's a lot of talk of backups & storage. But none of that is going to preserve the digital memories we have shared, after they die. All the old URLs that have been shared will, not rot & wither, but one day just up and vanish. Up to the big log-off in the sky.
I really thought a dozen GB of storage from Google to each individual in the world was pretty reasonable. That there is plenty enough resources. But no, in to the garbage file society goes. Throw out all the past. It was the promise, but it's not sound business.
If they are using it they aren't inactive? 2 years of no activity on a free account is a long time. What realistically are you existing from anyone else?
It's another "We've altered the terms of our deal. Pray we don't alter them any further," from Google. Changing policies in a destructive fashion is never good for a customer.
EDIT: It's especially problematic when there's no countdown, and it's not "inactive account wide", it's "inactive in product X."
EDIT: It's especially problematic when there's no countdown, and it's not "inactive account wide", it's "inactive in product X."
> It's especially problematic when there's no countdown
"The company said it will notify users multiple times before attempting to remove any content."
"The company said it will notify users multiple times before attempting to remove any content."
How? On your inactive email account?
My experience has shown that they're not great about deletion notifications. They changed how deleted items work in Drive, but never notified me outside of drive (work or personal, my memory backed up by a negative gmail search). Which was fine in this instance, but it doesn't set a great trend.
It's unfortunate, too, because their security group is nicely pedantic in notifying you about things.
My experience has shown that they're not great about deletion notifications. They changed how deleted items work in Drive, but never notified me outside of drive (work or personal, my memory backed up by a negative gmail search). Which was fine in this instance, but it doesn't set a great trend.
It's unfortunate, too, because their security group is nicely pedantic in notifying you about things.
No matter which service provider you choose, always backup your important data. Simply changing service providers won't make your data safe.
This is such a rude body of people. These downvotes come off to me as so unempathic, so cruel.
The promise was free unlimited storage & sharing of photos. Now, years latter, you change the deal. People planned to die with this, they read the words on the tin & said, yes, I wish to share photos in a way that will last. Yes, I want to give URLs to people with my photos that they will be able to use.
It's so heartless, so disappointing that such cruel negative people persistenly downvote & leave shitty comments like "you need to pay for it." (This thread here is not popular enough to attract those comments.) This is one of the persistent indicators to me that people in this community need help, need healing, and that there's so few around to show care & concern & support each other just frightens us all further. HN, you have a reputation, and this is it.
The god damned library of Babel is on fire people. The Library of Alexandria, a vast index of humanity, is getting torched. After years of promises that this would not happen. People's willingness to be reasonable over this matter is ghastly, is immoral, & wrong. People who are ok with, who are unsympathetic to this book burning, they scare the pants off me. There's a lot of them out there. A lot of them in here.
The promise was free unlimited storage & sharing of photos. Now, years latter, you change the deal. People planned to die with this, they read the words on the tin & said, yes, I wish to share photos in a way that will last. Yes, I want to give URLs to people with my photos that they will be able to use.
It's so heartless, so disappointing that such cruel negative people persistenly downvote & leave shitty comments like "you need to pay for it." (This thread here is not popular enough to attract those comments.) This is one of the persistent indicators to me that people in this community need help, need healing, and that there's so few around to show care & concern & support each other just frightens us all further. HN, you have a reputation, and this is it.
The god damned library of Babel is on fire people. The Library of Alexandria, a vast index of humanity, is getting torched. After years of promises that this would not happen. People's willingness to be reasonable over this matter is ghastly, is immoral, & wrong. People who are ok with, who are unsympathetic to this book burning, they scare the pants off me. There's a lot of them out there. A lot of them in here.
I've always told my relatives to get a huge hard drive, backblaze for backup, and stick all their photos on their own computer. If they want to use the cloud for convenience that's fine, but if the service decides to cancel your account you should always have another place with your data.
My wife currently has a 2TB nvme ssd in her Thinkpad laptop. Around 1TB of that is pictures and photos.
My wife currently has a 2TB nvme ssd in her Thinkpad laptop. Around 1TB of that is pictures and photos.
After losing two hard drives in the same week, I now consider cloud backup to be more reliable. I did eventually (a couple of years later) manage to fix one of the drives by freezing it, but for a while I thought I'd lost several years worth of photos. The rule around having data in at least 3 places is definitely a sound one.
i've been meaning to buy a pro-quality photo printer... had the idea to host a party where people can pitch in for materials and i could print all our photos on nice archival paper and we'd spend an evening scrapbooking
If you just want the photos printed, a printing service will be much cheaper. You're paying a lot for the privilege of being able to print high quality photos in your own home.
You're not paying a lot if you manage to use your printer well!
O_______O's approach is based on a model of plenty, of trying to provide & share the production means they equip themselves with. It's good for others, & it encourages one to continue to reap the benefit of the investment, by continually printing photos. Marginal cost ought keep lowering for years & years.
