Why do you pay for email in 2022?

[floatinghermit]

Originally Posted by TenFour

Google knows that without a recovery phone number a ton of people will get locked out of their accounts. Check out any Gmail help forum and most of the posts are people begging for help to get back into their accounts, and a high-percentage of the time they say they have lost the password for some reason. I imagine a high-percentage of these posts are from scammers who want to hack someone's account, but legitimate ones soon learn that the only way back into a Google account is via automated systems that seem to default to sending codes to the registered phone number. Even when you have a recovery email address the systems seem to default to sending texts to your phone number.

I feel like that's like the official response, but it is COMPLETELY in their hands. They can very easily use alternate email addresses to verify the account, or let you generate codes from Google Authenticator, or any number of other methods that don't need you to share your PII. Under the pretext of making our accounts more "secure", they are just getting our PII.

I'm okay with that being an option I can CHOOSE to use for my accounts, but now it feels practically mandatory if you don't want to risk losing your account. Also, if you end up moving to a different place, there's almost no way for you to escape this data collection even on an old account.

Maybe this should be a separate topic though ..

[Csin]

I was never a big fan of paid accounts until I got one with bluebottle which functioned so brilliantly I changed my mind. When they went under, I replaced them with posteo.de which is almost as good. To some degree paid accounts are less privacy invasive, provide more stability, and just seem to try harder to satisfy the user. There have been exceptions. VFEmail turned into webmail so complex it became useless, and more recently, Tutanota cheated me out of months of use on my paid account, by closing it due to 'inactivity', and not bothering to even refund the difference.

[TenFour]

I am currently without any paid email accounts for the first time in probably a decade or more. Decided to go all free. I do have some domain emails that get forwarded from my domain registrar, but those forwards don't cost extra. To me the bottom line is KISS--Keep It Simple Stupid. I find the less email systems I have to manage and pay for the less stress in my life, and I find that I am not missing anything. YMMV.

[Csin]

Originally Posted by floatinghermit

I am having a really hard time justifying paying for email in 2022. I had a discussion with my spouse who raised some great points. Hoping some of you that pay can answer with your thoughts on this. Note that this is from the perspective of a personal account. There's no doubt that a business account should be on their own domain on a paid account.

There are a few common reasons why everyone pays for email, but I don't find them justified in 2022 as much as they used to.

Your provider might go away/You might lose your address
This has indeed traditionally been a big risk. But if you are on gmail, I just cannot see this happening. 99% of people seem to be on gmail as their primary. Even if gmail does go away, pretty much everyone in the world just lost their primary email address and the world will figure out how to go from there. There have also been cases of people losing their email accounts, but again this is so rare that it almost seems like planning for an apocalypse.

You lose privacy with free email
This is certainly true, but even if we pay for email, do we _really_ have privacy? Facebook, Google, and Amazon still have all of our life info. Our friends are on these platforms even if we are not, and having our data in them irrespective of where we are. What are we _really_ gaining? It seems like a drop in the ocean with no meaningful result.

You get to use your own domain
I definitely like to use my own domain name, but this has definitely caused me to lose emails by the other party not understanding my email address, and assuming something that ends in gmail.com. It has also caused some raised eyebrows (and maybe eye rolls). Overall, I'm going to call this one a wash.

Overall, I feel like there's no tangible reason to pay in 2022 unless that $5 a month or whatever is completely insignificant to you. What are your thoughts? What am I missing?

What am I missing?

Firstly that "that $5 a month or whatever is completely insignificant". I'm retired and on a budget, but even I could afford that...but I don't...I pay about $15 a year at posteo email provider, so that's like a little over a dollar per month. Exactly what sort of amazing and cannot live without item does the wife expect to be able to afford, on that extra $1 to $5 a month you will be saving?

Your provider might go away/You might lose your address

Actually mine did, and I did...twice. A few years ago, Live.com decided that I could not live without their wonderful email service, and that they absolutely could not live without my phone number, so they locked it and held it hostage. Now they still do not have my phone number, but also are left with an abandoned email account that no longer generates any good saleable data. Last year gmail made the same exact mistake, with the same exact result. I consider both a win for me (in more ways than one), and a loss for them. While I intended to dump both eventually for being nosey-nellies, I might still be with them if they had not gotten greedy.

do we _really_ have privacy?

Privacy and security go hand in hand, and we have as much of both as we choose to acquire through time, effort and expense. I chose to have locks on doors and windows, a burglar alarm, motion-sensor CCTV, and a shotgun parked by my bedside. You may of opted out with the apologist rant that all locks can be picked, all doors can be kicked in, all alarms and CCTV can be defeated, and that everyone is a spineless pacifist that would rather die by a home invader that kill a thug...as Hollyweird has so desperately tried to convince through its myriad movies. If so, then I have a lot more security than you, simply because I was willing to take the time, make the effort, and pay the piper. Same for privacy. If you opted out of curtains/blinds on the windows, paper shredder, regularly evicting corporate squatters (LSOs, zombie cookies, etc.) from your PC, VPN, software/hardware firewalls, antivirus, antispyware, and so on, then I have a lot more privacy than you do for exactly the same reasons as before. Corporate thugs like Sundar Pichai, Zucky Zoidberg, Neal Mohan, and Satya Nadella will take as much as you allow, and while you may not be able to stop them from taking something, you can stop them from taking everything...if you are willing to take the time, make the effort, and pay the piper. I'm reminded of a speech by Frederick Douglass "“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.” Concessions empower bullies to demand more, not less.

[TenFour]

People are often afraid of the wrong things, and so it is with privacy and security. Many trust their email to small companies that are much more likely to be hacked or suffer from simple lack of security and privacy controls. Plus, how do you know they aren't just reading your emails for kicks? There are those who refuse to give a recovery phone number to Google and then lose their account when something goes wrong. Most people are most in danger from phishing or other email attacks, so if you want the most privacy and security choose the provider with the best spam filters. Those are not the small providers that provide paid services.

[SethM]

Originally Posted by Csin

Actually mine did, and I did...twice. A few years ago, Live.com decided that I could not live without their wonderful email service, and that they absolutely could not live without my phone number, so they locked it and held it hostage. Now they still do not have my phone number, but also are left with an abandoned email account that no longer generates any good saleable data. Last year gmail made the same exact mistake, with the same exact result. I consider both a win for me (in more ways than one), and a loss for them. While I intended to dump both eventually for being nosey-nellies, I might still be with them if they had not gotten greedy.

I often have to explain to people why we will not implement SMS-type two factor login or SMS as a recovery method: because I really don't want anyone's phone number for any reason.