This was the last straw for me. I'm migrating to Apple Mail and cancelling workspace ASAP.
ETA: I said nothing about where I'm planning to host my SMTP server. Apple Mail is a provider-agnostic client-side application, like Thunderbird.
ETA2: Those who read TFA carefully will know that, even though this doesn't affect Workspace aliases, it does affect this feature (Send-As SMTP) for workspace accounts.
So you got burned by a centralized proprietary mail service suddenly making user-hostile changes, and your first instinct is to move to another centralized proprietary mail service by a company with a long history of user hostile changes?
Truly modern consumer sensibilities are fascinating to me.
Personally I do not use any Apple or Google products. There are so many better choices!
Anyway, might I suggest services that run standard open source mail daemons that never restrict you, like Migadu.
Not everyone is interested in how the sausage gets made. Most people buy a drill to make holes, not to disassemble to learn how to build their own drill. And yes, I have a Migadu account. But I front many of those email addresses via Gmail.
Ignoring how the sausage is made is how people repeat the same mistakes, over and over, in domains as diverse as government, tech, employment, and automobiles.
I get that not everyone has the bandwidth or capability to dig into things on their own, but we live in a hostile environment, and we have to either acknowledge that and plan for it, or touch the hot stove over and over again.
This is partly why I like to read HN comments. People here go above and beyond in ways I would never bother. Reading other's experiences saves me from going through it myself.
There's no need to test mail services first hand. Just read up and do some rudimentary research.
What phone service? I have not had a cellular plan of any kind in over 6 years and travel the world, have an active social life, and run businesses without issue. Wifi is just fine and everywhere. I do not need to be communicating with people while driving. Prime thinking time.
People make all sorts of excuses, but at the end of the day cell networks and the attention, privacy, and sovereignty losses that come with them, are optional. There are -always- alternative paths if you ask, and I do not mind being "that guy" to ensure those paths exist for others that need them more than me and lack the privilege to demand them.
Also my attention span has not been this high in decades. I take on crazy hard shit now I would have never touched in my doom scrolling fugue state years.
Apple Mail is a client, not a host. It's an old school e-mail program on your computer, which you connect to whatever server your e-mail is. Whether that's your own domain, Gmail, iCloud, Hotmail or Yahoo or anything else.
Before you do that:
Consider a more open and transparent email platform such as Proton, Fastmail, Runbox, Tuta, basically just reconsider moving from one evil, unaccountable platform to another. As you may find the evil, unaccountable platform may do evil and unaccountable things.
I'll say this for Apple Mail (the email service, not the email client): it's dirt cheap and works really well. You can bring up to 5 self-owned domains to it on the $1/mo iCloud+ plan. That price includes 6 users, and up to 3 aliases ("hackernews@example.com") per person. Even when Proton isn't helping the FBI identify protesters[0], their family plan is $24/mo if you pay annually.
I ran my own server for about 25 years. I put in my time and got tired of doing it. I've migrated my own email to Apple's servers mainly because it's the only reasonably priced family host I could find.
Yes it is completely ambiguous stupid nonsense especially for emails which when sent anywhere outside of Tuta are not E2EE. How many emails are going to go outside of Tuta service 99%+?
Proton is activity enshitifying and has introduced dark patterns to their onboarding process. Suggest you deprecate them from your recommend list until they come clean and step away from this dirty business we’ve been seeing.
(not parent)
their onboarding pushing is frequent, app is fine but web is popup-y with offers/perks
<rant>if i get popups slowing down my web visit it makes me less likely to upsell to, i'd rather a seperate pricing page that i have to manually click to see, my memory serves that most services ive bought have no popup modal (my memory is probably wrong statistically but right emotionally\
maybe op was a/b tested to something more irritating
> (not parent) their onboarding pushing is frequent, app is fine but web is popup-y with offers/perks
Fair. They do advertise plans to existing subscribers, even plans that aren’t even an upgrade from your current one.
However on the other hand they do offer a toggle to turn these off completely in the settings. One could argue that it should be opt-in rather than opt-out though.
I wouldn’t count this as a black mark against their reputation though as it’s not the product inherently getting worse.
Funny enough this has been pointed out a lot pretty frequently this past week.
- They decreased the number of visible digits of unread e-mails from four (untested past four) to three. This is one of the first things the user sees when opening the application.
- After providing feedback, was told "that exceeding the number of 1000 unread messages displays the number of the messages in the counter as 999+. This is expected behaviour."
- Soon after, a further update (7.7.1 and further) brought this value down to two digits.
- The mobile application attachment upload has unclear wording and stopped working like it used to.
- The wording for attachments are:
- "From your photo library" (does not offer third party application selection)
- "Take a new photo"
- "Import from..." (allows third-party application selection)
- It's unclear how one:
- Adds a different attachment type
- Adds a photo in-line, or as an attachment
- "From your photo library" is in-line
- "Import from..." is as an attachment
- This may be Android related but ProtonMail was the system that changed most recently for me.
- I used to be able to upload attachments using a third-party file picker (stock android file selection is not great); the latest version doesn't seem to offer third-party applications as a choice.
- Application behaviour caused crashes and duplicate drafts on a mobile device, it turned out they had a new version. I don't remember crashes happening until that point, using the same version.
- There is a newer Category view feature to roll out (or is in progress now) on mobile devices. Something had triggered this feature on my device without my consent (I assumed they were going through e-mails and adding categories based on content or sender or subject or something). An update was required to fix this. They said "Kindly note that you just got an early glimpse of what’s coming for a future update.".
- Meaning each time you'd have to log in then select e-mail (basically advertising their other products).
- I ended up asking them for a corrected link (https://mail.proton.me/login)
- Desktop notification banner; there is no option to disable notifications, this appears set as a cookie. The banner says it needs "Proton Mail needs your permission to enable desktop notifications." It does not need anything; I don't want these.
- In the web client: Fonts are inconsistent, and can change and adjust on you when typing, or when opening drafts. I had it consistently failing this way in Firefox and Chromium browsers; Tor works better but this is not a preferred solution.
ETA: I said nothing about where I'm planning to host my SMTP server. Apple Mail is a provider-agnostic client-side application, like Thunderbird.
ETA2: Those who read TFA carefully will know that, even though this doesn't affect Workspace aliases, it does affect this feature (Send-As SMTP) for workspace accounts.