O_______O's approach is based on a model of plenty, of trying to provide & share the production means they equip themselves with. It's good for others, & it encourages one to continue to reap the benefit of the investment, by continually printing photos. Marginal cost ought keep lowering for years & years.
[deleted]
4.3PB/day.
A rare insight into the scale of cloud services. Amazon and Microsoft and Google generally keep extremely tight-lipped about the scale they are operating at.
A rare insight into the scale of cloud services. Amazon and Microsoft and Google generally keep extremely tight-lipped about the scale they are operating at.
... Promise?
When do the deactivate accounts then? I have had 2 at least deactivated had to connect them all together with a phone number.
[deleted]
Wow it seems like the effect of FB and Apple and Amazon on google’s revenue is real.
They have been on a cost cutting rampage recently.
They have been on a cost cutting rampage recently.
The real statement is they will delete your data as they see fit with no explanation at all, right?
So, is there a cloud email backup service? I had this happen to my hotmail and that sucked.
Why not just.. pay for an email account?
There are lots of community oriented providers which don't just kill off accounts in this way and are generally pretty cheap. See sdf.org and webarchitects.coop, both of which are membership based and reasonably priced. (Disclaimer: I'm a member of both)
There are lots of community oriented providers which don't just kill off accounts in this way and are generally pretty cheap. See sdf.org and webarchitects.coop, both of which are membership based and reasonably priced. (Disclaimer: I'm a member of both)
I thought SDF was even free? I never used it myself but I know of it.
Also to be honest: If you're not even going to log into your email for 2 years, why bother even paying for it? :)
Also to be honest: If you're not even going to log into your email for 2 years, why bother even paying for it? :)
SDF does have a free account yeah. Also a lifetime membership, but the quarterly one is amazing value for money.
Oh yeah I saw, when I wrote that I actually doublechecked but I didn't see any mention in their FAQ. But I see it now on the signup page.
It's indeed excellent, I might sign up myself. I do have VPSes of course, but I like the concept.
It's indeed excellent, I might sign up myself. I do have VPSes of course, but I like the concept.
Why are you waiting until that backup service goes bankrupt? Buy a HD and backup your stuff at home.
A 2TB USB 3.1 SSD drive is $200 (= 10 months of Google Drive)
500Mbps data transfer.
Free from ISP or mobile data caps.
Weighs an ounce and fits everywhere -- take it everywhere.
No one owns or even sees the data you write to it.
The whole "cloud storage" fad should go away.
The whole "cloud storage" fad should go away.
This looks like the same article that was posted a couple weeks ago.
Delete? Or just make it unavailable to you? If delete, sign me up.
I get where you're coming from, but isn't 2 years an awful long time for Google to have to use your data the way Google, and Google alone chooses, even if "delete" really means "delete"?
My statement is more about what I would _like_. Meaning, if Google is saying 'If you stop using google products, 2 years later we will full delete all of your data', I would spot using them today, right now.
If there is grey area, I probably wouldn't/don't care, because what can I really do?
If there is grey area, I probably wouldn't/don't care, because what can I really do?
you can manually delete your account and all data, today, and Google will actually delete everything much sooner than two years from now. You can also set your account to auto delete n months after it becomes inactive.
Full delete? No copies or derivations? No anonymized versions? No subsidiaries?
That's a good point. I think google doesn't delete anything unless the law forces them to do so.
That's not correct. If you delete things they are actually deleted, though it does take a few months to be gone from everywhere. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19965615, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12980863, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19809320, etc)
(Disclosure: I work for google, speaking only for myself)
(Disclosure: I work for google, speaking only for myself)
I believe what you say that it gets deleted. What I am not sure is whether it gets copied somewhere else for long term storage or some data mining, thing that you may not be aware of. I doubt you know everything that happens at google but I might be wrong there as I don't know who exactly is that I am talking to. Regardless, google has lost my trust completely and am not sure if it is possible to recover it and go back to the "do no evil stage" anymore.
Yeah - I believe this person believes that a set of data in its original state gets full-deleted. I do not believe that that data, in all of its forms, gets deleted from all of its storage locations. I'd hazard a guess that Google doesn't even have the ability to know whether it's been fully deleted across all of its storage locations even if they wanted to.
I wouldn't believe that Google deletes data even if they wrote it in stone.
Just logged on and downloaded all my photos!
Neat idea to clean up the internet
Will they do it upon request, too?
What's going on at Google? They have been cutting down on storage for the past couple of months.
Maybe they are bleeding storage costs?
Maybe they are bleeding storage costs?
Now is the time to pay for your stuff. Email isn't free, why do you want it for free?
next week: Amazon announces "forever" email addresses
This missing ")" in the title and in the content gives me goosebumps.
That's different from just deleting all your data because you're inactive. Which is it?
Edit: it seems both. Here's the blog post (maybe this is a better link): https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/