Google is too good not to roll the dice. I use Gmail in my own domain with a different registrar. Push comes to shove, I'll move, restore backups, and carry on.
But damn are non-Google ecosystems bad. At work we use m365 and everything is atrocious compared to Google. Loggin in is a mess, email search is dreadful, OneNote search unhelpfully defaults to searching the current pagwe, integration with Android is weak, Outlook Calendar never seems to do what I want it to and doesn't seem to handle location in any sane way... I could go on but every time I switch to my private machine and Google-first setup, it's like a weight has been lifted.
I had Google hosting my family's email for a long time (I had one of those grandfathered free custom domain setups).
It wasn't bad and it was free (!), but:
- Google threatened to cut me off.
- Wife's account needed attention to keep it under the disk space quotas.
- Google had creepy marketing based on private email content (making you worry about what else they are doing with my private email content).
- It was free. (Yes, I list that as both a positive and a negative, since it means they have no real responsibility to me.)
I migrated to fastmail and it's every bit as good as gmail with none of the downsides, for a small $/month.
Sure, Google backed down from terminating my service, but that reminded me not to rely on "free" services -- free is always limited. So I thought, "Fair enough, time to pay." I considered Google, but they did not make the cut.
> Google had creepy marketing based on private email content (making you worry about what else they are doing with my private email content
As far as I know, email content was never used for ad targeting on any iteration of Workspace/Gsuite/Google Apps for Your Domain/etc. (And it hasn't been used for consumer gmail for many years either.)
Not that the details of how they use a specific information stream are all that important (if they aren't using one it's just because they've got something else better). The fundamental problem is that their interests are fairly heavily misaligned with mine. They want to make money by effectively mining my information and I don't like that and find it creepy.
Because they've made public statements to this effect, including in the privacy policy.
Why trust those statements? Because lying would be a very bad idea. The lies would be revealed very quickly (e.g. via whistleblowers). The outcome would be expensive civil lawsuits, probably billions in fines, and a loss of trust in their $20 billion / year cloud business.
My google inboxes are full of spam. To catch the companies that were causing all of this spam, I setup a catchall email account on a non-google email service and switched every vendor over to a dedicated email address (i.e. hn@foobar.com, homedepot@foobar.com).
I expected to catch a tonne of vendors "red handed" sharing my email address, since spam was so prolific on gmail. Nope, I simply don't see spam anymore. In the last four years I've caught exactly one vendor sharing my email address (TicketMaster gave my email address to Warner Brothers).
Given I haven't changed anything materially with how I share my email address (it's still in my git commits as code@foobar.com, still on my website as website@foobar.com, etc., if anything I share it more freely now since I know I have control over each inbox), I'm lead to strongly believe GMail has a unique spam problem.
Dealing with GMail's spam problem isn't worth my time. That is amplified by the risk of me getting locked out of an email account. I have one Google account with files and emails dating back to grade school I can no longer access and no approach to "recover my account" has worked in the last 5 years - I've even paid Google for support to have someone tell me there was nothing they could do.
Google is a massive liability for me. They are a huge risk trusting them with anything that doesn't have a dedicated customer support team, a large part of their business model is to waste my time instead of charging me $$ for services rendered, and they do a pretty poor job of maintaining a level of quality in their products like GMail.
Whenever I have to deal with Google I get the distinct feeling that they consider their time infinitely more valuable than mine. I don't like doing business with people who are willing to waste my time like that.
I don't doubt your experience, but I've had the same pattern (gmail.com email spammed to hell, custom domain -> no spam) except that I'm in a grandfathered Google Workspaces account. I also do the custom email trick, and I'm very liberal about handing out those (makes remembering accounts easier as well), but no dice.
I'm convinced that companies filter out custom domain email addresses when they share and spam user data.
I do something very similar, and have a similar result - almost no cross-sharing/selling of addresses.
The two sources I have:
- Leaks
- Guesses - eg. webmaster@domain.com
- Kickstarter
Kickstarter gives over your email to projects, and now I get get lots of kickstarter type spam where it's clear projects have shared it out. It's annoying. My fault for using a real email with kickstarter years ago.
I'm pretty sure all the spam I get on my original account (20 year old email, first@firstlast.com) are also more leak related than anything else. That email has been around for so long, and is in a lot of leaked cred dumps. Whenever there's a new dump I get a small spam uptick.
I've been segregating passwords for several years, but nothing like the age of my original one true email.
