Why I stopped using Gmail by Google
A few months ago I left Gmail as my primary email provider and migrated to FastMail.com. The original cause of the decision was the fact that Google announced it was going to kill Inbox, but at the same time I started to realize that Google had too much power on the Internet.
If you think about it, Google, a single private company, owns and controls:
- the most used email service (Gmail)
- the most used web browser (Chrome)
- the most used mobile operating system (Android)
- the most used search engine (Google)
- the most used maps service (Maps)
- the most used video streaming website (YouTube)
Not to mention tools for publishers and developers, like Analytics, AdSense and reCAPTCHA.
That’s way too much power for a single company, that doesn’t even have a good ethical reputation.
Internet is by definition a network, and it is a decentralized one, meaning that there is no leader.
Email is (almost still) a wonderful example of this. You can build a mail server right now and create your own email addresses, then start sending messages to any email address in the world.
You don’t need to ask permission to someone, and you don’t need approval. It just works, and protocols and standards have made the whole thing essentially perfectly interoperable for decades.
Until Google. Gmail introduced the concept of labels. Any email message can have one or more labels. This contradicts how the email protocol standard (IMAP) works, where each email can only be in one folder at a time. Gmail in fact extended IMAP to make its labels feature kind of work.
So now every IMAP client that wants to handle Gmail literally has to add specific conditions in the code to check if the mail server is Gmail and then apply a different behaviour.
This also has the effect that you might see duplicate emails if your client doesn’t properly support the Gmail labels thing. In my case, migrating from Gmail to FastMail has been a pain because the IMAP client that FastMail is using for importing emails rightly follows the IMAP standard, and thus sees emails with multiple labels as duplicates in different folders.
It gets worse when you understand that Gmail doesn’t actually have an “archive” folder but a weird mechanism involving the “All mail” label. Or when you find out that you can’t access Gmail Tabs outside the Gmail web interface or apps.
And now the icing on the cake: Google is introducing AMP for Email. That means putting dynamic content inside emails, like forms, buttons, chats, carousels, offers. But of course, only if the whole world decides to jump on the Google train and adopt this technology. How can one even remotely think this might be a good idea?
Email was one of the few things that you knew it worked almost flawlessly on any operating system, platform, browser, email client or provider. Now Google wants to change that, by injecting its own technology inside emails, so that they can have control of them.
And remember, Google is not a non-profit. Google is a private company whose earnings come for almost 90% from advertising. Everything Google does, it does for money.
I think this is a bad perspective for the Internet, and I believe Google is being harmful to the Internet.
If you can, please stop using Gmail. Alternatives are there: FastMail.com, Mailbox.org, Qboxmail.it, Migadu.com, Posteo.de, ProtonMail.com, Postale.io. Google must not have control of the most long-lived and decentralized digital means of communication history gave us.
