But you don’t own your data unless you regularly run their nonsense client to tunnel into their servers. So if Proton goes shit tomorrow? All your emails are gone. Not a HUGE issue if you regularly fetch those but… yeah.
Tbf most people don’t download offline copies, they just let all their email live on their provider’s servers and never think twice.
Personally, I’ve used either Outlook or Gmail since 2000 and haven’t ever had an issue getting access to my emails.
That is an important point. For all that Microsoft and Google do to enshitify email, all the spying, all the privacy invasions they do monitoring your every click, contact, and the content of every email, they are extremely reliable at storing those emails. If you move away from them, there is a non-zero chance that is greater than the above companies that your new provider will go belly-up and you lose access to email. So there is an incentive to download things, at least periodically, and store them somewhere. If you use a mail client, that’s very easy. This is an aspect of tech literacy, like backing up your files in more than one place generally, that very few are taught.
The 3, 2, 1 rule of backups should be taught to school children. Instead, big tech go out of their way to abstract away the problem behind layers of infantilizing services. It works well, until it doesn’t.
@Jason2357@funkajunk I mean that was the initial selling point for Gmail wasn’t it? Don’t worry about deleting or archiving anything, ever, you can just search for it… Basic file management skills sidelined.
As I said. Works great until it doesn’t. In hindsight, Gmail has been extremely reliable for most people, but that wasn’t true for some other Google services. I do think a lot of people have probably lost their email because of their password management skills though.
Tbf most people don’t download offline copies, they just let all their email live on their provider’s servers and never think twice.
Personally, I’ve used either Outlook or Gmail since 2000 and haven’t ever had an issue getting access to my emails.
That is an important point. For all that Microsoft and Google do to enshitify email, all the spying, all the privacy invasions they do monitoring your every click, contact, and the content of every email, they are extremely reliable at storing those emails. If you move away from them, there is a non-zero chance that is greater than the above companies that your new provider will go belly-up and you lose access to email. So there is an incentive to download things, at least periodically, and store them somewhere. If you use a mail client, that’s very easy. This is an aspect of tech literacy, like backing up your files in more than one place generally, that very few are taught.
The 3, 2, 1 rule of backups should be taught to school children. Instead, big tech go out of their way to abstract away the problem behind layers of infantilizing services. It works well, until it doesn’t.
@Jason2357 @funkajunk I mean that was the initial selling point for Gmail wasn’t it? Don’t worry about deleting or archiving anything, ever, you can just search for it… Basic file management skills sidelined.
As I said. Works great until it doesn’t. In hindsight, Gmail has been extremely reliable for most people, but that wasn’t true for some other Google services. I do think a lot of people have probably lost their email because of their password management skills though.
Which, again, is an issue if you need to get your McCauley on and get out the door in 5 minutes flat