I was helping my dad with some computer stuff and I noticed Microsoft outlook online (Hotmail) has ads as well.
My corporate outlook online doesn’t have ads.
And my personal gsuite (paid for Gmail) doesn’t have ads.
I’m doing that now. Have had the free account sitting around for a while now. Decided to upgrade to the $5 version of mail before really starting to use it. They STILL endlessly blast you with that self-promotion. Full-page ads, at that. I’m immediately having regrets about my decision to switch. I’ll be primarily using Thunderbird on desktop, and on Mobile if/when they get around to the k-9 to Thunderbird switch, so I don’t get their self promo there. But the behavior in general doesn’t bode well.
That’s not how that works. Products that big don’t have features (or “features”) rolled out universally. They do things per county, per demographic, or to random groups first, to have data on how it affects usage.
Only if they’re happy with the results (or management overrides the rational decision process) they’ll introduce things globally.
I was wondering what people were talking about! Thank you!
I too, have never seen these before in my life, and I also don’t like tabs. I turn them off for everyone I can, too. I had no idea I was also turning off these ads. Nice.
Yes they’ve always been a thing in the promotions/else tabs, anyone who says they aren’t around simply hasn’t clicked those tabs or registered they existed (in fairness, everything in that tab is generally an ad)
Mailbox.org is 1€ / month for 2GB with first month free (with limitations), I don’t think it’s too much to ask for because Google has other ways of making money.
An instance of the software running as a service? A service.
The official Bitwarden service has a free and a more featureful paid tier.
Element offers paid hosting as a service with a limited free tier.
OSM isn’t software?
Mastodon and Lemmy are hosted and financed by individuals or organisations who usually choose to offer their service free of charge.
All of these are FOSS underneath but have very different costs. There is a difference between commercial for-profit services (BW, Element) and non-profit/public benefit ones (Lemmy, Mastodon) with the latter usually being free of charge.
There’s very little difference between a commercial FOSS application as a service and a commercial non-free software as a service.
For example, you could also buy Slack as a service as opposed to Element. In the end it’s a bill of $x/user/month. Nothing “free” about that other than the hosted software’s source code.
The software is the “primary component” but a service is far more than just a piece of software.
It’s providing infrastructure for the software to run in, maintaining said infrastructure, providing support to customers, billing/accounting, hiring people to do all of that etc. I’d even go as far as saying that the software being hosted ifself plays no major role in the service part.
Sure, but that’s exactly what people mean when they say FOSS service.
Regardless, that’s not the discussion we’re having. The point is that those services are free of charge, and you’re not the product. And that a big reason for that is that they are FOSS services.
Arguing about what people mean is futile. The point the other poster is making, and you’ve now agreed to be true, is that FOSS is software and a service is a service.
Most services powered by FOSS offer a free service as a taster for the paid service. The money made in the paid service tiers pay for the free tiers. Hopefully.
If you are self hosting, you are still paying in your time to set up, host and manage it.
And with FOSS, you are still the product. You are providing bug testing, there are no guarantees, and the idea is you contribute back by investigating bugs you find and submit them to the project.
So many paid products are buggy, get EOL with some small notice, or pad their bottom line selling user data.
At least with FOSS you have the option of picking up maintenance yourself if the corp drops that product. Support for mission critical infrastructure will only last as long as your support contract with closed software.
I disagree that the users are the product with FOSS is what I was getting at. Major contributions being done by individuals is a special case, with little regard for business continuity. There are obvious examples of people that do it, but the real value regardless of the quality of the individual contributors is the ability to fork your own if the contributions stop aligning with your business plan.
That ability to bring the software in house is a guarantee.
A email provider shouldn’t require a closed, premium-only, lock-in-required sidecar program just to use IMAP/SMTP. I don’t think the release these bridge apps on BSDs or smaller OSs & you’re forced to use their apps on Android & iOS (no support for KaiOS or other smaller mobile OSs). This should be a giant red flag—kinda like waiving around a Swiss flag as more secure when they will sell you out just as fast as others.
These free-tier-loss-leading strategies are expensive too. If you bump up to premium it’s like $5/mo, but less marketing-heavy options where everyone pays get you all the features–like what I’m using @ 1€/mo.
