All those hoops with their market share make it poisonous to the whole E-Mail space, same as Outlook. And despite that, 90% of spam i receive is from a random Gmail adress still. I strongly recommend ditching Gmail for a paid provider, better for your privacy too.
Honestly virtually all verification mail lands in spam on most free providers.
And it’s no wonder. Try running your own server sending these mails before you judge. My company needs to put a lot of work into this.
Why?
Because spam is rampant. So in return, anti-spam filters are extremely strict. And there’s dozens and dozens and dozens of hoops to jump, and holding one leg just a tiny bit wrong immediately gets you spam filtered everywhere.
You might think “This sucks, just don’t block as much!”, but you’re not seeing the thousands of mails that never even reach your spam folder because the server-to-server traffic already blocks them and they don’t make it through that. The percentage blocked is crazy. Spam is that bad.
Yes. And spam filters aren’t hand picked and written. Haven’t been for a few decades. They’re learning and statistical.
Like another comment said, the mails are hitting some traffic rules and having correlations in their text with phishing scams or something that pushes their score to the negative enough to “warn the user” level but not enough to file as spam or reject completely.
Also, even if “Google knows it’s a legitimate company”, it’s somewhere between stupidly hard and impossible to tell if an email came from that company. And again, nobody would keep a hand curated list of “legitimate companies” and their email for an ever growing list of companies. Even if that was possible to do.
Of course it’s possible to do. We’ve already done it for physical mail.
If (enormous if) the EU or FTC cared to issue a digital signing certificate to legally registered companies then this would basically solve the problem of trust. Now it’d be up to the government to deal with fraud cases, which would be much more manageable since spam offenders would necessarily have a uniquely identifiable certificate with a literal physical address attached (yes, fraud exists there, but the barrier to entry is orders of magnitude higher).
Plain SMTP’s trust model is broken but only legislative apathy enables Google to position themselves as the internet watchdog/bouncer.
If their spam filter is “learning,” and if new signup verification emails are a consistent decades-old practice, how much longer should we wait before it’s okay to question whether Google’s filter could do better at learning?
Not a lot at all, as you can run a spam mail center on a potato. People underestimate how power-/hardware-inefficient crypto really is, and how that alone already makes it unusable for banking at large.
When worked at Google I remember hearing a rumor from the GMail team that more than half of all messages are rejected early in the pipeline before even running the main spam filter. As in the majority of attempts to send mail to Google users is so obviously spam that it doesn’t even end up in the Spam folder. What does land in your spam folder is a tiny fraction of all spam.
I guess it’s totally subjective, but I don’t exactly see a lot of “shitposts” that are just an image of something like a ball or a rock with no context.
The truly wild thing about subscription pricing to me is how viscerally I’m against it. I’m not shitting on this business model, I think it makes perfect sense and is probably the only logical way to run a business like this. I’m just saying that everything in our lives is trying so hard to turn everything into a recurring fee that my first reaction to every recurring fee is pure hatred.
Alright, so the amount of data I’d need for pictures is probably the 500GB tier, so $9.99/mo. My first thought is that’s way too expensive, my second thought is that I’m not doing another subscription. My subscription-trauma addled brain will happily justify buying a little server, and a 1TB hard drive, and spending hours configuring them. By the time I’m done, I’ll have spent the equivalent of at least 3 years of the cost of this service, plus tons of my free time, and it will never work exactly right because there’s always going to need to be updates, and sometimes those will break something, and I’ll need to fix it myself.
Cloud storage is something I’m okay paying for. In general, if I want near 100 percent uptime, I’m ok paying for it, because the alternative is making sure it works by myself, and I have much more important shit to do.
I’m ok with subscription cloud storage provided it’s easy to move everything off of it to somewhere else and they don’t make me jump through ridiculous hopes to access it.
I was paying for Google drive until they killed the Back Up and Sync desktop app. The original app let you sync any individual file in any directory, and you could pick and choose how each was synced.
Then they killed that and replaced it with a desktop app they have now that creates a Google partition of sorts that the user can’t enter, shoves all your files in it, and forces you to use the app to manage what files are currently sitting on your own computer.
You can still do the individual syncing I think but you can’t pick and choose which files are synced and which stay on the cloud. You have to keep it all downloaded and synced or none.
Makes sense. Are there any alternatives which lets you pick and choose which objects to sync on the file level? I didn’t really know that was an option except for finangling rsync with cron jobs or something.
I got all the rest and I see your issue with wanting to sync only individual files. But I didn’t quite get what you mean with this: “…that the user can’t enter”. You can enter and copy/move/edit files… I cannot understand what you meant with that.
Regarding the sync thing, I am not as annoyed by it as much as you seem, and my use case probably was different, but in case it helps somebody what I opted to was to use it as a disk and use tools that work with disks, so in my case although other tools could be used I use FreeFileSync to copy files from the Drive to a local drive and viceversa. Mostly for backup purposes.
I would be tempted to say in some cases it is even better as in the past you needed to to use their APIs or use their tool to setup those specific sync options and now I can use any tool that works with copying/using normal files.
That said… for other environments like a server or similar, then you are back to RClone and API auths or similar to do actions on your drive.
You have to keep it all downloaded and synced or none.
This is me just nitpicking, but you can flag folders/files to be available offline and it will keep a local copy always, but it will be in their drive thingy. So you can access it even when offline but it’s not copied outside their virtual disk. It’s just a right click menu option.
One of my biggest concerns with subscriptions has to do with death. It feels gross to imagine companies just entitling themselves to my bank account after I’m gone, providing no value to anything, until someone comes along and cancels everything. Feels like one last free cash grab that could go on for years. I imagine board members congratulating each other for legally looting a dead man’s corpse.
You’re probably right, but we both know companies would go on for years if nothing intervenes. Then blame it on the dead man when there is no money left.
One of the reasons that I use Google photos is for the automatic backup of pictures I take. I’m working towards self hosting, and I haven’t got to this one yet, but that service is pretty nice. Also, when I’m traveling, I’ll take a handful pictures side by side, and Google will stitch a panorama for me. I spend time snowboarding in the mountains and hiking in tropical areas, and that’s the best way to capture a landscape that I’ve used.
I use Photoprism. It is sufficient, amazing even for what it is, but there’s a definite curve to getting it set up properly and there’s some babysitting involved to make sure everything keeps working.
I’m just saying that everything in our lives is trying so hard to turn everything into a recurring fee that my first reaction to every recurring fee is pure hatred.
But OTOH, it has ~always been that everything semi-worthwhile in our loves has been a recurring cost.
Food, sex, children, relationships, even things luxury/benign such as cars which are often mistaken for a one-time payment but really are not.
files.catbox.moe
Active