Google sent out a notification that it will automatically opt you into using content from your email campaigns to help Google know what to show in Google Search, Shopping, and Maps. It will look for content around “new arrivals, sales or ongoing promotions, social media profiles, and others,” Google said.
Just to clarify, “you” in this case refers to companies and marketers, not consumers. Looks like this news website is for marketers/SEO industry people.
So this is another headline designed to get a kneejerk reaction outta people.
Basically if I’m a store that sends out a weekly email to subscribers, Google will “read” that email for SEO purposes.
But how do they know which email that might be? Do they even know which of my accounts are for business or personal use? If I send an email from my business email to a bunch of friends and relatives to plan a party, will Google assume those are subscribers and pull my party-planning content from my email and put that info… somewhere… on my business page? I don’t want them reading any of my emails, ever.
The email from Google was laughable in that it contained almost no info on how this process is supposed to work. All it means to me is that I don’t have control over my own content. This should have been opt-in instead of opt-out.
I assume its more of it subscribes to your newsletter same as a user would, so when you send out the newsletter to “group 1”, the google thing is also on that mailing list.
And yes, should absolutely be opt-in, per mailing list, per email.
Me, in 2005: Why would anyone use a service that scans your personal email for things to sell you?
Me 20 years later: . . so. . . tired
I just remembered I still have an old gmail address, I should probably change those things over to my new addresses.
I’m so glad I made the choice to move away from Gmail and Google search a few years ago.
Anyone got a any opinions (or a link to a review) of the different options? Proton and tuta come up, are there others worth considering?
I understand that I’ll probably need to pay (otherwise I’m the product) and encryption / security is good, but the thing that keeps with Gmail (apart from inertia) is that it feels quick and easy to use. My only real experience of non Gmail sites over the last two decades have been terrible but mandatory work webmail systems that are slow, clunky and look a decade out of date. Or Hotmail, which sucks for a variety of reasons.
Startmail (from the Startpage folks) has been fine for me. You pay for it, you can put your domain on it, you can do alias addresses, works with any IMAP client since it’s just IMAP ran by a (so far) competent company. Their web ui is fine, but ive only used it for initial setup. Besides Thunderbird on mobile I use Snappymail within Nextcloud and this works just fine as well. All I can say is it does what it says on the tin.
My only real experience of non Gmail sites over the last two decades have been terrible but mandatory work webmail systems that are slow, clunky and look a decade out of date.
Uh same, Outlook Web’s search function sucks so much compared to Gmail’s 😫
So basically just give me Gmail’s UX without the corporation pls. Do any of the competitors have similar search, filtering and tagging behaviour?
