Friday, Dec 11, 2015 1:24 PM Chris Lewis wrote:
By this measure, all the large free mail services are garbage because they
simply cannot afford to provide the level of service you're implying - a
single phone call puts them well into the negative income zone.
I have a gmail account. It gets very little spam, gets the email that real
people send me, and delivers email from me to them fairly reliably. And it's
"free". The test of a good service is not how good the customer service is
when you call them: it's whether you need to call them. In practice, I do not.
This also implies that you're introducing an economic/knowledge bias into the
equation and an element of elitism (those who can afford). This is a really
bad idea when we're talking about personal safety/privacy of people who are
likely to be at the lower end of the income spectrum is it not?
This argument seems like a non-sequitur to me. It's certainly unfair that not
everybody has the resources I do to bring to bear on this problem, but they do
have very good options available to them, and TBH it's actually a royal PITA
for me operating my non-gmail service. I do it as a matter of principle, not
because it's better. If I were a little less annoyed about being spied on, I
would just redirect fugue.com to gmail, and it would be a hell of a lot less
trouble and work really well.
This is not to say that gmail is a universal panacea which will always be
great. It could start sucking next week. But the point is that if you are
going to claim that I am somehow privileged, I don't think you actually have
much of a case to make.
Furthermore, if my comment about the wide availability of privacy protection
systems (eg: email anonymizers, tor etc) wasn't good enough, why is "just
switch to a better provider" (_if_ you know it's the right choice and can
afford it) acceptable?
If your email service is sucking, that's readily apparent. You don't know
that you need more privacy than you have until it's too late.
In the real world most providers make it hard to make contact with a human,
and at best you get access to a level 1 support person who has a script and
is completely lost if you diverge off it. There is no substitute for a level
3 or 4 or 5 who has a bit more personal interest in your success.
I don't see that changing any time soon, nor is it anything the IETF can do
anything about.
I agree with everything here except the implication that if you can't talk to a
person on the phone, the service sucks. I would argue that if you are on the
phone with a support person, that's the evidence that the service sucks.
A concierge-style email service that provides genuinely useful phone support
really is going to be too expensive for regular folks. What has brought the
Internet to the masses is not the replication of what we all enjoyed as
Internet users in 1995. It's been the systematic removal of support costs
from the system so that the price of service is low enough for regular folks to
afford it.
Of course, we do occasionally hear horror stories who have been badly screwed
by the inability to talk to a human, but that's actually good: those people (a)
now understand why good email service is worth paying for and (b) are telling
all their friends, or at least (c) are learning to be more careful about how
they use the service (i.e., taking the support cost on themselves).
--
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