I recently bought a whole new anonymous domain too, to keep non-personal email off my personal domain (it's firstnamelastname.com). It's fun to have a second domain and totally unique emails per vendor, but doesn't seem to do much. I suspect this is also a volume/value thing for spammers. Everyone has a gmail so search/guess/spam those and it's easy. Individually targeted attacks on domains with very small address lists aren't worth it, and almost worth removing from your spam attack because someone with a small custom domain isn't likely to fall for it. Similar to the delivery typos approach of selecting for people who aren't sensitive/cautious to correct language.
I find Fastmail does a really good job at detecting spam in general too.
> At work we use m365 and everything is atrocious compared to Google.
In my experience the admin side is the opposite. I only have a legacy Google Apps account to judge, so maybe the paid stuff is better, but MS365 has some pretty good tools when it comes to email.
However, both of them have absolutely brain dead policies sometimes. Ex: Google bounces mail sent to accounts locked for suspicious login attempts and MS forces you to give admin privileges to normal users that have to deal with messages that are incorrectly flagged as high confidence phishing.
MS is a double edged sword though. You get access to a lot of tooling on the admin side, but they very obviously don't care about small business users. The Business Basic accounts are more like paid beta testers than anything. You can see it if you look at the release lifecycle for a lot of the products. Ex: Business Basic accounts get app updates before Enterprise accounts.
I currently use MS for everything, but the bloat is starting to get to me. They can't stop adding features and everything there is starting to feel unpolished. They can't even keep their own docs / support up to date and sometimes support will send you links to stale information.
The support is 100% useless from both Google and MS, so I almost never use them and prefer MS because I get more tools to solve my own problems. The "confidently wrong" part of ChatGPT feels like a Microsoft product. Lol. They could literally replace their support with that "AI" and I bet people wouldn't notice the difference. That's not because ChatGPT is good. It's because MS support is so bad.
"My name is ChatGPT. I understand your problem and I'm going to help you fix it." >>> Proceeds to demonstrate a complete lack of understanding and doesn't fix the problem.
I have been pleasantly surprised at the management tools provided by Microsoft to manage 365/Azure/Exchange accounts. Everything seems intuitive and easy.
> OneNote search unhelpfully defaults to searching the current pagwe
If this trivial complaint is the worst you can think of for OneNote then that shows what a good job they've done. I actually hate how good OneNote is because it doesn't work on Linux (as a native application) and there's no good alternative that does. The usual answer I hear is to use a wiki but one of OneNote's killer features is how good its offline capability is when using a notebook on a shared drive, and an online-only wiki is about as far from that as you can get.
(Ctrl+f to search current page, ctrl+e to search everywhere, by the way.)
My list of m365 complaints is virtually endless. It's nothing major but rather death by 1000 cuts.
The focus is almost never where I expect it, the notes overlap each other by defualt, the sync takes enough time to notice every time you make notes on your laptop before a meeting and then try to use them off the phone.
I would tell you that after using Fastmail, Gmail seems positively glacial and slow. Like, it's borderline "why would anyone put up with this, except maybe because they haven't used good email before". And we just got a huge fine for missing a bill here because a family Gmail account spam-binned it, which isn't an issue for my Fastmail, which handles spam better.
It could be a little faster, maybe, but with good indicators of things happening under the hood, which Google offers, reliable results, and the daily comparison to m365, I have no complaints.
And really, the only faster email setup I have ever used was mutt right on the MTA. I haven't used Fastmail but ProtonMail (my backup choice due to their combo mail+VPN+drive offer) certainly doesn't feel faster than Google.
My Fastmail account receives, at most, a handful of spam emails a week. And Fastmail uses a personal spam filter heavily weighted off your own mail and reported spam as opposed to the whole world's emails. Obviously it has weighting rules that are easily understandable and readable in the headers, but my own trained filter has a really strong impact on the spam score.
Whereas I find Gmail both often misclassifies legitimate mail as spam, and fails to catch obvious spam, the biggest issue is it rarely is fixable by my actions, because it's mostly based on Gmail-as-a-whole's perspective on spam. My Gmail is also receives an absolute deluge of junk even though I haven't used it as my primary mail since 2016. I have a somewhat short Gmail address and I strongly suspect it gets dictionary-spammed because the server name is a given, it also gets signed up to random things I never signed up for (including the NRA and Shutterstock, both of whom I had to contact and ask to remove me).
But damn are non-Google ecosystems bad. At work we use m365 and everything is atrocious compared to Google. Loggin in is a mess, email search is dreadful, OneNote search unhelpfully defaults to searching the current pagwe, integration with Android is weak, Outlook Calendar never seems to do what I want it to and doesn't seem to handle location in any sane way... I could go on but every time I switch to my private machine and Google-first setup, it's like a weight has been lifted.