These free-tier-loss-leading strategies are expensive too.
As a paying PM user, I think it’s fine. I can afford to pay ~$50/year for something as basic as e-mail. Not everyone is as privileged as me though and it’s great that they can have a slightly less featureful version for free.
Privacy in the most basic element of modern communication shouldn’t be reserved for the privileged.
marketing-heavy
Could you point me to the “heavy” advertising? I’ve yet to see any.
I didn’t do more due dilligence than looking at the ProtonMail downloads page + system requirements page—neither of which mentioned source which would instill better trust. So you’ve got me there, but really dumb there isn’t a link.
Open source or not, you still have to use their clients on mobile OSs even if you prefer running a client like K-9 & can’t run on a low-spec OS KaiOS (I suspect the site wouldn’t scale down to this either), etc. Mail protocols are old & should be able to run on a potato without many hoops.
Where I definitely don’t agree tho is the free-tier thing. Having access to the bridge cut off as well as not {Cal,Card}DAV is a real pain that forces the premium subscription, switching providers, or using something like Google for calender/contact defeating much of the purpose. If there was no free tier to subsidize everyone could pay a lot less & get “premium” features others deem as essential. $50 annually is a lot—$12, not so much.
you still have to use their clients on mobile OSs even if you prefer running a client like K-9
If you made K-9 speak their protocol, I’m sure that would work. Additionally, there’s also nothing preventing you from running the bridge on your Android (or whatever) device; it’s a statically linked Go binary.
What your point boils down to is basically that they don’t use or support IMAP. In order for IMAP to work however, the mail server must have access to all of your emails in plain text.
Do you see how that’s an issue when your service is intended to provide privacy to the user? The fact that PM cannot read your emails at rest (even if they wanted to) is one of PM’s explicit selling points. See proton.me/blog/zero-access-encryption
This is the primary reason why PM (and Tutanota for that matter) don’t support IMAP. As a software engineer, I can also imagine they wouldn’t want to base their entire operations around such an old and crufty protocol though.
Where I definitely don’t agree tho is the free-tier thing.
That’s fine. I can see both sides. Though, as stated, I’m clearly in the “socialistic” “pay more to support less affluent people” approach to commercial services product camp.
Having access to the bridge cut off as well as not {Cal,Card}DAV is a real pain that forces the premium subscription
For us power users who need that, yes, that’s the point. We should pay.
For your average Joe, they get a fancy web UI calendar and calendar app for free; just like they do with Google but private. I personally find that quite amazing.
If there was no free tier to subsidize everyone could pay a lot less & get “premium” features others deem as essential.
It’s also not altruistic to pay more for to subsidize in the manner you are alluding too since it misses the larger picture of how these wide free tiers have allowed contemporary services to gobble up users to impress investors with growth despite loss-leading products (in code forges look at the publicly-traded GitLab free model vs. SourceHut where everyone pays a small amount to keep servers running (post-beta plan)).
My affordable provider encrypts their servers & the account storage just fine without needing to reinvent the old, tested protocol (might just be a ZFS pool encryption passphrase). But it isn’t security/privacy that’s in question but the accessibility of this standardized protocols with years of tooling built around it & a business model that I don’t think is sustainable.
It’s also not altruistic to pay more for to subsidize in the manner you are alluding too
Whether something is altruistic or not is more of a philosophical debate.
Fact of the matter remains that unprivileged people using PM for free is only possible because us paying users pay at least slightly more. I don’t care whether that’s altruistic or not.
My affordable provider encrypts their servers & the account storage just fine without needing to reinvent the old, tested protocol
That’s nice but that’s just simple disk encryption at rest. That’s not at all comparable to zero-access encryption. Please read the Link in my last reply.
Like going to a shopping centre and complaining the stores have ads in front of their stores. There’s legitimate concerns about Google and then there’s just dumb users.
The promotion tabs is your actual emails, just labeled by Gmail as “promotion”. And then there is ads adding to your emails. If you do not open emails in this tab, it’s time to do some cleaning friend, and unsubscribe from a bunch of things
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